It involves llamas.
» Breaking News
Babysitter Synjan Mitchell Arrested For Leaving Kids To Go Drinking
Gemma Atkinson Promotes Command & Conquer Red Alert
Uganda Cops Warn About Knock-Out Breasts
CNBC Forced To Cut Costs
Sumner Redstone Sells Midway Games To Ease Cash Crunch
The Lama
The one-l lama,
He’s a priest.
The two-l llama,
He’s a beast.
And I will bet
A silk pajama
There isn’t any
Three-l lllama.*
– Ogden Nash
*The author’s attention has been called to a type of conflagration known as a three-alarmer.
No, no, of course you’re not prejudiced. Totally believe you. You just like Hillary…..y’know, cuz she’s white an’ at.
I’m so proud that this is one of the states that actually matter.
Um, Berube is an intellectually dishonest hack.
It’s great when he is writing and snarky on your behalf. But while you applaud his elitism here (he and you are so much smarter than those other people) remember that the day may come when he is using his dishonesty to attack some cause you hold dear.
Why after reading this post at TPM and the other comments, I can just see Berube trying to role back voting for the masses. He says most of these people are stupid bigoted ignorant racists, and lots of people at the cafe agree with him.
Since he is a tenured rich fuck, I have no doubt that one day he’ll decide that people should have to show an income statement and take some sort of literacy test and show off their academic credentials in order to show they really understand all the issues.
Yes. Oliver it is true. 50% of the people are below average in intelligence. There are probably Democrats in that group. I assume that Obama wants to be the President of that group too, but maybe Obama thinks like Michael Berube that only smart hipster types are his base.
Me, I am disgusted by the presence of elitist fucks like Berube in my party. I had thought they all voted Rethuglican.
Um, Jerry, could you provide actual evidence of my dishonest hackery, please? Because tenured rich fucks like me like to see that kind of shit before we role back voting for the masses.
In the meantime, the fact remains that Clinton is running a campaign that consists of “OMG Obama wasn’t really a real law professor” and “OMG Obama Hussein X has a scary pastor” and “OMG Obama doesn’t want you to vote in your state’s primaries.” Is it elitist of me to point this out? Dang, I’ve been pwned on the internets again. I’m just gonna hafta take my Birkenstocks and my lattes home to my Tenured Rich Fuck Department and think up some new kryptonite snark.
Berube, what Jerry said.
You are taking someone else’s piece, and conflating convenient parts of it to make snarky points that appear clever, but don’t advance anything.
Kinda sorta like what you and Maureeen Dowd and others of your type do regularly, ain’t it?
And no, the Clinton campaign consists of a lot more than the snark you list above. That’s why she’s won all the big states, except for Illinois, and brought out close to 13 MILLION voters, not llamas, to vote for her.
I’m just gonna hafta take my Birkenstocks and my lattes home to my Tenured Rich Fuck Department and think up some new kryptonite snark.
In your Prius.
That’s why she’s won all the big states, except for Illinois,
Because all the other states just don’t matter, right Wellstone?
Wellstone, you’re a little cutie pie, you know that? I wrote my followup TPM post just for people like you. Because you’ve got spunk! (And I really do want to know how in the world Hillary Clinton, DLC centrist and courter of billionaire Democratic power brokers, became a working-class hero runnin’ the Rocky road. That part of the post isn’t snarky at all.)
But you should look up the word “conflating.” It doesn’t mean “quoting,” which is what I did with Ms. Talev’s article.
Finally, yes, 13 million voters is very impressive. It’s almost as many people as have voted for Obama– but not quite.
Michael,
I actually read through this fiasco of yours, and all the ancillary threads, and though I am not as smert as you or ahve a Ph.D in deconstruction, I thought you were remarkably intellectually dishonest.
Claiming to be an english professor or whatever and all and insisting, demanding that KC Johnson was way out of whack to read your clear statements the way he did.
So yeah, you and I will disagree on this, but you got pwned in that thread. You got pwned and you had to go to the 6 point type to declare that your legalistic meaning was clear and you weren’t a piece of shit in the classroom. And you still got pwned because I think that the average American whom you clearly disdain would be agreeing with Johnson.
You’re basically all snark and no cattle. But you do have tenure and who needs more?
I am truly curious though, if I understand your mythology, you somehow made your name by saying there was no such thing as PC in the academy, but then a few years later you found out there were PC people in the academy attacking you? Is that true? Can you clarify for me what that’s all about? I always assumed tenure was there to protect the professor from the politically correct, but then you have tenure and you don’t believe there are politically correct forces in the academy, so what do I know? I’m certainly one of those 50% of Americans with a below average IQ.
If you weren’t an intellectually dishonest fuck you would have what many people admire about actual tenured professors: an open mind and an ability to listen to people who disagree with you, and the courage to stand up to people who you are friends with and tell them when they are wrong.
When I see your name attached to a thread these days, my experience is that the thread is almost certainly knee jerk, unthinking, dishonest, terribly politically correct, and completely dismissive of anyone that might respectfully disagree.
Part of the solution, or part of the problem. It’s your career.
By the way Michael, when you wrote “KC Johnson, Beacon of Integrity?”
KC Johnson has shitloads more integrity than you will ever know. As a Democrat and Obama supporter, he stood up for the innocent that no one else wanted to stand up for. And truly, with absolute respect for you and your family and best wishes to all of you, he didn’t do it for family. He did it because it was right.
And his payment? Assholes like you and Lemieux and others who called him out as a rightwinger and worse for his crime of defending “Innocent until proven guilty”. Jerkoffs like you and your friends who still can only say, “we don’t know what happened in that house that night.”
You should stfu until you’ve read his book.
And right now, it beats me whether or not you actually believe that or not. However, you love to frequent the bloggers like Lemieux that have said that, and you love to puff smoke up their butts about how cool and hip they are, and you would never tell them how full of shit and anti-american they are. Those are the friends that a man of your tenure and integrity and intellectual honesty and wisdom should be speaking to. Instead you let them badger others and get away with their smears and lies.
So yeah Berube. Integrity? Intellectual honesty? Can’t have them. not yours.
Oliver, I feel I need to apologize to you for dragging this post of yours into this. So let me do that. I sincerely apologize to you.
Ah, Jerry, BFF of KC. Let me explain with all the patience I can muster, none of which you deserve: on a far-right online site, CampusWatch, KC Johnson wrote that “the nation’s leading academic journal, the Chronicle of Higher Education, published an essay by Penn State English professor Michael Bérubé advising professors to treat conservative students as they would students with learning disabilities or who exhibited aberrant behavior.” This was a lie. KC Johnson has yet to acknowledge it or apologize for it. So yes, we will have to disagree about whether he is a person of integrity. As for the Duke lacrosse case, about which you apparently feel quite strongly: I never wrote a thing about it, because I believed that the accused were innocent until proven guilty. When it became clear that they were not guilty, I suggested, in one LGM comment thread, that Nifong should have been disbarred for suppressing exculpatory evidence.
I am truly curious though, if I understand your mythology, you somehow made your name by saying there was no such thing as PC in the academy, but then a few years later you found out there were PC people in the academy attacking you? Is that true?
No. It is false. I have seen this claim (in precisely these words) made on four different blogs now, and I am beginning to think you have been a busy little bee.
And now we’re done!
Oliver, I sincerely apologize for the fact that one of your trolls is so stupid and dishonest. More kryptonite, please.
Ah Professor Berube, a title you have but don’t deserve.
I have been commenting at Oliver’s site for several years now. You can call me a troll, but I doubt that Oliver thinks of me like that.
And that is precisely the problem with hipster blogger professors like yourself. It is anathema for you to conceive anyone could possibly disagree with you and hence you need to other them, and claim they are troll and dismiss anything they have to say, because god forbid, it may mean you were wrong.
No need to explain KC Johnson to me. I read all of that thread and all the threads it pointed to. Stomp your tenured feet up and down, and you were wrong. You can claim you meant what you claim you wrote, but most people who are not bound to you will disagree and say you wrote something very different from what you claim to have meant.
I never wrote a thing about it, because I believed that the accused were innocent until proven guilty. When it became clear that they were not guilty, I suggested, in one LGM comment thread, that Nifong should have been disbarred for suppressing exculpatory evidence.
Ah, but the issue is what you didn’t do. Did you tell Scott Lemieux, that you thought he was wrong? Did you tell Amanda Marcotte that you felt that her Airport post was execrable?
Have you told Amanda yet that you think the students were innocent? Do you think the students are innocent? Amanda and Scott don’t. They still cling to saying “we don’t know what happened that night.” And you still cling to saying, “I thought Nifong should have been disbarred”. Different questions.
No, you visit their blogs, you don’t speak from courage, you don’t speak for the innocent, and you let these assholes get away with murder and you let them smear the innocent, smear their defenders, and make outrageous sexist and racist statements. Why? Well, they are your friends and because you are an intellectually dishonest cowardly fuck.
In fact, the point of the very thread in which you came by to simply dismiss KC Johnson as lacking integrity, was a thread in which Scott Lemieux created to say Johnson’s analogy was the worst historical analogy ever, regardless of how many mainstream pundits, and liberals, and even african american bloggers were using that same metaphor.
Instead of using your powerful culture critical skills to help clarify the situation regarding the case, Johnson, and the metaphor, you slimed Johnson in an attempted drive by and you let Lemieux carry on incorrectly about the worst historical metaphor ever.
