A semester’s worth of readings, from John Stuart Mill to selected Facebook posts, as well as speakers representing a multitude of perspectives, and serious and civil class discussion. My students came to see that free speech protects everyone, especially the oppressed, and includes those who share their leftist views.
So it was with all this in mind that I went into a faculty meeting to present the free-expression “pledge” with the idea that we would have a productive discussion. Then reality hit.
As I stepped up to the lectern in one of the college’s elegant Federal-style halls, students marched into the room, bearing a letter naming me an “Enemy of the People.”
In the spirit of liberal openness, I read their letter aloud. This is what it said: “‘Free Speech,’ as a term, has been co-opted by right-wing and liberal parties as a discursive cover for racism, xenophobia, sexism, anti-semitism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and classism.” The letter reserved special scorn for liberalism: “Liberal ideology asserts that morality is logical — that dehumanizing ideas can be fixed with logic and therefore need to be debated.” But, it added, “dehumanization cannot be discussed away.”
Steven B. Gerrard
September 9, 2019
The Rise of the Comfort College: At American universities, personal grievances are what everyone’s talking about.
[Via email from Chet.
There is more good stuff in the opinion piece. I especially “liked” (emphasis added):
In response, students sent a letter to the trustees declaring that “We hold the truth of discursive and institutional violence to be self-evident.”
Self-evident. Refusing to consider evidence goes against the tenor of all three previous colleges. (Even the Christian college studied arguments for the existence of God.) We might at first dismiss this as (literal) sophomoric bravado. However, in a meeting for faculty of color called by the dean of the faculty, one professor asked for evidence of “violent practices.” Another professor responded that “to ask for evidence of violent practices is itself a violent practice.”
This reminds me of something Ann Landers once said. These people must be confronted. They are crazy. Allowing this to stand is to invite the destruction of rational thought and civilization.—Joe]
The left is using the Kafkatrap – denial of wrong doing, or even refusal to play their word-games and deny it in their terms, is proof of wrongdoing. Learn to see it, deflet it, and turn it back onto the accuser. Remember the three rules of the SJW – they lie, they PROJECT, and they double-down.
I suppose this was the inevitable result of the common practice among the left in the 1990s of assuming the victim stance, instantly, at the first sign of disagreement. I first fully realized it when I approached a leftist agitator booth in Moscow, Idaho, circa 1995. I calmly and politely told them how I disagreed, and without hesitation, and almost with a flourish (because they had been taught this, and jumped at their opportunity to use it), they asserted their right to free speech, as though I had ever even remotely questioned it. To disagree with them in any way is, in their minds, to violate their fundamental rights you see.
I was briefly stunned, having fallen prey to a simple tactic and not anticipating how disingenuous and unfair they could be right at the outset of a conversation.
In fact it’s all they have, because they will lose any rational, level-headed and fair discussion in two ticks, and they know it.
We must never be taken by surprise by such insane behavior. We were warned a lifetime ago by Ayn Rand as she explained how insanity was being used, even then, as a leftist tactic. The Charles Manson “family” was very much into it, and they were pikers compared to the master manipulators we’re facing now.
I think we’ve let the problem fester for far, far too long to be in any position to fix it now. Therefore we are certainly all screwed (them and us). Babylon, ancient Medo/Persia, Greece and Rome, as one conglomerate “beast”, will rise again, this time over the whole planet, with all the former ugliness, for a brief time. The United States will have helped it along significantly too.
The Protestant world, not long ago, believed these verses to refer to the United States of America, thusly;
“And I beheld another beast (government) coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb (i.e. gentile, Christ-like), and he spake as a dragon (a monster, devil or tyrant). And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him (the Roman Catholic Church – think Middle Ages), and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed.”
The papacy, which once controlled the modern world, was abolished as a political power (receiving a “deadly wound”) around the same time as the founding of the U.S., and then re-instated with the cooperation of Mousolini circa 1939 (“wound was healed”).
So if the interpretation is correct, there’s absolutely nothing we can do except to come out of that (Babylonian, Medo/Persian, Greek, Roman) system and be distinctly separate from it (a behavior which in itself will be considered “violence”), and then wait out the storm which will surely come. And of course to convince others to do the same.
It’s like being on a train, slowly heading for a demolished bridge. You can stay on it and die, or get off and maybe survive. For certain you aren’t going to stop that train, with its thousands of years of built-up inertia combined with the absolute resolve of the engineers– It’s litterally quite impossible.
Laugh at the poo flinging primates, publicly, loudly and often. Call their sophomoric antics sophomoric. Scream at them in outrage at their own word violence, and defend yourself physically if they come within arm’s reach.
When told your words are violent, offer to kick them in the nuts so they understand real violence versus words. If they refuse the offer, tell them you just won the argument, and they should sit down and shut up. Should they accept the kicking, remind them that self defense is violence, so they have to stand there as long as you want to kick them.
One way or another, they might learn a lesson. If not, hey, you got to kick them in the nuts, which is nice.