Thursday: Hili dialogue

December 7, 2023 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday, December 7, 2023: National Cotton Candy Day. Cotton candy is simply spun sugar with coloring, and thus will instantly dissolve in water. This raccoon finds that out to his dismay:

It’s also Letter Writing Day,International Civil Aviation Day, and National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day (the US was attacked by Ja0an on this day in 1941 the next day we were in World War II.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the December 7 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*War news from the NYT. Israel is busy sniffing out Hamas leaders in southern Gaza:

Israel was pressing on with its pursuit of top Hamas leaders in the southern Gaza Strip, as civilians forced into slivers of land on the southern edge of the enclave faced continuing bombardment even in the places they were told to go by the Israeli military.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday that Israeli troops had surrounded the home of Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis. Israeli authorities have said that Mr. Sinwar masterminded the Hamas attacks in Israel on Oct. 7. It was not immediately clear if Israel had confirmed his presence inside the home.

“He can escape, but it is only a matter of time until we reach him,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a video posted on the social media site X.

Some of the tens of thousands of people ordered to leave parts of Khan Younis have fled farther south to Rafah, a city along the border with Egypt and one of the few remaining places Israel’s military has told displaced Gazans they can seek safety.

Later on Wednesday, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military’s chief spokesman, said Mr. Sinwar was “not above the ground” but did not provide any additional details about where they believed he is.

I’m convinced now that Israel is dead serious about eliminating Hamas. I don’t know if they can weaken it to the point of disappearance, or what will happen after the war, but it’s also clear that the U.S. is not going to make Israel participate in a cease-fire that will end hostilities.

*The NYT describes the questioning of the Presidents of MIT, Harvard, and Penn by Representatives on the House Education and Workforce Committee, whose Republican determined to make mincemeat of the -entitled heads of elite colleges (see some of the exchanges here).

The criticism leveled at these Presidents is apparently on two fronts. The first, and least important, is whether it violates the speech codes of the universities. The second is whether it is considered Constitutional free speech by the University. The questions are connected if the university’s speech code adheres to First-Amendment style speech, which is automatic at public universities but not at private universities like these three.

However, calling for the genocide of Jews, the big deal here, usually does not violate the First Amendment unless it’s a form of personal harassment of individual Jews, is likely to lead to imminent and predictable violence, or creates an atmosphere of bigotry in the workplace, which is NOT out in the open quads but in the classrooms. Thus, the Presidents are correct in saying that whether calling for the genocide of Jews (or of any race) is illegal “depends on the context.”

Another issue is whether the universities previously criticized forms of speech that were legal under the First Amendment but don’t do so with antisemitism. That would be hypocrisy in treating speech, but I didn’t see the Representatives discussing that issue (I didn’t watch the whole several hours of the questioning). But all the fracas is about whether the Presidents would condemn statements about killing Jews, but I think that those who demand the three Presidents be fired for answering “it depends” don’t understand the First Amendment.

Here’s an example of Congressional bullying of the Presidents on these grounds.

From the NYT:

Support for the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and M.I.T. eroded quickly on Wednesday, after they seemed to evade what seemed like a rather simple question during a contentious congressional hearing: Would they discipline students calling for the genocide of Jews?

Their lawyerly replies to that question and others during a four-hour hearing drew incredulous responses.

“It’s unbelievable that this needs to be said: Calls for genocide are monstrous and antithetical to everything we represent as a country,” said a White House spokesman, Andrew Bates.

Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, said he found the responses by Elizabeth Magill, Penn’s president, “unacceptable.”

Even the liberal academic Laurence Tribe found himself agreeing with Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, who sharply questioned Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay.

BUT (bolding is mine)

But on the question of disciplining students for statements about genocide, they tried to give lawyerly responses to a tricky question involving free speech, which supporters of academic freedom said were legally correct.

But to many Jewish students, alumni and donors, who had watched campus pro-Palestinian protests with trepidation and fear, the statements by the university presidents failed to meet the political moment by not speaking clearly and forcefully against antisemitism.

I’m sorry, but a lawyerly answer is the correct one and, as the article notes above, the Presidents’ answers are “legally correct”. It’s irrelevant about whether those answers offend Jews and are seen as promoting antisemitism. The question is about whether such speech is allowable by a University itself. And the answer is “It depends.”  Of course free speech must protect odious speech, and this is one of the hard cases, like the ACLU allowing the Nazis to march through Skokie. Isn’t that antisemitic speech?

Below Liz Magill personally damns calls of genocide, and then admits that such speech is “harassment and intimidation” at Penn so she’s confusing matters further. She first says speech is legal under the First Amendment, but perhaps it violates Penn’s code of conduct anyway.  This could all be resolved if University speech codes were like Chicago’s: conforming to the First Amendment, period.  Magill is confused, but yes, her focus on the First Amendment led her to give the correct answer. Perhaps calls for genocide do violate Penn’s own speech code, but if that’s the case they need to modify their speech code so it becomes like the University of Chicago’s.

I see from today’s news that damnation of the three Presidents and calls for their firing, on the grounds that calls for genocide should be totally banned at their schools, are nearly universal. I dissent from these calls for firing.  I am of course a secular Jew, and find the cries for Jewish genocide deplorable. But deplorable speech is often protected by the First Amendment, as it should be.

*It’s clear that many people, particularly young ones, don’t know jack about the history of the relationship between Israel and Palestine, though that doesn’t stop them from supporting Palestine as People of Color oppressed by White Adjacent Settler/Colonialist Israelis. The ignorance of the young in particular is highlighted by a survey in a WSJ commentary, “From which river to which sea?” You can guess what it’s about (and you better know that it’s the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea!):

When college students who sympathize with Palestinians chant “From the river to the sea,” do they know what they’re talking about? I hired a survey firm to poll 250 students from a variety of backgrounds across the U.S. Most said they supported the chant, some enthusiastically so (32.8%) and others to a lesser extent (53.2%).

That’s 88% of the students (granted, a small sample) who supported the chant.  Taken literally, the call means that the chanters are calling for the elimination of Israel, but only half of these neuronally deprived students, or 41% of all of the students, could name the relevant bodies of water:

But only 47% of the students who embrace the slogan were able to name the river and the sea. Some of the alternative answers were the Nile and the Euphrates, the Caribbean, the Dead Sea (which is a lake) and the Atlantic. Less than a quarter of these students knew who Yasser Arafat was (12 of them, or more than 10%, thought he was the first prime minister of Israel). Asked in what decade Israelis and Palestinians had signed the Oslo Accords, more than a quarter of the chant’s supporters claimed that no such peace agreements had ever been signed. There’s no shame in being ignorant, unless one is screaming for the extermination of millions.

Would learning basic political facts about the conflict moderate students’ opinions? A Latino engineering student from a southern university reported “definitely” supporting “from the river to the sea” because “Palestinians and Israelis should live in two separate countries, side by side.” Shown on a map of the region that a Palestinian state would stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, leaving no room for Israel, he downgraded his enthusiasm for the mantra to “probably not.” Of the 80 students who saw the map, 75% similarly changed their view.

They should stop chanting, then, as no construal of that phrase can be taken to mean “we want a peaceful two-state solution”!

An art student from a liberal arts college in New England “probably” supported the slogan because “Palestinians and Israelis should live together in one state.” But when informed of recent polls in which most Palestinians and Israelis rejected the one-state solution, this student lost his enthusiasm. So did 41% of students in that group.

A third group of students claimed the chant called for a Palestine to replace Israel. Sixty percent of those students reduced their support for the slogan when they learned it would entail the subjugation, expulsion or annihilation of seven million Jewish and two million Arab Israelis. Yet another 14% of students reconsidered their stance when they read that many American Jews considered the chant to be threatening, even racist. (This argument had a weaker effect on students who self-identified as progressive, despite their alleged sensitivity to offensive speech.)

This is more evidence that the young students, who are those who most oppose Israel’s military action in Gaza, don’t know what the genocidal chant really means. Have they ever simply thought of what does this sentence say?

*A group of Oakland, California public-school teachers are planning a big pro-Palestinian “teach in”, which apparently will present propaganda to students.

Dozens of public school educators in Oakland, Calif. are planning to present pro-Palestinian lessons on Wednesday as part of an unauthorized teach-in.

The school district said this week that it opposed the event, and some Jewish groups and parents condemned it and called for teachers who participate to be disciplined.

The teach-in was organized by a group of activists within the local teachers’ union, the Oakland Education Association. But the union president, Ismael Armendariz, emphasized that the materials had not been reviewed by his group.

