“Cesar is Risen”

Today, with Sergey Brin and Larry Page celebrating Cesar Chavez rather than Easter, is a good day to recall Caitlan Flanagan’s article in The Atlantic, “The Madness of Cesar Chavez.”

[Chavez] was also taken with a Synanon practice called “The Game,” in which people were put in the center of a small arena and accused of disloyalty and incompetence while a crowd watched their humiliation. Chavez brought the Game back to La Paz and began to use it on his followers, among them some of the UFW’s most dedicated volunteers. In a vast purge, he exiled or fired many of them, leaving wounds that remain tender to this day. He began to hold the actual farmworkers in contempt: “Every time we look at them,” he said during a tape-recorded meeting at La Paz, “they want more money. Like pigs, you know. Here we’re slaving, and we’re starving and the goddamn workers don’t give a shit about anything.”

The drop-head on Flanagan’s story alludes to Orwell’s lede to his famous essay on Gandhi, “Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.”

“How Free Speech Died on Campus”

This article, from The Wall Street Journal, comes as no surprise, but it’s still unsettling. I hate to give away the kicker, but it is incredible that this even needs to be stated: even if the suppression of speech is happening to people you dislike, “it’s a fundamental violation of what the university means. Free speech is about protecting minority rights. Free speech is about admitting you don’t know everything. Free speech is about protecting oddballs. It means protecting dissenters.”

Not everywhere in America, apparently. The story, by Sohrab Ahmari, reports:

At Western Michigan University, it is considered harassment to hold a “condescending sex-based attitude.” That just about sums up the line “I think of all Harvard men as sissies” (from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1920 novel “This Side of Paradise”), a quote that was banned at Yale when students put it on a T-shirt. Tufts University in Boston proscribes the holding of “sexist attitudes,” and a student newspaper there was found guilty of harassment in 2007 for printing violent passages from the Quran and facts about the status of women in Saudi Arabia during the school’s “Islamic Awareness Week.”

At California State University in Chico, it was prohibited until recently to engage in “continual use of generic masculine terms such as to refer to people of both sexes or references to both men and women as necessarily heterosexual.” Luckily, there is no need to try to figure out what the school was talking about—the prohibition was removed earlier this year after FIRE named it as one of its two “Speech Codes of the Year” in 2011.

At Northeastern University, where I went to law school, it is a violation of the Internet-usage policy to transmit any message “which in the sole judgment” of administrators is “annoying.”

Conservatives and libertarians are especially vulnerable to such charges of harassment. Even though Mr. Lukianoff’s efforts might aid those censorship victims, he hardly counts himself as one of them: He says that he is a lifelong Democrat and a “passionate believer” in gay marriage and abortion rights. And free speech. “If you’re going to get in trouble for an opinion on campus, it’s more likely for a socially conservative opinion.” …

“Even when we win our cases,” says Mr. Lukianoff, “the universities almost never apologize to the students they hurt or the faculty they drag through the mud.” Brandeis University has yet to withdraw a 2007 finding of racial harassment against Prof. Donald Hindley for explaining the origins of “wetback” in a Latin-American Studies course. Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis apologized to a janitor found guilty of harassment—for reading a book celebrating the defeat of the Ku Klux Klan in the presence of two black colleagues—but only after protests by FIRE and an op-ed in these pages by Dorothy Rabinowitz.

Scary. Read it all.

Philip Roth: “I’m done”

From Salon:

Philip Roth is calling it a career.

In an interview with a French publication called Les Inrocks last month — which does not appear to have been reported in the United States — Roth, 78, said he has not written anything new in the last three years, and that he will not write another novel.

“To tell you the truth, I’m done,” Roth told the magazine, in the most definitive statement he has ever made about his future plans. “‘Nemesis’ will be my last book.”

He’ll be missed by many, though others, critical of his portrayal of women, will applaud. Weird, though, that Salon would rely on a web site to translate his quotes from the French magazine. Couldn’t they afford two hundred bucks for a human translator for a story of this importance–particularly since the topic is an American writer, and his exact words matter?

Relativity at a walking pace

…from the MIT Game Lab.

Reports Popsci:

Many have wondered (and theorized) what it would be like to travel at the speed of light, but over at MIT’s Game Lab developers are envisioning what it would be like if light moved at the speed of you. Through a new game, aptly titled A Slower Speed of Light, game designers there have created a first-person prototype game in which the speed of light slowly decelerates as the user progresses through the game, bringing the effects of special relativity down to walking speed.

A Slower Speed of Light is built on top of Game Lab’s own custom-built, open-source relativistic game engine imbued with all of the strange effects of relativity. But rather than taking the user up to the speed of light, where these effects would be far easier observed, the game brings the speed of light down to the user.

Via Instapundit.

“Loot the looters!”

I’m reading Evan Mawdsley’s The Russian Civil War, and this passage resonated with me today in this age of rage at “the one percent”:

The initial success of Bolshevik economic policy was less economic than political. “Loot the looters!” won backing for the Bolsheviks as the bosses and landowners were driven out; it did not matter at first that people were not immediately better off. Radical economic policies helped the Bolsheviks to take power and then to consolidate it in the winter of 1917-1918. As the months passed, however, even the political benefits came to look more dubious. “Workers’ control” of the factories and the general dislocation of economic administration actually contributed to a decline in production; they led (with other factors) to a shrinking of the working class and the rise of anti-Bolshevik sentiment in the factories.

This urban unrest was also the result of food shortages, which in turn came partly from the rural disorder created by the agrarian revolution. Soviet attempts to replace private trade with state-run barter foundered, angering both the peasants and the hungry urban consumers.

Tired of Bronco Bama and Mitt Romney?

So is this kid:

Is the Obama campaign borrowing ad ideas from Vladimir Putin?

We know how all you ladies lust after Obama. Putin seems to have the same problem with over-eager dames. Or maybe Obama’s people just borrowed a page from the campaign of Russia’s president-for-life, Foreign Policy suggests.

In the Obama ad a young lass (I gather she’s famous) enthuses about her “first time.”

“Your first time shouldn’t be with just anybody. You want to do it with a great guy,” she says, referring to casting your first ballot for Obama. (What were you thinking?)

It’s a clever conceit, but feels a bit familiar. Perhaps because the same joke was used in an ad for Vladimir Putin’s presidential campaign earlier this year:

“A suggestive ad rallying support for Putin’s presidential campaign shows a young woman seeking a fortune-teller’s advice. ‘Let’s find out, cutie, who is intended to you by destiny,’ the mystic says. The girl replies, ‘You know. I wish it to be for love. It is my first time.’”

I’m not so sure the conceit is clever; or rather, it may be clever in the same way the carriers and bayonets line was, costing the president votes (downplaying the need for a bigger fleet might hurt his standing among shipbuilders in Virginia and Florida). But at least this joke wasn’t about Big Bird losing his virginity.

Putin–the guy who saw protesters wearing white ribbons and immediately thought of condoms–campaigned with a suspiciously similar ad: