Sauce For The Goose: Avital Ronell Edition
Female NYU Comp Lit prof Avital Ronell (never heard of her) accused of sexually harassing male student...Judith Butler and Slovoj Zizek (described as "the moral conscience of international human rights and perhaps the world’s most famous living philosopher") listen...but they do not believe!!!! A clear violation of the principle!!!!
Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to believe a whole of of stupid bullshit about how skepticism, due process, and the presumption of innocence are all something something patriarchy...
Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to believe a whole of of stupid bullshit about how skepticism, due process, and the presumption of innocence are all something something patriarchy...
posted by Winston Smith at
2:52 PM
2 Comments:
Quite so.
Notice it's the eminences grises who get caught out this way, because of the continuous ratcheting of what (or, here, who) one must believe.
It's hard to get on-message retroactively. The most recent innovations in stringency of requirements and fanaticism of enforcement are always implemented by the the younger members of the cult, who are unencumbered by any of the misgivings attendant on changing one's mind about something. They can reassure themselves that if they'd arrived on the scene earlier, they would have enforced the newly stringent norms in just the same way. Moral clarity knows no season!
(1) That article is really something. The transparency of the anti-liberal left's tactic of relabeling any encroachment on their authority as violence is especially transparent here. Two different people label the investigation itself a "targeted assassination". One explains that the damage to Ronell's reputation constitutes "real violence". This is a group that coordinates their moves to the level of circulating talking points, whose ideological positions are only the thinnest veneer for protecting their positions and prerogatives, for whom consistency is a tactical mistake to be avoided. Its the contemporary GOP, basically, with bigger words and for smaller stakes.
(2) Butler seems to have a real penchant for using the power she has accumulated to help out friends troubled by those with who have accumulated very little. Here she is threatening to end the non-existent career of an adjunct who got into a rental dispute with one of her pals: "I have recently become aware of your scurrilous behavior—effectively squatting in the home of my colleague, Elizabeth Abel. If you are not out of that apartment within five days time, I will write to every colleague in your field explaining the horrible scam you have committed." It's pretty obvious from his behavior, by the way, that the adjunct in question is likely mentally ill. Justice!
(2.1) That whole Mother Jones article is worth reading, not in its own right, but as an epic display of sauce-for-the-goose blindness. The reporter shares with the professor a sense of total shock and bafflement that laws meant to protect tenants from landlords could apply to a professor. Who rents out a house she owns. For money.
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