The event’s anonymous organizers created a lengthy list of suggested curriculum materials for all grade levels, from pre-K through high school. The document calls Israel an “apartheid state” and refers to “the historic and unfolding oppression and genocide of Palestinians.”

Nate Landry, 40, a parent in the district who is acting as a spokesman for the organizers, said teachers saw the proposed curriculum as “a corrective” to mainstream education materials that take a pro-Israel view.

. . .Much of the recommended material comes from pro-Palestinian advocacy groups.

A coloring book for elementary students features a Palestinian character who says, “A group of bullies called Zionists wanted our land so they stole it by force and hurt many people.”

It also introduces the argument that Palestinian refugees have a right to return to the land that makes up the Jewish state. Children are prompted to solve a maze and given the instructions, “Handala has his family’s old house key. Now, he needs your help to get back home to Palestine! Trace a way home for Handala.”

I’m not sure what the “conventional” (i.e., pro-Israel view is, or if it’s really taught), but I object to this just as I’d object to pro-Israel propaganda. This is a case of teachers propagandizing their students with “progressive” ideology, and it’s wrong.

*Finally, there was a Republican Presidential debate last night, but who cares? Trump is going to be the nominee. Perhaps he can nominate the “winner” of the debates as VP (that would probably be Nikki Haley), but Trump, who might blow and artery and die in his second term, doesn’t want a strong VP, and doesn’t care who replaces him. A precis from the WaPo (if you care):

Four Republican presidential contenders clashed in Wednesday’s presidential primary debate, as former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sought to solidify their second-place position with less than six weeks left before the Iowa caucuses. Former president Donald Trump once again skipped the showdown.

Haley, who has surpassed or tied DeSantis in early state public polling, found herself the target of attacks early on, and at one point former New Jersey governor Chris Christie came to her defense. Haley and DeSantis continued to tussle on China, while Christie used his airtime to hit Trump for skipping the debates. Christie accused his opponents onstage of being hesitant to cross Trump, who holds a dominant polling lead in the primary race. Meanwhile, tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy espoused conspiracy theories and leveled personal attacks on his rivals.

Meh. The question is whether Trump will be prohibited from running by the more than two dozen charges against him, even if he’s not yet convicted by next November. Who knows?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is hard at work editing:

Hili: This paragraph must be re-written.
A: Why?
Hili: Tautology.
In Polish:
Hili: Ten akapit trzeba przerobić.
Ja: Dlaczego?
Hili: Tautologia.

*******************

From Christopher, a Dave Blazek cartoon:

Time Magazine has chosen its Person of the Year. Meh again; I’m more interested in her cat! Swift seems to be the new Beatles, but I find her music boring.

From Stash Krod, a nightmarish website entrée:

From Masih, retweeted by Richard Dawkins; the link to her interview with Richard is below (and here).  Masih is eloquent as always.

From Paul, another example of Oberlin’s maladaptive wokeness. Kim Russell’s story is here. but she also tells it below.

A multi-cat game from Merilee. The Google translation is this:

During the game  😹 I got home safely (｀･ω･´)ゞ

Oy vey!

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a man who survived only two months in the camp:

THREE tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, an amazingly flexible woman followed by a passel of angry chickens:

Joni was a great painter and designed some of her own album covers:

Not much difference except for color:

29 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  1. That’s the best commentary on the speech battle I’ve read.

    I think there is still confusion in the religious dimension – the distinction between criticism of religious doctrine and individuals who follow the doctrine (which readers here understand – but seemed elusive in the hearing).

    What use is there for DEI after all that then? Ideological capture of the institution through epistemic subversion to bind and orient all departments to critical consciousness. The Revolution is all that matters – the congressional hearing did not take place (as Jean Baudrillard might have written).

    Jon Haidt wrote a bit recently about the University needing to define its telos – which I found a striking notion – this seems a short note based on a talk (I have not listened yet): https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/one-telos-truth-or-social-justice-2/

    1. Those “lawyerly” responses would be more meaningful if they were uttered by people who were prepared to defend free speech of all sorts. We all know it is perfectly possible to be expelled from their universities just by saying the wrong thing with respect to race, sex, trans issues etc etc.

