Another edition of our ghastly campus wingnut ‘alternative’ paper came out today. I’m not going to go through it page by page — it’s just gotten worse and worse with every issue. Here are the three main themes:
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Frequent complaints that our chancellor is overpaid, and that faculty salaries are too low. Guys, we might agree that the administration gets paid too much money, but there’s no amount of sucking up you can do to win the faculty over to your side. Also, whining about salary inequities from a group of goddamned Republicans is really, really unconvincing.
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Yours truly got a grand 3 page spread, titled
A to (P)Z: The Pauley Myers Chronicle
. It’s pathetic. They seem to have gotten a few (very few) facts from Wikipedia, and then spun it out into a bizarre fairy tale about how my whole life has been about showing up the kids with whom I went to high school. Lazily written, not a speck of creativity to it, and honestly, people…outshining your high school peers is something 19 year olds might dream of, but most of us outgrow it. -
The worst: outrageous racism. A long article claiming Michael Brown was the real racist. Sample quotes:
No black-run city is livable.
The question is not whether police should shoot young black men; it’s whether we want the state to use coercive power in any way against minorities that threaten those communities.
Darren Wilson isn’t Bull Connor, he’s the misguided and confused white knight trying to help Cliff Huxtable raise a family next door to Old Dirty Bastard.
This rag is written by kids who hope to be UMM graduates? I’m embarrassed that they’re here.
Hmm….
1) Damned unions!
2) Damned atheists!
3) Damned black people!
What a delight… Ugh.
Do they have an online version?
I have some comments.
They have an online archive. It’s not updated in a timely fashion.
I can’t imagine why.
I sure hope you only took one copy.
They probably slipped one under PZ’s office door.
I wonder if Todd Starnes will write an other article about how PZ is suppressing the free speech o this student.
If it happens, will pitters again link to the work of a christianist hack, gloating that someone in the media is paying attention to the dangers that is the cult of PZ.
I would subscribe if they delivered to Canada for a reasonable fee. I’ve run out of bemusing wallpaper since I gave up on Chick Tracts.
Back at my big ol’ librul college, they had a regular student run daily newspaper. The opinion section was half-infested with right-wing or libertarian windbags. And I thought they were terrible enough. But then I stumbled across the “monthly or less quarterly or annually or who gives a fuck, we will produce one at some point” conservative newspaper on campus, usually with a bunch of articles making the same argument about the same subject. Think the one issue I saw had several pieces spitting invective about Barney Frank and how gay he is. It was similarly racist and spiteful towards filthy libruls, while also crowing about how victimized and unheard they are. This, despite the fact that our Republican Club and whatever they called our equivalent to Kampus Krusade for Khrist were the largest, most well-funded, most influential, and fucking loudest entities on campus. It was a librul college full of libruls, but because of that everyone was quiet and complacent about liberalism, for the most part, leaving the poor victimized conservatives more opportunities to cling to the microphone.
That comes from page 37 (dog-eared) of the Rethug/Teabagger handbook: accuse your opponents of the negative characteristics you exhibit, and do it first.
I’m still trying to figure out an effective countermeasure. Perhaps just stick to the facts: that an incompetent, racist cop murdered an unarmed man by shooting him in the head, and the corrupt prosecutor helped him get away with it.
I can honestly say that, while I really haven’t much idea what most of my nineteen year old peers are doing with their lives, I wish them well.
(… well, most of them. Some, come to think of it, were kinda jerks, it seemed to me, at least at nineteen. No idea if that was the rest of their lives, though, so, well, whatev, I guess… Either way. Still hope they got on, y’know…)
This said, I dunno… The oddly _obsessive_ attention this lot do seem to give you, I gotta wonder if _that_ just might bring out a certain juvenile competitiveness in me…
I mean, three-page-calibre-hatred, even! Yes, this, I fear, might well go to my head. I’d find myself unwisely competing, comparing, I’m sure…
Asking myself: have they ever done three pages on any of those _lesser_ hated enemies of the contemporary right? Slow freight like MLK, FDR? No? What about perennial bugbears like Marx, Mao, Lenin? Yeah, _those_ losers? Have _they_ ever got three pages in the mighty Morris Campus John Birch Society Picayune, hmm?
No again? Ha! Well, we’re _done_, here, then. I _win_!
I guess if you can find a better one for cheaper . . .
There’s some humor to be found in the fact that you got the infamouse page 3.
Just some perspective from across the pond. I was a working class teen who happened to win a scholarship to what was generally perceived as a very “Posh” university. My college produced a few PMs – but of all persuasions. Although the privileged classes were well represented, I never heard stuff like this even spoken in public, never mind published in a newspaper. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen but it quite a shock to see what PZ is reporting.
Please post the article about you verbatim. I’m sure there’s more than one reader here with a law background who would be interested to see if they inadvertently stray into libel. If they did, even if you didn’t take any action it could be kind of fun to “put the fear of god into them”.
So I guess their online edition is as current as their ideas. Zing!
“No black-run city is livable”
Are we close to having a remake of “Birth of a Nation”?
“No black-run city is livable.”
Huh, I’ll be damned, I was certain that I like living in Baltimore, but if the North Star says I don’t, then…
It’s rather hilariously telling that their most recent black cultural reference is someone who died ten years ago. Also, casting Cliff Huxtable as the “good guy” in their description seems pretty damn shady, considering.
Yeah, because fucking white cops keep shooting them.
I’ve been called a white knight in gender contexts and I’m proud of it.
It’s when the name gets applied to people like Darren Wilson in race contexts that I’m sadly reminded that it also has ties to the KKK. (Purely unintentional on the rag’s part, I’m sure.)
These are moderate Republicans. At least they’re not calling you a fat socialist poopyhead.
So-called “moderate” thugs are so far to the right they can see the curvature of the Universe. (With apologies to Terry Pratchett for nicking his joke.)
Man, I’ve been sent back in time 20 years to my days writing for one of these right-wing college screeds. It’s all there: Contempt for the administration complete with insubstantial claims of “corruption,” constant harangues targeted against one particular professor, and of course, racial and sexual bigotry that ranged from the subtle to the bald-faced.
Be happy that this piece of fish-wrap appears to be in it’s death throes.
Also, casting Cliff Huxtable as the “good guy” in their description seems pretty damn shady, considering.
The Huxtables are the platonic ideal of the what a black family is supposed to be: exactly like traditional white families, only darker. However, we won’t hold their Curse-of-Ham blackened skin against them so long as they don’t do anything “scary.” (e.g. Refuse to respect white authority, dress in any clothes that appear “ghetto,” speak in anything other than perfect English, vote Democrat.)
ajbajasus: your posh school probably had a posh sense of shame, because your unelected aristocrats have much less leeway to get away with acting like pond-scum than ours. And that, in turn, is probably because your unelected aristocrats are honest about what they are — a privileged class whose privileges come with obligations, and who can be judged by the commoners — while ours get away with pretending their privileges are inalienable rights that everyone has.
Yeah, I’m not sure referencing an authoritarian patriarch played by a(n alleged and probable) serial rapist as the “good” Black guy is going to help make the case…