56 Comments

Tomorrow belongs to Chad.

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50 years on, and that's still one of the most chilling scenes I've ever seen in a film.

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Same.

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It works for me because it turns me into a Nazi for a few seconds.

I quit reading most Right and all Fascist pages because, I've come to realise, I believe literally _everything_ I read for a microsecond, then executive functions clamp down on known falsehoods and on bullshit…but the experience of very briefly believing some stuff 0.) is too much of wrench and 1.) leaves me feeling unclean.

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That’s how I feel when Tulsi speaks. I nod along, drooling, til I snap back to my senses, such as they are.

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Maybe it's racism, or sexism, or (mainly, I hope) an allergy to Newage Woo (probably developed from my physics days), but I don't have that problem with her stuff.

Fascists very often are very good at constructing _formally_ valid arguments, that is arguments with decently-defined terms (which don't map onto reality well) that proceed with rational steps. It's very much like Augustine's 'proof' of Infant Damnation.

My problem with formally-correct argument makes the following my favourite of Orwell's rules:

'Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.'

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All I know is that I look, listen and the mind goes slack.

And then, as I say, I come to my senses. She’s vile but incredibly hot IMO. But, you know, that’s me.

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YES!!

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I’m pretty sure I know which actual northern VA university is being loosely described here and its generous endowments from the usual RW oligarchs. The “Chads” will always be with us.

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I know – hanging's too good for them.

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'generous endowments' hehehe... so you met the barista girl too?

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Silly Chad, he doesn't understand that being a conservative free-speech activist means talking as much as possible about your right to express your views, while keeping your actual views - which tend to be repellent and off-putting to the general public - on the down-low.

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Chad On Wheels, AKA Madison Cawthorn

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Heil on Wheels

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Dimpled Chad

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LOL, love Chad getting his Nazi eugenics on. Hey, it’s a “viewpoint,” right?

The obvious cynical question is if Emma Camp is so sensitive she can’t tolerate disagreement from her undergraduate classmates at UVA, how does she have the self-confidence to write a critique of university culture for the New York Fucking Times? It’s not the Muncie, Indiana Pennysaver.

Of course the irony here is that the hubris required to write this for the paper of record negates the entire notion she is too delicate a blossom to endure pushback. Doesn’t she intern at Reason or Fire Organization or something?

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I think what's more effective about the piece is that Prof. Thrum's "sotto voce" white supremacy is seen as less shocking, less a violation of the "free speech" principles of this "college."

As for the second ??, Sunday — she answers herself. The NYT editorial board is a far less critrical & confronting audience than an imagined hoard of misty phantoms of viewpoints Camp doesn't like.

** I'm betting NVCCC has a "Debate Me" program **

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She's a Reason contributor https://reason.com/people/emma-camp/

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Barf. Once more That Fking Newspaper (h/t Atrios) platforms a right-wing operative while navel-gazing about being the School of Fking Athens.

Plato! Euclid! Spencer, Riefenstahl, Laffer, Limbaugh! Come, let us reason together!

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Emma Camp Of The Saints

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Camp: "Forty-eight percent of undergraduate students described themselves as “somewhat uncomfortable” or “very uncomfortable” with expressing their views on a controversial topic during classroom discussions."

Thirty years of teaching experience tells me that most students are “somewhat uncomfortable” or “very uncomfortable” with expressing their views on ANY topic, controversial or otherwise, during classroom discussions. Hell, this particular faculty member is “somewhat uncomfortable” or “very uncomfortable” with expressing my own views during faculty meetings. Makes me wonder if there's some general human tendency to dislike public speaking, which a relatively small percentage is immune from.

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A related issue is how women are socialized in this society to be "people-pleasers" and to shy away from conflict. And even when the topic isn't controversial male students do tend to dominate classroom discussion if the teacher makes no effort to control the discussion. It would be interesting to see the gender breakdown on that 48% figure, also curious that Camp herself doesn't seem interested in that aspect of the problem.

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Yeah, judging by my classes, 75% of students are somewhat or very uncomfortable with sharing their view of what Geometallurgy is. Mainly because they worry the other students will think if their answer is wrong, or too right.

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Nonsense. Your students are being silenced by the Straitjacket of Metallurgical Correctness.

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They can take the course using the Geology or Mining Engineering prefix

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Prefix? Is that like pronouns? Help, help, I'm bein' oppressed!

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The course is GEO/MEM/MET 455/555, the prefixes are GEO, MEM, MET. MET is of course the best prefix, and I am not biased at all.

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Makes me mad! I'm going to write my own NYT Op-ed!

How do I do that?

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Your Editor over at Reason can hook you up.

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Goooo, Eagles!

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Gotta say, that reference to Camp was triggering. A) I had already read LGM's post on her and B) I may well have had my fill of these future-hero-of-the-anti-cancelculture-brigades. I mean, enough with the lionizing shitheaded snowflakes who get sad when faced with being held accountable and the pundits who hold them up as, well, special snowflakes.

But.