      1. ” “lawyerly” responses ”

        My impression was of a skillful truth-telling at play – a game of hide-the-ball – offer no words to be used back against themselves. Then of course the videos come out of the eloquent solo expositions.

        Which goes to show : the congressional hearing did not happen. The Revolution makes another partial turn.

      2. Please correct me if I am wrong here, as I do not work for a university.
        University administrations are not charged with enforcing the law, really. They cannot sentence you to jail.
        Their area of responsibility where it concerns issues of behavior and decorum is related to enforcing their code of conduct.
        The three presidents under discussion are woke activists, but smart enough to understand that the optics of public Jew hunts on campus would present the university in an unfavorable light, and possibly decrease alumni donations.
        I do not think any of the three could say honestly that they disapprove of the idea of a Judenfrei campus. So it should be expected that they try to focus the discussion on first amendment legality of speech, instead of explaining why they did not use their existing rules to quickly stop this, or the BLM disruptions and takeovers on campus a couple of years ago.

        1. They are trained for critical consciousness which does one thing : reveal the hidden power structure in society – the hegemony (Gramsci) – such that the relevant power might be seized.

          So if public perception is controlling the discourse – or questions from a representative in a seat of power – well, the only critical solution is to seize and control those things – eventually.

          Nothing else matters.

  2. On this day (Part 1):
    1703 – The Great Storm of 1703, the greatest windstorm ever recorded in the southern part of Great Britain, makes landfall. Winds gust up to 120 mph, and 9,000 people die.

    1732 – The Royal Opera House opens at Covent Garden, London, England.

    1787 – Delaware becomes the first state to ratify the United States Constitution.

    1842 – First concert of the New York Philharmonic, founded by Ureli Corelli Hill.

    1904 – Comparative fuel trials begin between warships HMS Spiteful and HMS Peterel: Spiteful was the first warship powered solely by fuel oil, and the trials led to the obsolescence of coal in ships of the Royal Navy.

    1922 – The Parliament of Northern Ireland votes to remain a part of the United Kingdom and not unify with Southern Ireland.

    1930 – W1XAV in Boston, Massachusetts telecasts video from the CBS radio orchestra program, The Fox Trappers. The telecast also includes the first television advertisement in the United States, for I.J. Fox Furriers, which also sponsored the radio show.

    1932 – German-born Swiss physicist Albert Einstein is granted an American visa.

    1936 – Australian cricketer Jack Fingleton becomes the first player to score centuries in four consecutive Test innings.

    1941 – World War II: Attack on Pearl Harbor: The Imperial Japanese Navy carries out a surprise attack on the United States Pacific Fleet and its defending Army and Marine air forces at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

    1942 – World War II: British commandos conduct Operation Frankton, a raid on shipping in Bordeaux harbour.

    1946 – A fire at the Winecoff Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia kills 119 people, the deadliest hotel fire in U.S. history.

    1963 – Instant replay makes its debut during the Army-Navy football game in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States.

    1965 – Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras I simultaneously revoke mutual excommunications that had been in place since 1054.

    1972 – Apollo 17, the last Apollo Moon mission, is launched.[7] The crew takes the photograph known as The Blue Marble as they leave the Earth.

    1982 – In Texas, Charles Brooks Jr., becomes the first person to be executed by lethal injection in the United States.

    1982 – The Senior Road Tower collapses in less than 17 seconds. Five workers on the tower are killed and three workers on a building nearby are injured.

    1987 – Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 1771, a British Aerospace 146-200A, crashes near Paso Robles, California, killing all 43 on board, after a disgruntled passenger shoots his ex-boss traveling on the flight, then shoots both pilots and steers the plane into the ground.

    1993 – Long Island Rail Road shooting: Passenger Colin Ferguson murders six people and injures 19 others on the LIRR in Nassau County, New York.

    1995 – The Galileo spacecraft arrives at Jupiter, a little more than six years after it was launched by Space Shuttle Atlantis during Mission STS-34.

    2015 – The JAXA probe Akatsuki successfully enters orbit around Venus five years after the first attempt.

    1. Apollo 17- more than the blue marble, I recall watching the silent blast off from the moon by the astronauts to begin the trip back to Earth. On a small b&w tv in a basement lab of the physics building, we watched the eerily silent and rapid ascent videoed by a camera left on the moon for that purpose.

