Tuesday, September 09, 2008



It's the mavericks who squelch debate??

Blame the victim! A loony British-Indian academic blames the VICTIMS (not the perpetrators) of censorship for shutting down debate:
"A troubling collaboration between parts of the media and some academics and writers becomes visible here. Pervasive silences or gaps in knowledge around difficult issues of race, class and difference may be periodically breached by the Maverick Don, that mythologised figure to whom the media seem irresistibly drawn. Rather than a thoughtful intervention, this apparently eccentric academic or writer will toss out a provocative and authoritative pronouncement that appears to fly delightfully in the face of "political correctness".

Such putatively daring truth claims ("Islam is the problem", "Racism is natural", "Men are being emasculated by women") allow for silences to be broken dramatically and temporarily, while closing off the possibility of sustained and knowledgable debate. Pronouncement, outcry, apology - so unfolds the soap opera after which we return to business as usual. Meanwhile truly substantial and necessary scholarship on race and culture, at Cambridge included, simply drops off the radar

Source

Somehow this stupid bint equates opening up topics for discussion with "closing off the possibility of sustained and knowledgable debate". It's only because these topics are taboo that it needs mavericks to raise them! I think Matthew 7:3-5 is again relevant here. She should read it.

The writer is a woman with an Indian name. The name does not sound Muslim but her logic does.

I guess I can unravel her thinking, though. "Sustained and knowledgable debate" is debate that comes to the "right" conclusions -- and she knows what those conclusions are. So anything that upsets her neat little assumptions is disruptive and upsetting and should be STOPPED!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Are you sure you understood what she was saying? That portion you quoted struck me as nearly incoherent.

As I've done my own writing, I've discovered that if I'm having trouble expressing a thought in writing, then I probably haven't given the topic enough thought. The fact that this woman's writing is far more confused than anything I've written since I was about eight years old tells me that she simply does not understand her subject material.