By Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
Seems the far Right just can’t stay out of – or quit throwing – the muck. The Huffington Post reports that University of Rochester econ professor, Steve Landsburg, has launched his own attack on Georgetown law school student, Sandra Fluke, who had the temerity to speak her mind to a congressional committee discussing contraceptive services. Landsburg apparently dabbles in English grammar when his dismal graphs and computer models become tiresome. In his off-hours, he seems quite content to edit Rush Limbaugh’s right-wing attack pieces, adding some of his own insights. On his blog he felt compelled to share:
[Limbaugh] wants to brand Ms. Fluke a “slut” because, he says, she’s demanding to be paid for sex. There are two things wrong here. First, the word “slut” connotes (to me at least) precisely the sort of joyous enthusiasm that would render payment superfluous. A far better word might have been “prostitute” (or a five-letter synonym therefor), but that’s still wrong because Ms. Fluke is not in fact demanding to be paid for sex. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) She will, as I understand it, be having sex whether she gets paid or not. Her demand is to be paid. The right word for that is something much closer to “extortionist”. Or better yet, “extortionist with an overweening sense of entitlement.” Is there a single word for that?
But whether or not he chose the right word, what I just don’t get is why the pro-respect crowd is aiming all its fire at Rush. Which is more disrespectful — his harsh language or Sandra Fluke’s attempt to pick your pocket?
Seems he may be on to something etymologically speaking but he fails
miserably in the free speech/separation of church-state class. I’d think he’s also getting a “D-” for comprehension in my class. Fluke made no claim on the public funds and instead merely advocated that private insurance cover contraceptive services to further women’s health rather than cater to religious convictions of a particular sect.
While Professor Landsburg doesn’t get it, the University’s students did. Thirty of them dressed in black and made a rather dramatic entry into his classroom passing out summaries of the professor’s musings and then opted to stand between him and his charges staging a pedagogical wall of separation between scorn and student.
Landsburg called security to disband the protest, but the students left of their own accord making their point for both civility and free speech. “We are appalled by how often women and their bodies have been used for political theatrics, and we refuse to remain passive on this issue,” Kelly Rickert, a Rochester student who was a part of the protest, told The Huffington Post. “To do so would be to condone the actions of Professor Landsburg.”
University of Rochester President Joel Seligman acknowledged his employee’s right to the academic freedom to express unpopular opinions but added:
“I am outraged that any professor would demean a student in this fashion,” Seligman said in a statement. “To openly ridicule, mock, or jeer a student in this way is about the most offensive thing a professor can do. We are here to educate, to nurture, to inspire, not to engage in character assassination.”
Well, Dr. Segilman some of you are. On the other hand, seems some in the ivory tower like to attack from the comfort of their office. Landsburg was undeterred, “[Fluke] deserves only to be ridiculed, mocked and jeered,” and “Rush stepped in to provide the requisite mockery” with a “spot-on analogy.” And in one of the most ironic statements I’ve heard from the academe in a long time said of the protestors, “in their contempt for the free exchange of ideas, they appear to be comrades-in-arms of Sandra Fluke.”
Comrades-in-arms by personal ridicule and thus chilling the free speech of another? In Rochester, it seems it takes one to know one.
In keeping with our academic theme, in a hundred words or less, pick the victim(s) and defend your answer:
a. Sandra Fluke
b. Professor Steve Landsburg
c. The University of Rochester
d. First Amendment
e. Academic Freedom
Source: Huffington Post
~Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
@idealist707,
You’ve amply demonstrated you’re a paranoid conspiracy theorist troll.
I am pleased to know you serve[d] past tense in the Army.
Our Army and its members and its country deserves far better than crapola. It’s good to know you’re out and they and we are safe from you.
Piss off. Sir.
Anon
You’re clueless and humorless, which’s kinda bad too.
Your stuff isn’t even funny. So sad. Sad ANON.
Can’t you do other than fart up some words like lunatic and troll.
sheesh. No imagination at all.