Berube. You carry water for a group of politically correct often wrong bullies. You do not call them on it. You claim to be above that. You bully people with snark, name calling, and smears, and you support people that you know are wrong and that you know are smearing others.
Dishonest. Intellectually dishonest. Cowardly. Fucktard.
It’s really a shame on our American Academy that lightweights like you bear the title Professor. You are as intellectually honest as John Yoo. You are an enabler as is John Yoo. It’s too bad you don’t have the office next to John Yoo, you have much to discuss.
So that’s not your mythology?
I got it from Salon:
His career as a public intellectual was born out of his exasperation over the response to books like Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind” and Roger Kimball’s “Tenured Radicals,” which depicted America’s universities as overrun with crazed, politically correct deconstructionists hell-bent on destroying Western civilization. “It’s the same reflex I get when I watch ‘The Capitol Gang’ and you’ve got really serious righties against these wishy-washy centrists or mealy-mouthed liberals; I keep wanting to stride out of the dugout and call to the bullpen for the real lefties to come in. I was sure that someone was going to deal with Kimball, but after a while it seemed to me that the responses were sort of missing the point, and were utterly clueless about where this stuff was coming from and how it had been building for years.” So Bérubé, then a junior faculty member who had published only two scholarly articles on the obscure African-American poet Melvin Tolson, sat down in the spring of 1991 and wrote his own response. That article, which appeared in the Voice, was a scathing attack on critics of political correctness. It argued, often with detailed refutations, that most of those critics were ill-informed of, or even actively misrepresenting, what they claimed to criticize. It mounted a defense of the academic left and of the value of literary theory. And perhaps most important, his writing style was nothing like the stereotypical theorist’s jumble of jargon. Colloquial and funny, he wrote with a “volatile mix of Irish ire and Irish wit,” as Bérubé proudly quoted a fellow colleague — and funny was precisely what the humorless drones of PC were not supposed to be. It brought him immediate attention and a host of further mainstream publishing opportunities.
Since then his fervent defense of university has become more complicated and more nuanced. “Over the next couple of years, I ran into enough academic nonsense to make my defenses of the academic left more qualified,” he says, mentioning his disavowal of speech codes.
If you want to clarify that, I would be interested….
And here too, where the PC isn’t in the academy but in the left:
http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2003/02/12/lerner_ban/index.html
“One of the arguments against me and people like me [who criticize ANSWER] is that the left now is doing its own dirty work,” Berube says. “My counter is that ANSWER’s politics are not going to be ignored forever. It’s not as if these kinds of associations will delegitimate the antiwar movement only if the right finds out about them. They’ll delegitimate it if a lot of the attendees find out about them.”
Hip young professor who is going to change the world cries out there is no bias in academia and on the left, and then finds out, that there is lots of bias in academia and on the left. And drives his tenured ass in his tenured car into his tenured garage.
Well, Oliver, we’ve got a live one here. Has he really been commenting here for years? My heart goes out to you.
most people who are not bound to you will disagree and say you wrote something very different from what you claim to have meant
Actually, no. Very, very few people have been so craven as to try to suggest that I counseled professors to treat conservative students as students with disabilities, when in fact I argued that all students deserve reasonable accommodation for their views in class. So far, I’ve counted those readers on the fingers of one hand– and they don’t include David Horowitz, which should tell you something. Horowitz has been perfectly willing to tell any number of lies about me, but this one is too low and implausible even for him. So you and KC are now below the Horowitz Level, which is to say, below the bottom of the barrel.
About the first Salon essay: arguing that critics of PC were “ill-informed of, or even actively misrepresenting, what they claimed to criticize” is not the same thing as arguing that PC doesn’t exist. Dinesh D’Souza, for instance, was full of shit in 1991, and he’s been full of shit ever since. About the second Salon essay: I’ve been criticizing the far-far-away left for twenty years now; there’s no volte-face involved in my criticism of groups like ANSWER. You could, you know, go back and read my actual work. (Or, since dead-tree pubs may not be your milieu, you could just check my blog archives from Aug 7-11, 2006, when I did a whole series on people to my left who’ve fallen off a cliff.)
But this is now the fourth blog on which you and I have had this exchange, jerry/ wtf/ anon/ and lots of other pseudonyms (via Pandagon, Alicublog, LGM), and I know that asking you to read stuff I’ve written before making claims about my work is pretty pointless. I see you’re into insults instead! Fine. You are, my friend, a vile, cowardly (anonymous!), sniveling little crank with a very bad Amanda/ Duke lacrosse obsession, and I’m going to let your mother know that you’re using very bad words on the Internets. In closing, as James Joyce once wrote, go fuck yourself gently with a chainsaw. Do it today!