Larry Summers v Ward Churchill - why the disparate treatment?

I suppose it did get a tidge off topic; my apologies for contributing to the wrong turn.

 

For little fauss:

First, inmates do not leave prison gay. If hetero before, they return to hetero behavior.

You denigrate the importance of empirical evidence in this case. Since choice is inherently a conscious decision (or pehaps subconscious), how else would you get a handle on it other than a large empirically generated data set? Perhaps DNA evidence will one day decide the issue completely, but until then...

Your stance reminds me of the cigarette industry arguments in the 1960's. The evidence was before them, and they clung to propoganda and served it up as research.

Moreover, if you discount empirical evidence, then what evidence can you produce that gays should be held responsible for their choice of sexuality? What reality do you cling to that contradicts the natural intuition that most of us possess that gays do not make a choice in this matter. Perhaps the evidence is not 100% for the no-choice crowd, but that says almost nothing about the choice hypothesis.

You say you're not making the case that homosexuality is wrong, yet you continually imply that those who act on their predilections (even if natural) should be held responsible. Responsible for what? Are you not making a tacit assumption of guilt in this case? If not, then why is this argument even relevant or interesting? You're hedging in a big big way.

You write, "I have no problem with a live-and-let-live mindset, I'm not even addressing that issue. I do have a problem, though, with brushing reality aside because it fails to support a live-and-let-live paradigm."

Listen to what you're saying here. You certainly are addressing the issue. And, again, what evidence do you have that runs counter to a "live and let live" lifestyle?

So if you can't support a live and let live lifstyle, you're in favor of what? I guess we have to assume you're in favor of not letting gays live and let live. What does that mean? You are in favor of giving them a hard time, ridiculing their choices, contesting their version of reality, imposing your own version of reality on them? What is it? How should we be treating gays, if not letting them live? Tell me, please. I don't understand what you are advocating at all.

To Janko:

You are positively transparent. I see your posts and I can't get the term "fustigating gadfly" out of my head.

Let me spare you the trouble, "who me? couldn't be....in the cookie jar."

 

Like Janko is saying, perhaps this is better continued elsewhere, this thread isn't about homosexuality, at least it didn't start that way, not good form for us to continue hijacking this thread.

 

Thank you for the kind comment Janko, it's appreciated,

I just don't understand how people buy into that guy's BS, but where there is a loud voice, there will always be sheep that follow (that crazy alien cult and the waco texas incident are good examples...)

What about all of the people (more of my family, and friends included) fighting the war in Iraq? They are doing service to their country, despite whether they agree with Bush or not. I am sure he also goes around calling them "baby killers" and other crap just like the hippies did with viet nam vets. These people are risking their lives so he can enjoy the freedom to trash them daily, so maybe we should send him over to Iraq instead, I wouldn't lose any sleep over that, and I am sure no one else would.

If he's going to sit and say that my family deserved to die, fine, I am not going to condemn the man, he will be judged accordingly when meeting his maker.

 

Tom 57:

I really wasn't talking to you. But since you decide to pee in the tea party, you know why gay militants and mean fundamentalists deserve each other? Coz they think everything in the whole bloody universe is about them. Grow up. It ain't.

By the way, if you think that my offering condolences to that other poster is homophobic ("transparent" elsewise as what, exactly, given your one topic of discussion?), you only confirm the point I just made in a profoundly sad way.

Now maybe the fundie who called me a Nazi will show up, and we can forget all about the dumb stunts of Larry Summers or the professional anti-Semitism of Ward Churchill. After all, if Summers and Churchill are neither gay nor fundie, they can't possibly be worth discussing.

One could have a better exchange of ideas with Terri Schiavo...

Janko

 

Actually, the tide could be turning regarding the Larry Summers controversy. A number of (brave) credible authorities are stepping forward to say there could indeed, be a biological basis for the disparity in mathematics and science performance by males and females.

 

Hi Tom,

Since you said you didn't follow Churchill I assume you didn't see the clip of him attacking the reporter. He literally pounced upon him and his facial expression was enough for me to see he was not a man of peace.

Many Vietnam War protesters were violent, Tom. They bombed ROTC buildings, local draft boards, local military recruiting stations, etc. That's violence, Tom.

I marched against capital punishment one weekend in 1977 in Atlanta. The typical leftist groups were all there singing and shouting about peace and love.

When police began to patrol the area on horseback, the filthy names began to spew forth, middle fingers were displayed, bottles and rocks and other objects were thrown--all in the name of peace and love.

Again, this type of hypocrisy is one reason I slowly moved to the center and then, at times, right of center. As an old RFK liberal, I think I have a pretty good handle on what my former cohorts preached and what they actually practiced.

Many other former liberals were disgusted by the hypocrisy and moved to the right. Two come readily to mind, Linda Chavez (former Socialist Workers Party member) and David Horowitz (former Marxist).

You used the word "hyperbole." Yes, Tom, I used hyperbole so why get bent out of shape with some statements I used? Hyperbole or not, I witnessed blatant hypocrisy by the left on numerous ocassions, including four years on a college campus!

 

Janko,

You're right. You weren't talking to me...not directly at least. You're mostly right about the gay militants and mean fundamentalists, except that the mean fundies think everything is about themselves AND gays. They spend WAY too much time thinking about such things.

And, no, that's not what I meant about transparent.

BTW, I'm neither gay nor militant, not that there's anything wrong with that...

 

Yeah. Right. OK. Peace.

The gay militants I knew when I was teaching were every one of 'em obsessed with fundies, just like the mean fundies were obsessed with gays. The normal Christians and the normal gays useta hide when the one or two of each variety of maniac would go on nasty verbal rampages in the office.

Talk about winning friends and influencing nobody...then the mean fundies would whine about "persecution" and the gay militants about "hostile work environment." Sheesh. All the rest of us wanted was 'live and let live' and to get our work done.

It must be tough peddling one variety of apocalypse or another.
I wouldn't know.

And ole Ward needs a makeover. QESG, where are you?

 

surrealism in academe

President Hoffman of the University of Colorado has called criticism of glamour puss Ward Churchill "new McCarthyism." Apparently in her eyes the American Indian Movement (AIM) is guilty of red-baiting.
Well, okay!

 

Re: surrealism in academe

Am I missing something? If she thinks that such criticism is a new form of McCarthyism--boy, don't liberals love to trot that little word out so as to squelch all opposition--why would she be accusing AIM--Ward's tireless defenders--of anything, least of all red-baiting?

Did you mean: "Apparently in her eyes OPPONENTS of AIM are guilty of red-baiting?"

 

fair's fair: AIM blasted Churchill

No, I didn't. AIM denounced ole Ward's comments about 9/11. It surprised me, too, *but they did it.* Good for them. They got Clairol Boy's number dead to rights. I believe the first post on the other Churchill thread linked to the AIM statement. Here it is: http://www.aimovement.org/moipr/churchill05.html

See, in case anybody missed the subtext, calling the victims of 9/11 "little Eichmanns" is not only generally reprehensible but specifically antisemitic, since all far-right-thinking and all far-left-thinking people (as opposed to conservatives and liberals of good will) know for whom "New York", etc., are code words. Call it the Hymietown Principle. Or the Chomsky Formula. Or the shadow side of "academic freedom". Or what goes around in extremist circles goes all around the ballpark.

Maybe Ward could go visit Ernst Zundel in his new German digs. Call it the Gefaengnisprinzip. Or the Verfassungsfeindlichformel.

(Inventing weird German compound nouns is too much fun to be legal.)

 

WRONG, but...

Since the controversy itself is a product of academic commitment to a politically correct position - men keep women 'down' (whatever that means - it's surely an inadequet characterization to say 'the tide could be turning,' given any brief, transitory time frame as a month.

Of course, specialists in these matters have finanlly had their voices heard. (For example, The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 4, 2005
WOMEN AND SCIENCE: THE DEBATE GOES ON "Primed for Numbers"Are boys born better at math? Experts try to dividethe influences of nature and nuurture." I can email you a copy upon request.))

But this is nothing new to those, like me, who've paid attention to the facts undergirding the matter instead of venting ideological utopian 'thinking.'

-Orson

 

Ward Churchill is an interesting character. He has a Masters degree and apparently an eye for self promotion. He IMHO is somewhat of a pseudo intellectual. Does not come across as very bright in terms of an ability to be analytical. Make outrageous statements and hope to appear avante guard and intellectual.

Reminds me of a women in a Sociology class with me. The Professor was a very bright Conflict Theorist (die hard Marxist) but he stretched all of us intellectually. He did not allow people to try and suck up to him with capitalistic consipracy theories. He always expected well reasoned arguments that based themselves in logic. One time a middle aged woman obviously newly discovering her leftist nature lit into him under the mistaken impression that one of the arguments he made from the point of view of Augustine was his. The professor tried to get her to understand and then told her outright that she could not follow a simple argument. She was more interested in regurgitating psuedo intellectual nonsense than academic debate and understanding.