Serious?, not where you’re concerned. You’re only a serious threat to yourself. That’s the only serious I see in you.
Ah shit, I tracked a link to the September 9 2011 posting, and forgot to click back to find the actual reponses.
Well, that joke is on me.
With apologies to LK and her mother for responding in this thread to her quip from September 9.
@lk
“And so have you, I suppose that makes you a one-trick dick.”
It’s quite a trick and your mother enjoyed it enormously.
“idealist707
1, March 19, 2012 at 12:01 pm
Mike S.
Don’t apologize. ANON is suckering you. He works for Google, in the data managemet on order group. He cleans up after himself, of course.
No. seriously, lack of data doesn’t change a bad apple, it’s still rotten.
And don’t steal my mea culpa territory. Smile.”
I work for google in the data management group and have cleaned up google so Mike can’t get to it.
Well, now you’re clearly both a lunatic and a troll.
I stand corrected, I thought you were serious participant.
@SM,
Thank you, because this statement,
“anon 1, September 8, 2011 at 3:50 pm
@AY, I am just tired of @SM’s constant stream of misandry in thread after thread that goes unremarked, why? Because it’s not PC to do so. Because we think there is some progressive value in bashing men.
And In this thread she calls once more for a black and white vote against someone based on a single issue.
This is the strategy the Corporate Dems use to bludgeon us time and again into voting for Obama and other tools, because any alternative IS DEATH HITLER FASCISTS TEA PARTY RACISTS.
Greenwald took that meme down a month or so back. We should all refuse to be bludgeoned by speech policing, gate keeping bullies insisting that if we don’t vote for their single issue, the result is HITLER.
So no, voting one issue, voting your vagina, is a losing way.”
Is absolutely the epitome of not misogyny.
And it’s clear that since you view it as misogyny how warped your logical processes are, and how you do wrap yourself in vagina politics.
@swarthmore mom
“swarthmore mom has always been a one trick vagina in the comments. Even her name emphasizes her vagina. You’re not going to knock her off her vagina stump.”
This is not a misogynistic attack you dimwit. It is not an attack on women.
It is not even an attack on feminists.
This is an attack on you for the one trick nature of your handle, and the crap you shove down on throats everyday that you think makes you unassailable because you are trading on being a feminist and a woman.
I call you on your bullshit.
If I came in here everydad handled as JoeBob’s Dad, letting everyone know I was a man, and harped everyday on the outrageous discrimination against men in this country, like how prostate cancer kills as many if not more men than women every year but gets much less funding, than you would be reasonably annoyed to put up with my abuse of this forum and call me a one trick penis.
I would not interpret that as misandry or an attack on all men.
I would interpret that as an attack on me and my abuse of this forum.
As for you, your behavior demonstrates that you view every political candidate and every topic as how it pertains to your bigoted special interest: women.
That’s fine and proves my point.
My calling you out on it, is not misogyny it is noting the one note bigot you are.
@Mike,
Scrolling down to read your apology, I thank you for it, sincerely.
@mespo:
“Who advocated restricting Professor Landsburg’s academic freedom?”
You did, when you suggest a reasonable response to his blog post is the disruption of the class times of his 200 students.
Christine Noble does when she proudly hypothesizes that this disruption was staged by the gender studies department.
HTH
Lotta,
“…AY and SWM aren’t going to fall for it. Just sayn’….”
Fall for what, lotta? fall for what?. Clarify. Is it me you are accusing for putting out stuff that i expect other to fall for? you better clarify that. it escapes me completely. I feel deeply cranked, I was an Army officer and still stand by that oath and those values. Don’t ever intimate otherwise.
I’ve never said an untruthful or deceitful word here. Never!
To say that I do stuff which I think others would fall for is deeply cranking. Calling me a deceitful person. Don’t have anything worse to be called. Are you intentionally saying so?
Prove it or apologize.
Next you will be calling me a traitor for living in Sweden. Am waiting for more.
Lotta,
“…We already have a posterlike that on Turlyblawg. AY and SWM aren’t going to fall for it. Just sayn’….”
