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i read through the article at the beginning of this thread and found to total lack of detail concerning the trials of dr jean cobb to be interesting. why is the explanation offered in the article--that all this happened because she was a republican--compelling if there is no detail offered?
how did it come about that the sequence of cliche floated in rightwingland about academic cultures, such as they are--you know, the pc nonsense, the endless redbaiting, the whining about the persecution of conservatives--have amounted to a set of assumptions about academic institutions that are accurate at all, much less that can function as adequate premises for evaluating particular situations to the exclusion of actual information about actual cases?
more broadly:
what exactly is the motive behind the conservative assaults on university-level education?
what do they hope to gain?
a country of absolute political monotony where no questions concerning the obvious problems that run from end to end of conservative ideology can be formulated?
do they want to extend the politically-motivated intellecutal and political handicapping of children, carried out in church basements and/or conservative homeschooling now, into universities?
is the assumption that if you cant make your ideology coherent, you can counter the problem by eliminating spaces where problems are raised and discussed?
of all the various elements of conservative ideology that tend toward the authoritarian, few are more obvious than the conservative loathing of dissent.
maybe it is the case that for the american right, democracy can be understood as many people talking--the question of whether they are all saying the same thing is secondary to seeing alot of people talking. that these people have no pwoer, can influence nothing is secondary to hearing the same thing coming from all quarters. all dissent is heresy.
this aspect of conservative ideology seems to me far more like the ideological component of stalinism than anything the right isolates about "the left" : dissent in america seems to the right to be what the "hitlero-trotskyite wrecker" was for stalin--an empty floating signifier that offered a pseudo-explanation for problems with the existing order, an enemy against which hyterical bile is directed, a signifier that justifies any and all types of repression?
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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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