        1. If memory serves me, the camera operator had to time his movements about 1 1/3 seconds early to compensate for the distance to the moon. He pulled it off practically flawlessly.

          1. In the caption for the above YouTube clip showing liftoff of the Apollo 17 ascent module:

            “Ed Fendell in Houston had to anticipate the timing of ignition, lift-off, and the rate of climb, to control the camera tilt to follow the ascent.”

            “If you’re interest[ed] in how this footage was obtained, this blog post explains – ‘Leaving the Moon, Watching at Home’ “:

            https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/leaving-moon-watching-home

            The short article (with video clips) published by the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum mentions that there were also attempts to video the liftoffs of the Apollo 15 and Apollo 16 ascent modules, but there were glitches and miscalculations. Thankfully, everything worked well for Apollo 17.

            Similar to Jim Batterson’s thoughts, I was electrified by the video of the liftoff from the Moon, though I was curious about the invisibility of the rocket’s exhaust. (It’s typical of rockets operating in the vacuum of space.)

            I was similarly thrilled by the extraordinary video footage obtained during the descent and landing of the 2021 Perseverance rover on Mars, using a “sky crane” technique that was first successfully used by the Curiosity rover mission in 2012.

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4czjS9h4Fpg

            For a long time I had a framed shot of the ascent module of Apollo 17 as photographed during its approach to the command module. It shows an amazingly cobbled-together and flimsy-looking spacecraft, not aerodynamic at all — a true spacecraft:

            https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Apollo_17_LM_Ascent_Stage.jpg

        2. What’s fun are all the comments “proving” that the whole thing was faked in someone’s garage.

          And Jim, did any of the earlier missions film lift-off from the moon? I have this vague memory, which is probably wrong, that we saw these on live TV before 1972. I know I stayed up late and got up early to follow them all! The other crucial moment was firing the service module’s engine on the back side of the moon to leave lunar orbit to return to Earth. Those were long tense minutes because not a soul knew (other than the three on board) if the engine had ignited until the vehicle emerged from the moon’s shadow.

          1. And for Jon, thanks for answering my question.

            My understanding from NASA’s fight against allegers of fakery is that the hypergolic fuels used in the lander (er, lifter) (and in the Titan ICBM) don’t produce a bright incandescent flame. There are photos of Gemini-Titan launches with pale blue flames issuing from the nozzles. Atlas and Saturn used kerosene + liquid oxygen which burns bright yellow-white. I think of the difference between a gas stove and a wax candle. It’s easy to imagine how the intense sunlight on the moon would mask the pale (yet very hot) flames.

            Hypergolic fuels ignite spontaneously when fuel and oxidizer meet, making one less thing to go wrong in a moment of truth.

          2. Thanks to all for the follow up information and comments. I love the readers of WEIT! I am afraid that I lost some contact with the day to day of the space program in the early to mid 70’s when I was in grad school…too many day/nights in the lab. But in the 60’s I was very close to the action as my father was a principal investigator on the Surveyor soft landing project…designed the landing gear. But he passed away in 1970, I went to grad school, but became reacquainted in 1978 when I started my own career with NASA. I feel very fortunate to have seen the Apollo 17 lift off and suuccessful rendezvous in lunar orbit live. But I did not know until Filippo and Jon’s comments that the camera was controlled from Earth. Nothing fancy in those days…just good solid engineering!

  3. Part 2
    Births:
    1598 – Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Italian sculptor and painter (d. 1680).

    1863 – Richard Warren Sears, American businessman, co-founded Sears (d. 1914).

    1873 – Willa Cather, American novelist, short story writer, and poet (d. 1947).

    1878 – Akiko Yosano, Japanese author, poet, pioneering feminist, pacifist, and social reformer (d. 1942).

    1904 – Clarence Nash, American voice actor and singer (d. 1985).

    1905 – Gerard Kuiper, Dutch-American astronomer and academic (d. 1973).

    1907 – Fred Rose, Polish-Canadian politician and spy (d. 1983).

    1910 – Louis Prima, American singer-songwriter, trumpet player, and actor (d. 1978).

    1915 – Eli Wallach, American actor (d. 2014).

    1924 – Mary Ellen Rudin, American mathematician (d. 2013).

    1928 – Noam Chomsky, American linguist and philosopher.

    1947 – Anne Fine, English author.

    1949 – Tom Waits, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and actor.

