…from my wife, especially appropriate in these times of threats to our nation from without and from within.
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Tag Archives: culture
It Wasn’t Political
Recall that the Hampshire College President, Jonathan Lash, pulled the US flag down from all campus flagpoles, along with “all other flags.” Recall further that he took this action after he
had lowered the US flag to half-staff after Election Day[]
followed by the US flag being burned on Veterans Day.
Lash, though, as he finally was forced by the public’s hue and cry to restore our nation’s flag to its proper place atop flagpoles, is still denying that he did it for politics.
We did not lower the flag to make a political statement. … We acted solely to facilitate much-needed dialogue on our campus about how to dismantle the bigotry that is prevalent in our society.
As an aside, what you mean “we,” Paleface? You’re the President; it was done at your order. Full stop.
More importantly, how are lowering the flag to half-staff and then taking it down altogether under the circumstances in which you ordered these things done not political statements? Anything done with the flag beyond its normal handling is political.
And then: Lash thoroughly contradicted himself within his own statement: the free speech that is the “dialog” engendered by his actions is at the center of what is political.
The Law Professor Misapprehends
Jacob Gershman has a piece in The Wall Street Journal‘s Law Blog about the increasing use of software algorithms to assess newsworthiness and the implications of that increasing use on legal assessments of the tradeoffs between individual privacy and what’s fit to print. In it, Gershman quotes Georgetown University Associate Professor of Legal Research and Writing Erin Carroll.
Given the dominance of platforms like Facebook, the related influence of algorithms on how news is made, and specifically how algorithms are beginning to supplant editorial discretion and the editorial process, courts need to rethink their rationales for deference to the press. In the realm of privacy law, courts have long trusted the Fourth Estate to vet the newsworthiness of a subject before publishing, so that the courts themselves did not have to. Today, that trust is becoming misplaced.
Carroll is right that courts need to “rethink their rationales for deference to the press,” but for reasons wholly independent of the existence of news algorithms. On the contrary, Carroll has a couple of misapprehensions here. For one, editors (and publishers, come to that) certainly are outsourcing the work of assessments in making editorial decisions, but they cannot outsource their own responsibilities in the newsworthy judging process.
For another, related thing, there’s no reason to believe the courts’ trust “is becoming misplaced” due to the use of news algorithms.
In both instances, Carroll has missed the key factor: it’s entirely the editors’ and publishers’ decisions to use new algorithms, and it’s entirely the editors’ and publishers’ decisions to use any part of the algorithms’ outputs. The editors and publishers remain entirely and solely responsible for the material they publish—whether that material originates from interns, news algorithms, or journalists.
Full stop.
Update: Missing word is no longer missing.
Teaching Opportunity Successfully Avoided
Because safe spaces are more important than education spaces.
A Virginia school district has “temporarily” banned the classics, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, after a parent complained that her high school-aged son was traumatized by racial slurs used in the books.
Would a trigger warning have helped this snowflake masquerading as a Mom to do her job as a parent? Probably not:
I keep hearing, “This is a classic, this is a classic[.]” … I understand this is a literature classic. But at some point, I feel that children will not—or do not—truly get the classic part—the literature part, which I’m not disputing. This is great literature. But there are racial slurs in there and offensive wording that you can’t get past that.
No, the children can’t. Not when their parents won’t let them learn how to do so. And: I read Huck Finn in junior high and Mockingbird as a high school sophomore. The slurs, aside from being part of the stories—they were, after all, tales of their times, another aspect of this teaching opportunity away from which this school, this “parent,” slunk away—they were minor incidents in the tales.
And: if these minor parts of the tales really are that important to today’s youth, to today’s infantile parents, then how better to teach these children how to deal with the slurs, the racism, the ugliness that still exists, for all the progress we’ve made since those days when I read this stuff without a hazmat suit to protect me, than to do it in a controlled environment where such words can be put in the contexts of their times and then in the context of our times?
The alternative, after all, is that these children will eventually leave their safe space homes and their safe space schools and encounter such behaviors out in the world without having had a chance to learn how to deal with them. Then these children will learn how badly cheated they’ve been by those whom they thought they could trust because those homes and schools were not even close to safe because of “safe” space shielding.
The Diversity Officer Doesn’t Understand
Recall the Somali student at Ohio State University who attacked so many of his fellow students because he blamed the US for anti-Muslim fervor in Burma and who “wanted to kill a billion infidels.”
Stephanie Clemons Thompson, Ohio State University’s Assistant Director of Residence Life, put this up on Facebook, according to Debra Heine of PJMedia:
Heine has already addressed the pain of his fellow students whom he attacked and other of his fellow students, pain which Thompson has chosen to ignore. I’ll just note that Thompson plainly does not understand family, community, association.
Artan removed himself—no one removed him—through his own criminal acts from his earlier status as a Buckeye, from his membership in the OSU family, from his membership in the community of the United States. He created himself an outlaw. Thompson should review her Locke, which she surely read in her own freshman General Studies coursework.
Oh, and Thompson appears to have taken down her Facebook post. Apparently she doesn’t even have the courage of her own conviction.