Chronic Murmuring

You just have to love this line from the accused professor, "This is so overshadowing the bigger problem on campus, which is that the administration has turned its head regularly on hate speech and hate crimes," Ms. Dunn told the newspaper.

Yeah, I loved that. Here, let me translate: "Crap! I'm deadmeat!"

Behold the ridiculous depths to which liberalism (lower case l) can descend. Despite my firm belief in due process, my first instict would be to deport her to someplace where idiocy of that nature isn't as big a deal. France, for example.

"Swing voters are more appropriately known as the ‘idiot voters’ because they have no set of philosophical principals. By the age of fourteen, you’re either a Conservative or a Liberal if you have an IQ above a toaster." -- Ann Coulter

I'm not sure I'd be throwing stones if I were Ann Coulter.

This has nothing to do with liberalism or liberals. Nor is it fair to call someone's nature idiotic.

I do wonder, though, if maybe it indicts the uncritical eye that liberals have when it comes to this kind of stuff. If something reeks of a hate crime, there's far less critical attention given to ascertaining exactly what happened. This is partly why I think this lady probably thought she could get away with it. In the radical fringes of academic liberalism - which actually isn't so fringe in academia, but more of the dominant ideology - the sense I repeatedly get is that that kind of openness and laziness creates makes it much easier to pull these kinds of capers off.

This is anecdotal, but when I was a college student, my main adviser was fairly radical in his politics (member of the communist part, for instance). One day, a student died falling down an elevator shaft. He had gotten stuck in the elevator, and had attempted to climb out through the ceiling, but slipped and fell. He was also active in the local chapter of a Homosexual society. My professor actually told us that he believed the boy had been pushed out of the elevator because of his homosexuality. No evidence, nor was this idea even floating around. I see that kind of related to this incident at Claremont. In my experience, academic liberals are looking for reasons to further an agenda, and they don't seem to me, as a group, concerned about getting the facts straight so much as they do in using those events. It's never right to call someone idiotic, but I do think that liberalism uniquely invites some of this onto itself. Think, too, of the girl who claimed she had been raped, and who Al Sharpton defended and even accused the DA of being involved with the crime, but who was later found to have fabricated the entire story. Or even Jane Roe in the Roe v. Wade case, who was used in a similar way. In my experience - again, limited - I sense liberalism as a movement using specific cases like the ones mentioned as ammunition in a larger culture war. It makes me a bit cynical about the ideology, since it props up more and more.

But at the same time if something reeks of a hate crime, no one else is doing anything about it. Sure, everybody goes overboard a bit on something they feel strongly about. We admit to sometimes going overboard on our theology. The fact that they are probably the only ones doing anything remotely constructive, even if sometimes hampered by comments and behaviour we don't always understand and find almost ludicrous, says something. And they have historically done a lot to further improving social interactions in society. It was the liberals, after all, who achieved civil rights and women's suffrage.

Yea, the story about the kid being "pushed" off the elevator makes us roll our eyes. But why would the person feel like perpetuating that story if that wasn't a possibility or a world didn't exist where things like that are done.

The woman should not have vandalized her own car, but reading the whole Chronicle article shows that it was already in a series of hate crimes. But who, other than the "liberals", was doing anything to combat or to understand the ideology that perpetuated these events.

I think that before we start rolling our eyes at their less than stellar moments, knowing that we, too, have less than stellar moments, perhaps we should at least try to understand the essence of the social benefits of what they are trying to bring about.

One way that we can possibly help liberals to be better at what they are doing is utterly make fun of them when they do something as stupid as this, though. The more times the movement does something this stupid - which is essentially blindly promoting the agenda, rather than careful attention to reality - it only reinforces that maybe they are a bit too preoccupied with their own interpretation of reality. If they are so willing to suspend scrutiny of an event like this before essentially blaming the entire campus body as being infected with racism and sexism, then doesn't it call into question some of the work they're doing? They claim to be the only ones working towards social justice, but this event and several others cause me to doubt that seriously. Perhaps they are chasing bogeymen, after all - dragons of their own ideological creation.

Both sides of the spectrum do this - I have no doubt in my mind. Conservative extremists and liberal extremists both suffer from a myopic and narrow view of reality. But, the difference is that most universities in the United States lean left of center - usually far left of center. There's very little diversity of opinion when it comes to the beliefs of faculty, especially when you move into the softer sciences and the humanities. And so I think it is fair to not be soft-handed with them when they repeatedly reveal themselves to have what John Frame called a "movement mentality." They shoot first, ask questions later.

I also would seriously question the assertion that they are the only ones doing anything constructive against social injustice. Many of the things that liberals do to fight social injustice strike me as utterly counter-productive to the very things they're trying to eradicate (like poverty, violence, etc.). Conservatives may also be against those things, but differ philosophically in how best to meet those problems, yet are continually accused of not doing anything constructive. That seems hardly fair.