Monday, August 3, 2015

Leftism Illustrated

Free Speech: Reserving for oneself the right to make clueless tweets while denying to others the right to participate in calm, reasonable dialogue.

Another University professor is showing us why a university education is highly over-rated and way over-priced:
A Rutgers University professor who is under fire for saying that the U.S. is “more brutal” than ISIS has used racial slurs against white men, attacked a leading advocate against female genital mutilation and even led a successful protest last year to stop former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from speaking to students.

Deepa Kumar, associate professor of journalism and media studies at New Jersey's main public university, made news recently by tweeting: “Yes ISIS is brutal, but US is more so, 1.3 million killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.” But that tweet, sent in March but only brought to prominent attention after it was noticed by the site SoCawlege.com, is not Kumar's first brush with digital bigotry.

“Okay, I'm sold on using the term ‘douchebag’ to describe rich, white entitled males and their misogynistic, racist behavior!” Kumar wrote in a Facebook endorsement of an online article last fall.

Kumar also attacked Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Muslim and activist against the practice of female genital mutilation,as an “islamophobe and native informant” in a public Facebook post, and wrote glowingly of Marxism.

“Here is a great conference on Marxism and why it makes sense!” she wrote in one recent post.

Kumar did not respond to a request for comment on her posts from FoxNews.com, but within hours of the request had deleted or locked her Facebook account. FoxNews.com took screenshots.
Professor Kumar is a virtual stereotype of the contemporary liberal progressive. She has opinions which she feels she should be free to advocate on social media and elsewhere but denies to others opportunities to voice and hear opinions which she herself doesn't like. She's inclined to name-calling rather than argument, and the opinions she holds are in any case absurd. For example, as the article points out:
Regimes operating under the banner of Marxism killed between 85 million and 100 million of their own citizens in the last century according to the Black Book of Communism published by the Harvard University Press, both through mass starvation caused by government takeovers of farms and also mass murders of citizens thought likely to resist communist policies.
That's contemporary leftism in a nutshell. It's intellectually vacuous, ideologically totalitarian, emotionally puerile, and chronically unable to live by the Golden Rule of granting to others the same prerogatives one wants granted to oneself. It is, in fact, a kind of intellectual bigotry, as insufferable in its own way as racism, sexism, or any other form of bigoted behavior. Unfortunately, it too often sounds superficially cool to young minds eager to rebel against traditional thinking and common sense.