"THRUM: Of course we know about it, Jason! It’s already been in National Review, The Daily Caller, Fox News, and of course on Rumble, GETTR and Gab."

Eventually, I was amused. And then Chad's truth telling and cancelling by Thrum. 👩🏻‍🍳😘 (I was sort of wondering initially why it was Thrum and not my man Manfred Sheboygan but, obviously, by the end of the piece it was obvious why.)

BTW: Besides the triggering thing, as a dotard, I take offense at any sort of mockery of old time pearl-buttoned work shirts. Just saying.

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"salmon shorts"

Yeah, brilliant...but how does it scale?

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Emma should thank her lucky stars she didn’t go to college in the ‘60s. Tear gas trumps “cancel culture” in the battle against free speech.

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And the Berkeley Free Speech Movement wasn't just about tearing down stupid campus speech codes (like the one Camp mentions, regulating the size of posters on doors, which is bullshit, and good on her for opposing it.) At the time, there was a rather large war going on that ended up killing more than two million people, and the free-speech activists of the time wanted to say something about that. Today's conservative free-speech advocates seem suspiciously coy about the actual views they want to express and op-eds like Camp's are carefully scrubbed of any opinions that most people would find objectionable. I wonder why?

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We are currently more worried about people putting up outward facing security cameras near their doors. Also, I don't think I have ever put a sign up on my door. We had a technician that put up many right wing comics on his door. They weren't funny but I got along with this guy fine.

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Ah, I always wondered who Mallard Fillmore was for.

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While there was some Mallard, this guy was more a Ben Garrison guy IIRC. He also lost part of a leg to diabetes, so we mostly talked about medication, etc.

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How long ago was it that that campus cop pepper sprayed students at a protest? Was that not quite 20 years?

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You mean the one where they sprayed it at close range in their eyes, or the one where they flooded a small room with pepper spray, or the one where they rubbed pepper spray directly into the eyes of protestors? I note they're a lot less likely to do that shit near cameras anymore, so I suppose the cops and campus security have now been cancel-cultured.

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I think it was likely sprayed at close range in their eyes

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I think it was Cal State Fresno -- the Occupy protests

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I looked it up and it was during the Occupy protests, but it was Cal-Davis. The sprayer got some workman's comp for what happened to him after the incident, and the school paid $1 million to 36 students that got sprayed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC_Davis_pepper_spray_incident

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I remember that one, but there was also a sit in inside an office on campus that led to pepper spray being *swabbed* into protestors' eyes. Q-Tips, I think, but it may have been a rag or something. Just literally going down the line one at a time and the students who hadn't been tortured yet sat there listening to their allies scream and waiting for their turn.

It was traumatic as fuck just hearing about it. There was video, so I know it's out there, but I have no interest in seeing it again.

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Delineating characters through their fashion choices really works for me. There's a lot of information there! How the character sees themselves, how they think others see them. Values, income. Tons of information. Have you always done this? I've really only noticed it here.

It's everywhere but a couple of my favorite authors really use this - Jon Sandford.for one -. Nobody moves a narrative like Sandford. It's simple pulp fiction policier but man oh man is it ever put together . Every one of his books I promise to myself I'm going to concentrate on figuring out just how it's constructed . Before I know it I'm sucked in - I'm reading it as fast as I can because that's what he knows how to do . I've finished books of his and immediately started re-reading it determined to figure out just how he does it . Two pages later I'm just wolfing it down caught up in a story...

His main character , Lucas Davenport really really likes good clothes and can afford them . There's always a scene in these lightning fast super tightly plotted books where everything stops and he goes shopping or runs into another clothes horse and they start discussing what they're wearing . It's not a big part of the books but it's always there and it's always enjoyably done .

And then I think of that incredible sentence in the introduction to the Magnificent Ambersons-

"In that town, in those days, all the women who wore silk or velvet knew all the other women who wore silk or velvet ..."

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Sandford sounds great.

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Trousers were worn without a crease, as the presence of a crease would indicate the item had lain upon a shelf, and was therefore "ready-made."

I love that Wells kept that in, a lesser director would have seen it as something easily cut to make a long book fit into a short movie.

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THRUM: [Grandly] There are limits! We have to demonstrate respect for other viewpoints. I don’t say we have to have respect for them, but we do have to demonstrate it. What a polite Con.

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From Ms. Kampf's op-ed:

"At U.Va., only 9 percent of students surveyed described themselves as a “strong Republican” or “weak Republican”

Might indicate something about today's Republican party, no?

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Last time I checked, the percentage of scientists identifying as Republican was in the low single-digits. Cue the op-eds about how all of science lacks intellectual diversity.

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This is almost surely a lie too. Only 9? At a school with that deeply ingrained a Greek system? Sure....

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Factor in the Republicans who now call themselves "Independent" and the fact that many Republicans refuse to talk to pollsters, and it might be possible.

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Also, where are the moderately Republicans?

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"UNVCC"

I see what you did there.

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Hilarous! Right up until it was chilling.

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I know I said this just yesterday, but this column should be public too.

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