    1973 – Damien Rice, Irish singer-songwriter, musician and record producer.

    1974 – Nicole Appleton, Canadian singer and actress.

    1978 – Suzannah Lipscomb, English historian, academic and television presenter.

    Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic:
    43 BC – Cicero, Roman philosopher, lawyer, and politician (b. 106 BC).

    1817 – William Bligh, English admiral and politician, 4th Governor of New South Wales (b. 1745).

    1970 – Rube Goldberg, American cartoonist, sculptor, and author (b. 1883).

    1975 – Thornton Wilder, American novelist and playwright (b. 1897).

    1979 – Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, English-American astronomer and astrophysicist (b. 1900).

    1980 – Darby Crash, American punk rock vocalist and songwriter (b. 1958).

    1985 – Robert Graves, English poet, novelist, critic (b. 1895).

    1998 – Martin Rodbell, American biochemist and endocrinologist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1925). [Best known for his discovery of G-proteins.]

    2004 – Jerry Scoggins, American singer and guitarist (b. 1913). [Sang “The Ballad of Jed Clampett”, the theme song to the 1960s sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies.]

    2013 – Chick Willis, American singer and guitarist (b. 1934).

    2016 – Greg Lake, English musician (b. 1947).

    2020 – Chuck Yeager, American aviator (b. 1923).

    1. 1949 – Tom Waits, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and actor.

      I always think of Waits as much more of a pianist than a guitarist, especially when the piano has been drinking:

  4. Kim Russell’s story is very pertinent after the testimony of the three university presidents. Strangely, they can justify free speech for calls for genocide, but, as others are pointing out, for years schools have punished “micro-aggressions”, “mis-gendering,” and “implicit bias.” Will they go home and stop this in the name of free speech? Defend a person’s right to say there are two sexes? One can’t help feeling that they seek the protection of the First Amendment around genocide because they agree with the protestors.

    1. These hearings are only a circus, done so that some politicians can be seen by their constituents to have rightthink by their lights. The constitution be damned since constituents can be trusted to be ignorant about that.
      But it is a strange thing that this may later be recognized as a kind of turning point where universities in general turn to the Kalvern principals as an island of stability.

      1. Let’s hope so. I am fairly certain that the three presidents have not gone home with the intent of cleaning house.

  5. Apropos the CAPTCHA image with the resistors, there was a time, many years ago, when I dabbled in electronics, and I could have picked out the 220-ohm resistors. It’s just a particular combination of three coloured bands, in this case red-red-brown.

  6. About the congressional hearings, the video below doesn’t present a solution but nicely highlights the hypocrisy of the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn. Gay’s moves to widen DEI by bringing antisemitism into it more are wrong. The answer isn’t more speech restriction. FIRE is right that Republicans getting university admins to sanction calls for genocide will backfire, leading to even weaselier muzzling of wrongthink. Universities ought to formally adopt and implement neutrality and free expression, not declare themselves baptismally washed of their selective application of these. Unless they go about this formally, the sudden, born-again embrace of free-speech and neutrality by university admins on antisemitism will continue to lead to pressure from Republicans for speech restrictions, which will in turn lead to more DEI.

    https://x.com/bariweiss/status/1732774984173474208?s=20

  7. > “The question is whether Trump will be prohibited from running by the more than two dozen charges against him, even if he’s not yet convicted by next November.”

    How so?
    So far as I know, the only challenge to Mr. Trump’s being on the ballot consists of his political enemies’ assertion that he committed insurrection. He is of course litigating against this. It has nothing to do with any charges or indictments he faces, none of which allege insurrection or rebellion.

  8. All three of the college presidents that were questioned by congress –believe in relativism, and think different people can have different views about what’s moral and immoral–and demonstrated that they do not stand for anything.

  9. With regard to the river-to-the-sea survey I’m not sure whether to be greatly depressed by the students’ ignorance or mildly encouraged by their change of mind on encountering some relevant facts.

    As for the video – ‘ an amazingly flexible woman followed by a passel of angry chickens’ – watching this on a small screen I waited some time for the chickens to follow the flexible woman under the bar and was disappointed this did not happen.

  11. I have a question for the lawyers in the audience.

    The government frequently puts conditions on accepting federal money. Why can’t the government require that universities abide by the first amendment if they accept federal dollars?

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