You can tell a lot about a person by what they choose to fight for or advocate. George Will is not spending his time worrying about a subject that is concerning Congress and the White House at the moment, which is the ridiculous levels of sexual assault in our armed services. Instead, Mr. Will is worried about college students’ rights to:
Make “sexual or dirty jokes” that are “unwelcome.” Or disseminate “sexual rumors” (even if true) that are “unwelcome.” Or make “unwelcome” sexual invitations. Or engage in the “unwelcome” circulation or showing of “e-mails or Web sites of a sexual nature.” Or display or distribute “sexually explicit drawings, pictures, or written materials” that are “unwelcome.”
When I went to college in the early 1990’s, we were starting to see some pretty stupid stuff in our student handbooks about political correctness, mostly related to race. I remember that there was an instruction not to stare at tables of minorities in the cafeteria paired with an instruction not to deliberately avoid making eye contact with tables of minorities in the cafeteria. So, I’m familiar with well-intentioned regulations that attempt merely to get people not to be jerks but which come off sounding idiotic.
But, here, Mr. Will is concerned that students may be punished for behavior that a reasonable person (usually a woman) would not see as offensive. You know, like when you just shrug off as a lame joke the rumor that you slept with half the football team. And this is all part of the suppression of speech you saw with the IRS.
I am not even arguing that Mr. Will doesn’t have a point. Some students will get caught up and punished for behavior that really ought not be punished, and that’s a concern.
I just note what and who he’s fighting for. Boorish assholes.
Oh please, mr. Will. It’s hard enough to punish college students for actual rape, both criminally AND at the pledge level. And he’s worried about them getting in trouble for “jokes”? Fuck you, mr. Will.
College level.*
I can imagine someone saying:
Sure, which is why I acknowledged that he has a point.
You can spend all your time defending Nazis’ right to hold a rally, but if none of them have even asked for a permit recently, one has to wonder if you are actually a Nazi yourself. Why the obsession? Aren’t the victims of Nazis important, too?
It’s not like we have a bunch of Nazis locked up in indefinite detention right now.
Gee, didn’t some kid at Rutgers a while back kill himself over an “unwelcome rumor”? Well, it happened to be true, so I guess it was OK.
Thought it was Harvard, but really no difference. The case I’m thinking of was when the roommate posted videos of the guy getting anal sex.
Not just the choice of topic for the sake of something to talk about but the choice of topic to detour a Rep claimed stronghold that is in trouble. He manages to make himself and his argument weak and other matters of the day unattended to.
George Will is married, so he’s just going to have to get over what happened in college. Yes, sometimes your sexual attentions are “unwelcome,” and that can be confusing and painful. But it’s not a reason to punish all women everywhere.
“I just note what and who he’s fighting for. Boorish assholes.”
Well I think it is human nature for us to defend those with whom we most identify.
When the Trayvon Martin thing was all over the news, it blew my mind when I realized how many right-wingers (like approximately all of them) identified with George Zimmerman.
First they came for the boorish assholes, but I said nothing because I wasn’t a boorish asshole…
Also, freedumb.
In a rational world George Swill would have lost his job long ago. He has on many occasions posted Global Warming denier bullshit, easily disproven, and not only has he a) never retracted it when proven wrong and b) later repeated it, – it’s also a fact that his employer apparently is so scared of upsetting Mr. Swill that they won’t publish retractions when he is caught openly lying.
His most common lie is that in the 1970s science thought the earth was heading into an ice age. His usual reference is a National Geographic article that said nothing of the sort – instead it was a general article that gave a variety of scenarios for temperature change with no reference whatsoever to current scientific thinking.
He also loves to pass on obviously fake studies. He gleefully wrote about the Hummer-more-environmental-than-Prius study in 2007 and since then has basically served as an amplifier for anything that comes out of the denier movement.
In short, George Swill NEVER STOPS LYING – never has, never will. And honest journalism organizations would have fired him decades ago.
Don’t know about actual scientists, but I do recall that in the 1970’s the MSM, television and print, told us that scientists said that we were heading into an ice age with all sorts of warnings about how it was due and climate was getting colder. Back then we didn’t realize Fox News Syndrome was so common. But surely George Will did.
Actually a lot of research has been done on just what science was predicting in the 1970s and found that the consensus even then was towards a warning trend. There is some potential confusion because due to the aerosol problem the period from 1940s-1970s did actually see an interruption in the industrial era warming trend (aerosols blocked sunlight and thus reduced heat, in addition to destroying ozone). Most of the few papers in the 1970s that predicted cooling did so predicated on the aerosol problem not being reversed, but of course it was.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.htm
http://greenfyre.wordpress.com/2010/11/20/the-1970s-ice-age-9-myth/
Meanwhile, George Swill’s lies have intentionally tried to have it both ways (of course) – citing popular magazine articles (not scientific publications) and using that to conclude that there was a scientific consensus toward cooling. But even though he relies on media sources he still misrepresents his media references as badly as an Ann Coulter endnote:
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2006/04/03/4570/willful-deception/
These links are only starting points – others have dug into this whole myth – made popular by that wingnut Crichton – and researched each and every 1970s citation, in most case finding that the references were not what the wingnut claimed they were.
Now, as you say Voice, there were a few popular media stories claiming a coming ice age. There was an infamous “In search of …” episode, for example (that was a series that frequently went off the deep end in search of things like ghosts). We shouldn’t be surprised that you can find a few popular references like that in the 1970s – that was the decade of some really really bad popular science, like the bestselling book-and-movie “Chariots of the Gods?” that claimed UFOs roamed the earth in early civilized time and for proof cited stuff like a sinkhole that they claimed must have been the exhaust blast of a rocket ship because it was perfectly round.
I do think that our memories have reinforced some of the 1970s coming-ice-age stories because the winters of 1981-1984 were unusually cold – lots of records were set – and with each new record the ice age myths tended to get regurgitated. The reason those years were so cold was easily explained – the output of the Mt St. Helens volcano which, as certain types of volcanos do, emitted particles which reduced sunlight around the globe for a number of years until the particles finally settled to earth.
Agree totally. If I was unclear, let me reiterate. The MSM and especially television commentary said scientists were predicting an ice age, which doesn’t mean that legitimate and respected scientists were actually saying that. IMHO, that was propaganda put out by the oil companies/ sensationalism. As you, say the von Daniken nonsense was big also and,IIRC, bigfoot. Or was bigfoot later?
I was only contending the proposition that nobody in the ’70s said that scientists said that an ice age was coming.
I will admit that I do believe that if fossil fuels had never been discovered, we would be heading for an Ice Age, i.e. another periodic cooling cycle, but I couldn’t tell you if in a hundred or a thousand years. OTOH, that’s like saying that I believe that if you never had a furnace or fireplace in Chicago, a frozen house is on the horizon.
On your last paragraph, that too seems to be the scientific consensus.
I’d forgotten about bigfoot, though of course it was HUGE for a while in the mid-1970s.
The sad part is this … out of control media did actually help us sometimes in the distant past. The “energy crisis” of 1973-74, for example, was mostly an exaggeration of hyped-up media – yet for a while the resulting behavioral changes were very positive for society. But that was before the Pentagon-CIA-industrial complex took full ownership of the media. You won’t find that sort of accidentally beneficent result of media over-coverage of an event in today’s world.
I dont anderstand
http://huwatehnik.blogspot.com