I actualy object to any nation but our own operating our ports.

That’s interesting. I object to any nation including “our own” operating “our” ports.

Why the exception on your part?

“Actually he was a faculty member…. While he talked the talk, he also walked the walk and taught introductory seminars.”

Well, good for him; my bad at misrepresenting his position.

That said, the position that he was hounded out of was not his teaching of introductory seminars, but rather his position as CEO of the University, and the censure resolutions passed by faculty bodies concerned his “leadership” as an adminstrator, not his teaching or research. In point of fact, I notice that Harvard has been specifically invited to take a position as senior faculty if he wants it.

The substance of my comments stands.

“Summers was well within his rights to lead on this issue.”

It’s not his job as CEO to “lead” research “on this issue.” That’s a job for people who are paid to do research. In his role as a faculty member he would be well within the bounds of academic freedom. In his role as an administrator his “leadership” on substantive questions [of research] is at best intrusive micromanagement and at worst ignorant ranting. If he wants to “lead” research then he’ll be better able to do that now that he’s stepped down.”

“Ask any sociologist or anthropologist how much human biology matters to their work. To put on ideological blinders in research and then create purposely misleading research by not accounting for known factors is a akin to creating Ptolemiac epicycles in honor of false ideology.”

This is a serious distortion of the controversy over Summers’ remarks, in which Nancy Hopkins of MIT (who is a qualified scholar in biology, as Summers is not) played a substantial role. Nobody is suggesting that “human biology” doesn’t matter to sociology or anthropology; only that it doesn’t matter in the way that Larry Summers thinks it does. That said, I’m not concerned with settling that dispute, or the unrelated dispute with Cornell West that you invoke for some reason in the middle of a discussion of this other controversy.

The issue here isn’t whether Summers is wrong or right; it’s whether he deserves any special protections for public expressions of his views without any repercussions from faculty members who think he’s a jackass. If he were losing an academic position, then he would deserve it under principles of academic freedom. But there’s no such thing as “administrative freedom” in the University and there’s no reason why there should be. Too bad for Larry.

“What is not valueless is the conception of a university as a place where questions may be asked — even if they annoy particular sets of people.”

Your concern for academic freedom is misplaced.

Lots of people ask lots of questions; some of the questions are stupid questions and some of the people are not people engaged in the scholarly community. It’s not the purpose of the University to provide a forum for just anybody to ask just any question.

The position that Summers was hounded out of was not a scholarly position but rather an administrative one. He was not a student or a faculty member, but rather a CEO; a position which (if it need exist at all) exists only to facilitate the faculty and students’ research, not to participate in it (let alone ignorantly tread on it).

If we were talking about a faculty member being hounded out of a job largely over controversial views, I’d be the first to write a letter, even if I personally think he’s a first-class numbskull. But as far as academic freedom is concerned, the entitlements of University CEOs to rant and rave about whatever they like without repercussions from the faculty that they serve, are worth less than nothing.

My sarcastic remarks about red tape are not unrelated to these points.

Oh no. Another useless University bureaucrat was no longer happy with his comfortable academic CEO position and maybe it’s due to his unpopularity with the faculty. The invaluable services that University administration offers to the faculty and students of the University will be disrupted, uncoordinated, scattered, leaderless.

I weep for the future of Harvard. Damn that coterie of academic feminists, interfering with our absolutely vital educational red tape infrastructure.

“I was trying to express frustration with the fact that a lot of anarchists only seem to gain scholastic inspiration from members of the scholastic anarchist tradition”

Well, sure, this is a genuine problem.

“The indigenous inhabitants of North America, while not Utopian (there is no such thing as a Utopia) were a good example of what could be described as “anarchism”, or at least something very close to it.”

Some of them were and some of them weren’t. You’re talking about an entire continent’s worth of people over a period of tens of thousands of years, who ranged from nomadic hunter-gatherer bands, to roving warrior-bandits, to settled stateless confederations with complex social structures, to rigidly authoritarian terror-empires. Some of them are good examples for anarchists to study and take lessons from; others clearly are not. The idea that “the indigenous people of North America” are some homogenous block that exemplified anything in particular at all is precisely as silly as the idea that “the people of Eurasia” are.

Personally, I don’t think we need new terms: “sadism” or “masochism” are derisive enough. De Sade and Sacher-Masoch weren’t actually about the “safe, sane, and consensual” happy-sexy-leather-time that the sadist crowd wants you to believe in these days.

“Sexual sadism” makes it pretty explicit what the feminist objection is.

Lewis: “That is, a lot of people may radically diverge from the theories of their immediate predecessors on the tree.”

Brian: “Like who?”

Russell and Wittgenstein, to take a rather famous example.

