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more rightwing smear.
more prestructured "opinion" from the foxnews set.
the ethnicity question smacks of limbaugh or hannity-level nonsense. the kind of thing that only a conservative nitwit could find a way to invert--the guy supports a.i.m.--therefore he must imagine he is native american--blah blah blah--idioitic stuff.
if you have other stuff about this particular matter, post it.
the plagairism thing could be quite serious--but i do not think any group of citizen types has adequate information to say much about it. i know this kind of thing--data, proof--rarely stops the right machine in its favorite passtime of character assassination, but there we are. i read about the circumstances that surround the piece in question--i dont imagine that they would be grounds for dismissal. but i could be wrong, and would want to see the actual materials--all of them--before making up my mind. i woudl think the foxnews set would like to have data as well. but i could be wrong about that.
oin the question of credentials: i suspect that the university was aware of his credentials when they hired him--it is far from an extraordinary circumstance--if you think about who teaches creative writing, for example, many of these folk have mfas. if they were to get an honorary degree after the fact, would it too be characterized as a "mail order degree"--do you, ncb, have an honorary doctorate? from where? when did you get it?--the reason this practice has receded on recent years has more to do with the overproduction of phds (a function of their increasing function as cheap labor for universities) than policy changes.
the political motivations for this are glaring, evident, obvious. whether you agree with churchill, he maps the kind of analysis of the holocaust you find in zygmunt bauman's "the holocaust and modernity" onto the united states---evaluating this claim would require that conservatives had actually read his work--have you read it ncb? have any of the churchill critics here actually read it?
another characteristic of this degenerate political space is that folk who live there have no problem with getting in a real lather over books they have not read and films they have not seen....it is interesting, isnt it?
anyway, it is not really surprising to find such an argument be made--you might argue with churchill's particular premises--which i would suspect entail an examination of what kind of relation you see in the present between the american cultural order and the genocide of the native americans during the 19th century, their continued marginalization, etc.---but that such an argument is possible (the guy aligns with a.i.m.--it is pretty obvious that his would be a position from which such an argument could be made)---i dont see the problem. maybe it all resides in the fact that churchill called the american state fascist. and it seems the right has a problem with people using that word. probably because it creates obstacles to their mode of cultural domination. better to mobilize folk in an effort to effectively censor him--all the while denying that you are doing so of course. denials which change nothing....
in short, you cant make any claim that his arguments or his work are or are not responsible )whatever that means in rightwing land--i have no idea--i suspect it means whatever conservatives of this stripe are told it means) unless oyu have read the bgook, done some research, and can present an argument based on that. until i see something on this order from churchill's rightwing critics, i will simply assume you are talking out your hat.
that a university would consider buying him out of his contract is an index of the level of pressure the university feels is being brough to bear on it. they obviously have no grounds for any process to dismiss--like most universities, colorado is concerned with its reputation beyond everything else--universities are typically quite spineless in this kind of situation--so there we are.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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