Sarah Braasch, bless her cotton socks, is the self-styled social justice warrior who recently got herself driven out of a doctoral program at Yale by her pitchfork-wielding fellow students, and brutally pummeled in social media, for having called the cops on a black student for being where she had every right to be. The world … Continue reading SARAH BRAASCH AND THE BURQA BAN
Tony Hall
DON QUIXOTE’S BLESSING
Why is it that some truths have to be learned over and over and over again? I suppose it’s because they’re just too hard to believe. I learned about fifteen years ago that many of the people I work with don’t share what I thought were the values we all share, because, well, surely we … Continue reading DON QUIXOTE’S BLESSING
CHALLENGE versus RIDICULE
Much as I’d sometimes like to be, I’m not a knee-jerk civil libertarian. I understand that the maintenance – and before that the promotion – of a civil society sometimes requires limits to freedom of movement, of association, of expression, even of thought. But I want to see if I can draw some lines here, … Continue reading CHALLENGE versus RIDICULE
THE TONY HALL CASE REVISITED
I made a stab at this in my blog in an earlier post entitled “Holocaust Denial and Anti-Semitism”. Since that post, an internal investigation of an internal complaint against Tony Hall has exonerated him, and the Administration’s complaint against him to the Alberta Human Rights Commission has been rejected, both pretty much on the same … Continue reading THE TONY HALL CASE REVISITED
HOLOCAUST DENIAL AND ANTI-SEMITISM
Down the hall and around two corners, I have a colleague named Tony Hall. I say ‘colleague’, but only in the sense that we’re both tenured professors at the same university. I teach in the Philosophy Department; he’s a one-man show in a program he calls Globilization Studies. Tony’s an affable enough fellow, but he’s … Continue reading HOLOCAUST DENIAL AND ANTI-SEMITISM
Confirmation Bias
WHY MY COLLEAGUES ARE IDIOTS - Rant # 171 - CONFIRMATION BIAS Okay, this is now the 314th time I’ll have said it. I take no interest, one way or the other, in any of the The-Sky-is-Falling-No-it’s-Not claims and counterclaims currently consuming many of my colleagues’ time. (And, unfortunately, their students’ class-time.) But I do … Continue reading Confirmation Bias