Or Ramsey and Wittgenstein, if you aren’t skipping over the technicality on which Ramsey became one of Wittgenstein’s “advisors” for his “dissertation” after L.W. returned to Cambridge.

What’s more, there are any number of choices that had to be made the way they were in order for me to exist. … That doesn’t prove, in itself, that the debate isn’t justified, but it does go some way towards demonstrating that “What if your mother was pro-choice?” is a red herring as far as the debate is concerned.

No joke.

My mother’s parents met because of World War II; granddad was in the Air Force and grandma was a military nurse. They were from completely different parts of the country and wouldn’t have met if it weren’t for the war. So it turns out that Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, among a number of other factors, was necessary for my personal existence.

This does not, however, seem like a good reason for me to become a neo-Nazi.

Alex, I consider insults that use women’s genitals as a marker for anger or contempt worse than the equivalent insults using men’s genitals (because we live in a patriarchy and so the context of each is different), but I don’t think either is a great feature of the language that needs to be preserved, so if getting people to treat “cunt”-as-insult as the slur that it is involves getting them to treat “dick,” “dickhead,” etc. the same way, I don’t consider that much of a loss.

It seems to me that “reclaiming” the word “cunt”, if it is going to be reclaimed, would involve making it non-insulting, rather than making it as commonplace an insult as insults based on male genitals. Because there’s nothing wrong with having one of them and there’s nothing unpleasant about them, so why use it as an insult?

DK, I’m familiar with the patterns of usage.

Could you explain to me what you take “the point” to be that’s being missed? Because I don’t understand what “the point” of referring to authoritarians in New Labour as “cunts” is supposed to be, if not insulting them by comparing them to women’s genitals.

In the United States, at least, it’s still common in certain quarters to use the words “faggot” and “gay” to deride men you’re contemptuous of, or things that you think are stupid (“That’s so gay,” etc.). Just out of curiosity, if I were objecting to a post about the “authoritarian faggots in New Labour,” and how “gay” their policy proposals were, would you be reacting the same way?

If you’re afraid I’m personally wasting time that I could be spending “challenging the patriarchal status quo” elsewhere, you needn’t worry; I’ve plenty of other things that I’m doing towards that end besides spending a couple minutes of my time asking you to think harder about the language that you’re using on your weblog. However, I will say that whether or not complaining about something “completely fails to challenge the patriarchal status quo,” that’s not an excuse for reinforcing it, even in ways that you personally consider small or trivial.

Sunny: As for these comments, they are a lot of Nazi twaddle.

… because the Nazis were, of course, well known for their relentless criticism of public celebrations of military prowess.

Sabotta: As for the notion that Boyington was just paid by the “federal government” to “kill people” — while this is true in one sense, it is idiotically reductionist in another.

Please instruct me in the subtleties, then. What’s the purpose of “shooting down enemy planes,” if not to destroy the plane and kill the person? What was Boyington’s job in the south Pacific, if not to take commands from the federal government as to where and when to do just that? War, whatever you think of the cause that the war is supposed to serve, does involve killing people at another’s command. Sometimes killing is just and sometimes it’s unjust, but it is deliberate blood-letting from beginning to end.

I really have no patience with this kind of thing – I suppose I could suggest (in connection, for example, with his service with the Flying Tigers) looking up “the rape of Nanking” – but since all that happened to non-Caucausian people, I suppose it doesn’t matter.

This is disingenuous. Boyington’s military career didn’t end with the Flying Tigers and he went on to play an active and important role at the command of the United States federal government in their air war in the Pacific, after his tenure in the Flying Tigers — quite a different cause, with quite different ends and quite different means, which also happened to adversely affect the lives of a few “non-Caucasian” people along the way.

That said, it’s also rather beside the point, at least as I see it. Even if Boyington had only fought in unambiguously just wars, it’s not a University’s job to drum up military parades or put together memorials for successful killers. Why would it be?

As for Spencer, his comments on High Church revivalism in the CoE are steadfastly silly (and a reflection of his growing statism in old age), but the bulk of his remarks are quite right. The regimentation of every aspect of society, from recreation to politics to charity, into forms that unconsciously or consciously ape military subordination, at the direct expense of individualistic and industrial patterns of life, is a sign of decadence. The prominent celebration of martial and physical prowess, at the expense of art, intellect, industry, etc., is a sign of growing barbarism. Belligerent squadrons of ruddy-faced order-takers on the march may swell the Movement for or against whatever, but they don’t augur well for a free and humane society. In the very best of circumstances they may even be necessary evils to save or to make it possible to later achieve better things, but the incessant celebration of this kind of life from the commanding heights of a society is as sure a sign as any of long-standing rot.

And, to come back to the point, when did it become the job of Universities to give dead government warriors a parting rah-rah?