I told y’all that Rashida Tlaib was a goddamn racist, but you didn’t believe me:
Even funnier because she was trying to pretend like she doesn’t hate Jews, too. Good try, Congresswoman!
(Subtext: most of y’all who defended her sorry ass are probably also racist anti-semites. Figured I probably needed to spell that out since some of my younger readers appear to have very poor reading comprehension skills, based on their apoplectic summaries of my posts…)
I just finished reading an article by Noah Carl, a fellow academic victim of a fanatical left-wing Twitter mob, on the threats to free speech in American and European universities. Much of it looks very familiar to me these days, having faced bullying of various sorts both online and in real life, and at my own university and elsewhere, due to the ideas and positions expressed in this blog.
In recent weeks, after a longish period of mostly silence, my own mob of clandestine harassers re-surfaced. Having failed to bully me into a ritual apology, and having failed to force my university — to their eternal credit — to abandon their ethical defense of academic freedom and free speech, they’ve decided to attack my collaborators and colleagues. Basically, because I announced my support for President Donald J. Trump, anybody that is willing to work with me is subject to the hatred of the mob.
Which sucks, but it is also edifying in a way, because it reveals a bit about the range of responses from institutions toward this harassment. Research-oriented institutions appear to be the most resilient, particularly public universities. Presumably people who do real research understand the value of diverse perspectives. For instance, if you actually care about affecting environmental policy, how could you not see the value of having an environmentalist on your team with a genuine right-wing perspective? However, the response from prestige universities and teaching-oriented colleges is much more disheartening.
The former are not surprising; leftist fanatics have worked to infiltrate the commanding heights of culture since the Progressive Era. The vulnerability of teaching colleges to mob pressure surprised me, however. In principle, these are institutions for the common person, and therefore one would expect that their ideological skew would be much less extreme, and much closer to the roughly 50/50 right/left split of the general population. But they are also focused more completely on the classroom experience than are research universities, so the ability of a few angry bullies to destroy that experience looms much larger. Regardless of their personal attitudes toward the value of academic freedom and free speech, faculty and administration at such universities are likely to take the path of least resistance and simply avoid any connection to controversy — which in 2019, means avoiding anything that deviates from the political dogma of the “resistance” left, or even interaction with any people who have ever expressed opposition to those orthodoxies.
Like I said, my university, as of right now, has strongly supported the speech rights of dissenting professors and students. But I am struck, looking at the range of responses elsewhere, by how much luck is involved in the outcome of an academic speaking out against orthodox belief. At other universities, I could have been denounced by upper administration, removed from teaching, or even fired, largely at the whim of administrators. Even here, a change in administration could result in a radical shift in my fortunes. There are legal recourses to prevent this, of course, but they are costly and time-consuming, and certainly less than ideal.
This is an unacceptable situation. One can’t fault universities — which are dependent on putting butts in seats to stay solvent — for wanting to avoid controversy. But information and thought are public goods — the learning and scholarship performed at the university by a few academics for their whole career, and enjoyed by most citizens for a small part of their young life, disseminate throughout society with countless positive effects. As public goods, they are both critically important for the well-being of the nation (and indeed humanity) as a whole, but also vulnerable to infection and misuse by unscrupulous “cheaters” willing to manipulate the system for their own selfish gain.
If we want to prevent the slide of the university system into irrelevancy and preserve public trust in both our scholarship and the education we provide, we have to protect these public goods. And this protection can’t be piece-meal, existing at one university and not at another. It has to be system-wide, and therefore it will require legislation, either at the State or Federal level. Universities and other educational institutions at all levels must be compelled by law to protect students and professors from harassment, both academic and personal, for their speech. Toward this end, there must be significant legal consequences for engaging in mob harassment and bullying, whether from a left- or right-wing perspective (or any other wing for that matter). Moreover, if it is to be successful, the burden for enforcing these laws must not fall to legal action by the student or the professor, who will easily be outspent into penury by the massive endowments and crack legal teams of university violators, but rather by the government, probably through some sort of watchdog agency. At a first glance, fines and removal of federal or state funding from violating individuals and agencies seems like a reasonable stick to use for enforcement.
Not being a law guy, I’m not sure how to accomplish this in a way that prevents it from being used as a way to enforce orthodoxy, rather than resist it. For instance, a red line has to be discovered that clearly separates dissent and disagreement from harassment. Dr. Carl has promised a sequel to his article where he will address some proposals — I look forward to reading it.
In honor of the British people’s historic victory yesterday over the cultural steamroller that is the EU, as well as Corbyn’s Labour Party’s invidious global socialism, I figured I’d post what I believe might be the best patriotic song ever written, which never fails to make me want to wave a Union Jack around like a wild man:
I’ve always loved the Battle of Britain. The romantic in me (or is it the toxic masculinity?) longs for epic war stories of good guys vs. bad guys, but the grim truth is that most of the war history of the 20th and 21st centuries has been a grim, very morally ambiguous slog between vile oligarchies that mostly resulted in devastation and suffering with little if any benefit to anybody. Even in WWII, the moral triumphalism of the Allies has to be balanced against the horrors of Dresden and Tokyo, not to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the horrific treatment of German civilians by conquering Russians after the war.
But the Battle of Britain? I’m not sure there’s been a clearer example of good guys vs. bad guys since Thermopylae. The survival of Britain hung in the balance, with no expectation that any other nation would — or even could — come to their aid. The Wehrmacht waited a few miles across the Channel like some vast carrion bird ready to pick the UK clean the same as it had France. But despite that, guys with no reason to think they had a chance of victory took to the skies a few at a time to do battle with a Luftwaffe whose planes sometimes flew so densely packed they would blot out the sun. Guys who got shot down and survived would be back at the airfield later that day to do it again. Guys that learned engines working on tractors went to war in the sky against the aristocracy of Deutschland. And you know what? They won. By the end of that conflict, the struggling Luftwaffe would never blot out the sun again, and the NSDAP’s hopes of expanding westward were extinguished forever. Couple that with the roaring engines and amazing tech of the era’s warplanes, and you’ve got a story to stir the heart of pretty much every young boy that’s ever lived (and probably plenty of young women as well).
But beyond that awesome air battle, the resistance of the Brits against the Nazi empire is a perfect microcosm of a struggle that predated WWII and persists to the present day. Humanity is confronted time and again with movements that believe that they have figured out the One True Path for everyone. They dream of utopias — whether thousand-year Reichs, ends to all manner of inequalities, humanity delivered from the iron bonds of biology and economics, or any of a dozen other feel-good imaginings — and always the pursuit of these visions outweighs any concern for actual human beings. People in the service of these utopian fantasies are willing to engage in any subterfuge, any atrocity, any dishonorable awfulness if they believe it will bring the world closer to their vision of the beatific future. They betray family and friends, mercilessly pursue their “enemies”, and have no qualms about grinding entire civilizations to dust if they get in their way. Over the past few months I’ve seen these sorts of people up close and personal, and if anything, my characterization of them isn’t harsh enough.
Did the men who flew the Spitfires over Britain do it to spread Britishness to all peoples, or to establish a British Empire that would last for all eternity? Did they do it to fight the “racism” of the Axis in order to bring about equality for all people? Did they do it because parliamentary democracy is a superior political system to fascist autocracy?
No. They did it for rolling green hills and snow-capped Scottish crags looming over dark glass-smooth lochs. They did it for full English breakfasts and women with sensible shoes. They did it for Stonehenge and the cliffs of Dover and Piccadilly Square. They did it for the memory of 1200 years of Britons who would have done it just the same as they did. They did it to preserve the sovereign culture of a unique place in the world, a uniqueness that is far more fragile than one likes to believe.
Russell Kirk once wrote that conservatism is marked by “affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems”. Whether communists, national socialists, or 21st century progressives, we see these movements time and again acting as steamrollers flattening the landscape of human culture and diversity in pursuit of their utopias. Thermodynamics reminds us that it is much easier to destroy than preserve, and so those who value the diversity of the human race are constantly at a disadvantage against those agents who seek its destruction. But nevertheless, we have to keep getting into that cockpit and flying to meet the enemy.
Gods bless you, Prime Minister Johnson, and gods bless the United Kingdom.
An old colleague and friend of mine was brave enough to stick his neck out by writing a blog arguing for tolerance of people like me. Check out this comment from one of the bravely anonymous Good Guys that have been dragging me:
Your buddy Jeff is a racist and supports Trump — a racist. So he supports racism.That makes you complicit. Your actions are creating an atmosphere of hate on our universities that hurts black bodies and erases minorities. We are literally being persecuted and cannot feel safe while you buttress this network of oppression by aiding and abeting white supremacy. Or don’t you think Black Lives Matter?
Perhaps before your reflectively support Jeff’s white privilege, you should give a little thought to the history of this country’s horrific treatment of black and brown people.
I very much look forward to evicting Trump from office and installing a real liberal. This country has suffered for far too long. Progressives are going to grow our institutional power and work to ensure people like Jeff, his friends and family are unemployed pariahs in polite society.
Follow the logic: all Trump supporters are white supremacists, and all white supremacists — plus their friends and family! — deserve to be permanently disenfranchised and driven out of society. They need to be unemployed. They need to starve, and therefore presumably die.
That’s at least 40,000,000 human beings. Again, plus those people’s friends and family.
Notice that the individual didn’t engage (surprise) with anything related to my original blog post or tweets. He/she may not have even read it. It’s sufficient that I unapologetically voted for the President.
Just imagine a world where these people gain power.
An old mentor accused me a couple of nights ago of “needing counseling” if I was afraid of these people. How dare I believe the evidence of my own lying eyes!
Since I’ve never had an audience this large before, I might as well try to reach out to some of you. Following my now-famous post, I’ve been surprised how few people have engaged with what I said, at least to me. With literally thousands of people reading it, I was expecting to get a mountain of hate comments, and maybe some constructive engagement of some kind. If I’m wrong, maybe you could explain to me how instead of just pointing and shrieking? It’s even possible you could change my mind, you never know.
But no, it’s mostly been crickets. Despite the fact that there’s people calling for my head all over the Internets, almost none of that invective has been directed toward me directly, and supportive comments and emails have actually substantially outnumbered the opposite. Not sure what that means.
So consider this an invitation to talk. If you would like to know more about what I actually think, or would just like to see whether or not I’m actually a misshapen troll, reach out to me, either publicly through the comments or privately via email. If you’re on the UAB campus, come talk to me in person. I’m easy enough to find and my door is usually open.
The Antisocial Darwinist 