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    jackasses..., 2005-03-25 10:14:02 | Main | happy zombie jesus day..., 2005-03-27 14:30:11

    pot and the fucking kettle:

    The Cultural Revolution which took place in China in the 1960s (when Tommy Tomorrow and Michael Berube were campus radicals supporting the revolutionaries)

    That should be self-explanatory.

    Then there's this: "from the writings of Mao that politically correct professors like Michael Berube and his friends actually got the term 'political correctness'". The old New Left 60s-radical long-haired-commie usage of "politically correct" was ironic self-mockery, e.g.:

    its modern use in the political left, however, has consistently been to disparage those who were overzealous or excessively doctrinaire. Maurice Isserman recalls using the phrase in the early Seventies; "It was always used in a tone mocking the pieties of our own insular political counterculture, as in 'We could stop at McDonald's down the road if you're hungry,' or 'We could spend good money to get the television fixed,' etc., but it wouldn't be politically correct."

    Personally, I think Perry and Isserman are closest to the mark. The translation of The Quotations of Chairman Mao Tse-Tung distributed by the Black Panthers uses an awkwardly exact English that's ripe for parody. And my own memory corroborates Isserman's almost precisely. As an undergrad at Temple University in the early Eighties, I'd heard the phrase only as irony; "I'm getting something to drink. Which is politically correct, Coke or Pepsi?" "Well, who shot more labor organizers in Guatemala this week?"

    Which, you know, is completely unrelated to the rigid Orwellian ideological conformity it's suppose to conotate now anytime somebody gets offended at a racial or sexist epithet while it doesn't, apparently, refer to the "anti-American" epithet or McCarthyist pogroms against alleged Commies or innuendos and allegations of treason or 'objectively pro-terror' by six degrees of vague associations or for that matter Horowitz's allegation above of being pro-commie in Vietnam, rather than just anti-the-US-campaign-to-rape-vietnam. Talk about a Lenninist mindset, you are either with us or for the enemy.

    Were the objective of Horowitz's various projects to "introduce intellectual diversity" it wouldn't consist primarily of waging a political correctness campaign against allegedly intolerant liberal academics, it would be a program to try and convince conservative intellectuals to take a paycut from their ritzy think tank gigs and teach humanities courses at universities, or maybe pushing for more heterodox economists or green engineering professors.

    update: numerous other examples could be cited, but since it's topical Horowitz could also not persist in publishing strings of lies and fake arguments about said liberal academics. Maybe Seth Edenbaum was right to just say "I'm sick of this shit, so Horowitz is an idiot" and leave it at that, but the basket case has eight states seriously pondering his "academic bill of rights" legislation - demonstrating his antipathy towards frivelous lawsuits - so maybe it should be proclaiming 'Horowitz is an idiot' on street corners.


:: posted by buermann @ 2005-03-25 12:47:27 CST | link





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