Sunday, June 10, 2018

"What we are seeing is a politicization of the commons"


Bret Weinstein's testimony to the House of Representatives about the free speech crisis on U.S. college campuses. (Link)

3 comments:

ricpic said...

Politicizizizization.

ampersand said...

First they came for the Conservatives, and I did speak out— I said 'get em kids' because I was not a Conservative. Yada, Yada, Yada, then They came for me—and that's just not right!

Amartel said...

"The commons." Don't like the smell of that. At. All.
But I do like Bret Weinstein.
What we are seeing is decades of systemic internalization of the fiction that politics is personal and we know who barfed that up and freely distributed it in the guise of conventional wisdom/education/lightbulb moments/whatever served in the moment. Hint: Not the right. Maybe, recently, the "alt right" (whatever that is) driven from desperation to mimic their opposites who had a half a century long march and a jump on them. Like showing up to a nuclear war with a tiki torch.
I've met Bret Weinstein and he and his wife are formidably smart and were terribly and terrifyingly wronged (the bit about the dumb little thugs searching car to car for him and the campus police who were forbidden to do anything about it). He's still trying to figure out how his whole world got flipped turned upside down. Feeling his way. Totally right about what he says but still slips back into the professorial mediator role, where there has to be two sides at fault. He's still very much "of the academy" though the academy has unequivocably rejected him. He can't get hired so he's formed up a "dark web" alternative. (Great initiative for someone who has never really been in the private sector.) But the instinct to defend the system that made him is still strong.