Not sure where I stand in regard to Ward Churchill and his free speech rights. He appears to be an intellectual lightweight that got more publicity out of this than need be. Not the first bone head nor the last...what was that other guy with the Somalia remark (A thousand Mogedesu's----- spelling is off).

North

 

North-

I like your post. But emerging evidence of your estimate of a benign Churchill undermines it.

First, a respected MOR radio talk show host, after a conversation with Churchill's former employer - the editor and publisher of "Soldier of Fortune" - judged Churchill to be a "sociopath." (The precise substance of the conversation had to remain praivate, on advice of legal counsel.)

Then yesterday, it emerged that Churchill is quoted in a radical publication that he had "to do something apocalyptic against the University of Colorado at Boulder" because they weren't hiring enough radicals of his ilk.

Finally, several sources including The Denver Post indicate that a multi-million dollar buyout of this creeps tenure contract is in the works, and the preemptive resignation of president Hoffman was only beginning; she has to be the "fall guy" for the inevitable acrimony.


Now, turning to the Larry Summers' PC sex 'debate,' Victor Davis Hanson observes:
"At one time my university’s classics faculty [at Stanford] privately used to wonder why most of our best students in Greek and Latin were women, who almost alone went on to doctoral programs in philology. That disproportionate number of women classics majors prompted speculation behind closed doors that perhaps females just grasped languages more easily, or were more mature in their study habits at an early age, or did less partying. We also sometimes worried that working-class males thought that the classics were not muscular enough, or that they felt such a less lucrative career would impair their ability as breadwinners — or about anything other than the need to implement some sort of special program to address this statistical anomaly. After all, Homer wouldn’t care if he were read by a woman or a man, and students seemed to worry not about their instructors’ gender, but only about having exciting and competent professors.

"But such unfettered inquiry about gender or racial imbalances is precisely what one doesn’t do publicly on a university campus [among many other things] — unless perhaps one has the multifaceted exemptions of a Ward Churchill. So Summers touched the third rail of contemporary university life, by questioning one of the hallowed tenets of the victimization industry: Deliberate discrimination explains all inequality of result, precluding free discussion of other theories — and thus justifies compensatory collective benefaction.
. . .

"What are we to make of all these recent university teachable moments? The usual exegeses suffice: The contemporary campus has devolved into an Orwellian world in which the ends usually justify the means. Diversity really means no diversity of ideas. Unfettered expression is a code word for groupspeak of the Left. Academic freedom and tenure ensure timidity and monotony of thought. The champions of the oppressed and discriminated are, in fact, the affluent and privileged, whose antics are excused only by the irrelevancy of academic culture and properly deplored solely through the accidental discovery of a forgotten rant or taped remark."
http://victorhanson.com/articles/hanson031005.html

-Orson

 

Or, only his hairdresser knows for sure.

 

BUT BACK TO SUMMERS...Trouble w/PC prez's

I caught this on an aggreived and greiving Princeton alumnus, TheAmericanThinker.com:

"The NOW-prescribed 'solution' to the 'problem' of an unequal number of male and female math and science professors is the familiar liberal troika: social engineering, affirmative action, and quotas. Over the past several weeks, NOW’s followers, both on and off Harvard’s campus, have been pressuring Summers to implement these policies. Among them is Princeton University president Shirley Tilghman. In mid-February, Tilghman, along with MIT president Susan Hockfield and Stanford University president John Hennessy, issued a public statement
http://www-tech.mit.edu/V125/N5/5_hockfield_statement.5n.html
condemning* Summers’ remarks for allegedly 'rejuvenat[ing] old myths and reinforc[ing] negative stereotypes and biases.'


"For Tilghman and her colleagues, speculating about the role played by genetics in math and science performance only discourages women, and 'can be as destructive as overt discrimination.' Instead, the three presidents emphasized the 'important cultural and societal factors' that must be addressed so that 'women can feel as much at home in math, science and engineering as men.' So much for the commitment to truth, merit, and free inquiry at our nation’s top universities."

- - - - -
*Amusingly, this statement uses Marie Curie as proof that women are not in any way - as a group - different from men in science. The problem is that this example, ironically, cuts against thier argument and goes to their opponents: Curie won her Nobel Prize not for the abstract, mathematical work that stereotypes 'men in science,' but for basic, attentive, lab science.

At any rate, the PC beat-of-the-drum goes on - against Summers for entertaining a politically incorrect idea.

-Orson