What the fuck does that mean lotta?
which poster are you referring to?
I am not attacking SwM and never have.
I never attacked AY, he has attacked me as SwM can attest since I came.
She came to me and attested to that she had been bullied here for some time, but did not say who it was—-but is that hard to guess.
AY has claimed BS about me. constantly, everytime I posted.
False flagger, sockerpuppet manipulator, not who I say I am, etc etc.
So how much shit am I supposed to take?
I would like to ignore him, and have reached out a friendly hand on several occasion, just yesterday for example. But he attacks again and again.
So if I take the chance from hís shit he’s feeding to another person here and call him for a hypocrite—–then that is tit for tat in my eyes.
Mike S disclosed apparently stuff I had previously posted in an attempt to get him to lay off. AY intimated such at any rate. But the attacks mounted in intensity and after a couple of weeks it was back to usual.
Now I will gladly shut up, but being needled constantly is tiring. Or have you ever been subjected to it?
AY knows very well who to keep on the good side of. He also tests and finds out who he can dominate, count on not opposing his crap. No names.
Well, I have no need of any of him. Just want to go on getting the kind attention and help which has been increasing. He says, BS when i ask what DWB, WWB lol, etc I’m a false flagger.
As I wrote to the kind persons who explained this and other acronyms to me later, I have been doing acronym , codes, assembler language, since was 14 etc etc but this part of my education was not there. Was other places. Was in Stockholm in ’68 and have to say it wasn’t fun to fight the FNL / FLN girls here although the american cops were certainly worse.
have no use for hashing over this again. but your comment seems to intimate that I am in the wrong—-and there you are dead wrong. It also seemed to intimate that you thought I was in the wrong with AY. BS again I say. Do you understand me? If you feel so, then say it openly.
If you think so, then say so, and stop the cryptic reference. Plain speaking for an expat who hasn’t used english daily for over 40 years, and hasn’t been on a blog over there either since last Fall, when I checked into Willy Loman on wordpress.
So let’s hear it.
Blouise, Everybody on the outside tells me to stay off of those blogs. lol
SwM,
BTW … given the nature of the v-word, vagina-boy posts, it was your call to make. We were all just kinda waiting in the wings. 😉
Woosty,
I like the new avatar almost as much as the occu pie one from Nov-Dec
lotta,
always getting in other peoples fights= wrong
always nitpicking= wrong
getting attacked by certain persons= must be doing things right=right
responding to those persons=wrong
taking up space on the mea culpa piedestal= wrong.
Noted.
OK?
PS to Mike S.
Why are you pissed at me? I said above to you that you should not back down on the basis of a Google search. And said in effect don’t let your “righteous self” force you up on the mea culpa piedestal.
And you never answer me except to occasionally show me how stupid I am—-which is appreciated, but kinda lopsided contact, considering my effort here. ??????????
And giving me the silent treatment gets to me as you see. Shit, manl Cough it up.
Blouise1, March 19, 2012 at 11:51 am
———————————–
grin 🙂
idealist707
SwM, AY
AY says:
“….Do not attack me personally….. Attack the posting…. Can you distinguish the difference? ….”
————————–
From the mouth of hypocrisy itself. That’s all he’s done to me, never the argument. What a bullshitter he is.
He never said a true word in his life.
Medusa was a woman, here is her male counterpart—-but without power, thus the verbal venom.
————–
I don’t know what’s up with you and AY (please, don’t re-hash it for my benefit) but a word to the wise: At some point things start sounding like ‘yea, let’s you and him fight!’ We already have a poster like that on Turlyblawg. AY and SWM aren’t going to fall for it. Just sayn’
SwM,
I think lotta had the right take on it when she mentioned “showboating for the newbies” … there’s a lot of that going on … 😉
Swarthmore mom
1, March 19, 2012 at 1:19 pm
Blouise, I hesitated and did not bring up it last night as I did not want to dredge the sorry episode up again. But then when Mike apologized I changed my mind.
===============================================
Yep … well done
SwM,
Crocodile tears