Tag Archives: culture

“Context”

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Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R, NY) asked a question of three university presidents, Claudine Gay of Harvard, Elizabeth Magill of Penn, and Sally Kornbluth of MIT, a simple, straightforward question at last week’s House Committee on Education and the Workforce hearing regarding campus antisemitism:

Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct, yes or no?

Magill’s answer, smirk on her face:

It is a context-dependent decision, Congresswoman.

Gay repeated the claim:

It can be, depending on the context.

Kornbluth tried to dodge the question altogether:

I have not heard calling for the genocide of Jews on our campus.

Stefanik called her on that…misinformation:

But you’ve heard chants for intifada.

Kornbluth’s response:

I’ve heard chants which can be antisemitic depending on the context when calling for the elimination of the Jewish people.

Wednesday after the hearing, Magill attempted to clarify:

In that moment, I was focused on our university’s longstanding policies aligned with the US Constitution, which say that speech alone is not punishable. I was not focused on, but I should have been, the irrefutable fact that a call for genocide of Jewish people is a call for some of the most terrible violence human beings can perpetrate. It’s evil—plain and simple.

A couple of things about that. At the hearing, Magill spoke from what was in her heart. Further, as a talented academic and a university president, words are her stock in trade. She knew exactly what she was saying, she knew exactly what she was focused on in real time—and she focused and said those words deliberately and consciously. This statement, coming as it does later, after the outpouring of opprobrium, can hardly be taken as sincere. All Magill is doing now is covering her academic and political behind.

The other thing is that, in that statement’s second half (not quoted above, but it’s a two-minute video) Magill made the sotto voce admission that calls for Jewish genocide are not against Penn’s current rules. With that tacit admission, she “promised” to work with the Provost to adjust Penn’s rules. Sometime. She was careful to not offer a timeline for this effort, not even a general one, nor did she commit to what those “adjustments” would look like.

One more thing about Stefanik’s question and those presidents’ answers. An obvious follow-up question is “In what context would such calls for the genocide of Jews be acceptable in any legal way?”

Stefanik did put that question to Gay:

What’s the context?

Gay’s answer:

Targeted at an individual[.]

Stefanik followed up on that “individual” evasion, and Gay then refused to answer beyond repeating her claim if targeting an individual. Apparently, at Harvard, calling for the destruction of groups of Jews is acceptable.  One or two at a time, maybe not.

These are three school presidents who need to be fired for cause—not passively allowed to resign—and these are three schools that need to have all Federal funds headed their way canceled until those schools show, over a suitable number years, that they have corrected their behavior.

A Curmudgeon’s Take on the Gifting Season

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The headline on Jason Gay’s op-ed on Christmas gifts in Friday’s The Wall Street Journal actually reads,

The Elusive Challenge of De-Escalating Gifts

That’s the point, though. In Gay’s piece, the season isn’t about Christmas, it’s about whether to incur the expense of profligately scattering presents about, with the Christmas season serving merely as backdrop and an excuse for the ostentation, or as a device for crying about the money—and intrafamilial competition—involved.

Gay pretended to considerable angst about trying to tamp down the gifts (with nary a word about Christmas itself), and he offered a number of excuses [sic] for the failure to tamp. A couple were these:

Complete multilateral de-escalation is essential. You cannot have a situation where five people give no gifts, or tiny gifts, and then someone shows up with a wheelbarrow full of Johnnie Walker Blue and PlayStation 5s. If this means impromptu site visits to make sure a relative isn’t secretly stockpiling an illicit stash of Ugg boots, so be it.

No, it isn’t, yes, you can. And no, you don’t have to be intimidated into any spying-on-relatives visits; that’s just cowardice. Instead, it would be easy enough to shame the wheelbarrow-er for his naked attempt to abuse the season to curry favor, or to show off his own ostentatious wealth, or both. If the wheelbarrow-er, in the end, shows himself to lack the grace to be shamed, then he needn’t be invited back the next year.

Ditto grandparents. It’s easier to talk a squirrel off a bird feeder than it is to convince a grandparent not to give gifts to grandchildren. Gifts are what grandparents are for.

Hard means possible, full stop. And no, gifts are not what grandparents are for, no more than wives are baby making machines for those same grandparents. If they’re unwilling to follow the parents’ strictures, then ditto the misbehaving grandparents. They don’t need to be invited back the next year.

Timidity like Jason Gay’s are why it’s so difficult for so many to have a sane Christmas that’s in keeping with the actual meaning of the season, and of the year surrounding it.

Limits

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Progressive-Democrat Joe Biden, through his Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, is busily trying to tie Israel’s hands (plural) behind its back as it fights its war of survival against the terrorist organizations of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other terrorists ensconced in Gaza Strip. Blinken’s words:

“…the imperative to the United States that the massive loss of civilian life and displacement of the scale we saw in northern Gaza not be repeated in the south.” He said Israel must take “more effective steps to protect the lives of civilians.”

This is Biden and Blinken continuing to be cowed by the mullahs of Iran, who want Israel defeated to the point of destruction.

If these two had any morals at all, they’d take up that “massive loss of civilian life and displacement” with the Hamas, et al., terrorists (excuse the redundancy) who are butchering those civilians through their use of them as shields and of their residences, schools, and hospitals as weapons caches, rocket launch sites, and command centers.

If these two had any sense at all, they’d recognize that Israel already is taking the most “effective steps to protect the lives of civilians:” Israel is killing the terrorist Hamas, PIJ, et al., so they can never inflict those butcheries again.

Instead, these two…politicians…are bent on betraying Israel, and intended or not, they’re betraying the United States in consequence.

Not Radicalized

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Recall the…incident…a few days ago in which a Hillcrest High School teacher was terrorized, solely for her support of Israel during the current Hamas-instigated war against Israel, and driven into a locked room for her own protection when 400 of the high school’s students rioted and targeted her, threatening to kill her, while waving Palestinian flags.

New York City Schools Chancellor David Banks is vociferously denying that those students were radicalized; he’s insisting, instead, that

This is a really good school with wonderful young people. And I’m so taken aback by this notion that these kids are terrorists…or radicalized.

Say Banks’ claim is true, and these antisemitic, terrorist-supporting, rioting students aren’t radicalized. What does that say about what is going on in Hillcrest High, one of the NYCSchools for which Banks is responsible, that their antisemitism, their support for terrorism, their rioting actually is their normal behavior?

What does that say about Banks that he considers their behavior to be unradicalized?

Talking a Good Game

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Javier Milei, the newly elected Argentine President, is, indeed, talking a good game. It’ll be well worth watching to see if he can deliver—and he has many large obstacles in his way, including (this is far from an exhaustive list) opposition to his wish to get rid of the nation’s central bank (and the economic pitfalls associated with it, both near term as Argentina’s economy adjusts, and longer term with currency controls devolved to the provincial banks or to individual banks (some of which may already be too big to control without stern measures aimed at them in particular)), opposition parties bent on restoring/maintaining their own political power, general resistance—both political and popular—to any change of such magnitude, and his own political inexperience and naivete.

With that rambling lede, here’s an excerpt, via RealClear Politics, from an interview that that Milei had with Argentine TV host Alejandro Fantino just before Thanksgiving:

We aren’t above the ones we represent. In financial terms, “The derivative is never worth more than the underlying asset.” The derivative exists because the underlying asset exists. We exist as representatives of the people because the people exist. It is madness, it is delusional, to think that a representative of the people is above the people he represents themselves. It is a delusion in which the political caste exists.

The full hour-and-a-quarter interview, in Spanish, can be seen at the link at the bottom of the linked-to article. That YouTube link also is this.