The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

#Metaphor: Academics Sign Their Own Death Warrants by Defending Loomis

Posted on | December 19, 2012 | 11 Comments

Professor Erik “Head on a Stick” Loomis has established a new precedent in Online Civil Discourse: Any epithet-strewn obscene rant full of violent language against political opponents is acceptable, as long as you explain that it is a Metaphor Right-Wing Morons Can’t Understand.

We thank our enlightened progressive overlords for this blessing.

It has furthermore been established that if you are engaged in metaphor, and sympathizers of your political opponent quote you in such a way as to suggest that your sentiments are deranged, menacing and offensive, this is a “witch hunt,” and anyone who calls attention to this is “orchestrating a campaign” against the user of metaphor.

Such is the essential syllogism of “Statement on Erik Loomis“:

[W]e must stand by Loomis’s side and speak up and out on his behalf, for he has become the target of a witch hunt, and as an untenured professor at the University of Rhode Island, he is vulnerable. Loomis needs our solidarity and support, and we must give it to him. . . .
Glenn Reynolds is now accusing Loomis of using “eliminationist rhetoric.”
Other conservative voices have joined in. The Daily Caller says Loomis “unleashed a flurry of profanity-ridden tweets demanding death for National Rifle Association executive Wayne LaPierre.” Townhall put Loomis’s tweets in the context of NRA members and leaders getting death threats. And just this morning, Michelle Malkin wrote at National Review Online [a column critical of Loomis] . . .
We do not expect any better of the orchestrators of this campaign—this is what they have done for many years, and doubtless will be doing for years to come. We do expect better of university administrators. Rather than standing behind a member of their faculty, the administration has sought to distance the university from Loomis. . . .

In other words, if Professor Wobbly-Gay-Lumberjack Dissertation fails to gain tenure at the University of Rhode Island, the haters win, and the academic right to use fucking bloody hate speech metaphor in Online Civil Discourse will be destroyed.

(Damn it, why did Ace of Spades have to take a vacation this week? How can this douchebag not receive the full-on AOSHQ treatment?)

Nevertheless, in order to show “our solidarity and support” for the unalienable right to employ violent obscene rants metaphor in Online Civil Discourse (and still get tenure at the University of Rhode Island), I will list the signatories to the “Statement on Erik Loomis“:

  1. Chris Bertram, University of Bristol
  2. Michael Bérubé, The Pennsylvania State University
  3. Henry Farrell, George Washington University
  4. Kieran Healy, Duke University
  5. Jon Mandle, SUNY Albany
  6. John Quiggin, University of Queensland
  7. Corey Robin, Brooklyn College
  8. Brian Weatherson, University of Michigan

Perhaps readers can offer appropriate suggestions for what should be done to these subversive Bolshevik intestinal parasites metaphors!

UPDATE: I’ll have to provide the dog-whistle translation for Professor William Jacobson’s eliminationist rhetoric here:

I don’t think Loomis should be fired

Instead, he should be castrated with pruning shears

but that doesn’t mean he should be free from criticism.

And by “criticism,” I mean “Birther lynch mob rage”

And he certainly is not a hero of anything.

Except to the Marxist traitors who voted for the Kenyan usurper!

He’s just a guy who

should have his eyes gouged out with rusty nails because he

wanted to deprive others of the rights he claims for himself.

Right-wing morons don’t understand metaphor, but our ears perk up quick when we hear that secret lynch-mob dog-whistle.





 

PREVIOUSLY:


Category: Education, Instapundit, Michelle Malkin, Rhode Island

Obama’s Benghazi Fall Guys

Posted on | December 19, 2012 | 24 Comments

It took long enough, but President Gutsy Call finally located three State Department employees who don’t have enough political juice to protect them from getting blamed for the predictable failure of the administration’s Libya policy:

The A.P., quoting an unidentified administration official, said Eric Boswell, the assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security, and Charlene Lamb, the deputy assistant secretary responsible for embassy security, had resigned. The third person, who was not identified, was an official with the department’s Bureau of Near East Affairs, The A.P. said.

You have to picture in your mind Obama’s advisors huddled with Hillary’s advisors, going over a list of State Department personnel, trying to figure out who doesn’t have a key Democratic Senator or an influential DNC contributor to defend them against this “under-the-bus” move.

So now we know who the three least-connected State Department employees were, thus providing Obama with the chance to say that he has now solved the problem that his policies caused. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Disinformation’s effort to deceive voters has succeeded remarkably, with 56% of the gullible sheep telling CNN they fell for that farcical Susan Rice dog-and-pony show.

The resignations of the “Benghazi Three” followed the publication of a report from the Libya Cover-Up Scapegoat Search Committee:

The report, posted Tuesday night on the State Department’s website, also identified “leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels within two bureaus.” It suggested 29 ways the department can improve its operations, but recommended no disciplinary action.
The Accountability Review Board’s report . . .

(“Accountability”! Like the kids says, “LOL.”)

. . . comes after more than three months of intense debate in Washington over who was behind the attack, what motivated the attackers and why U.S. authorities weren’t able to stop the violence, which took the lives of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

It’s the standard Obama-era Jedi mind trick: Four Americans dead, don’t blame the President, nothing more to see here, move along.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! The professor obviously appreciates the way the passive voice magically relieves the important people from the burden of responsibility. Somebody got screwed over, but who did the screwing?

 


Category: Barack Obama, Libya

University President Repudiates Professor’s Violent Anti-NRA Messages UPDATE: Associated Press Article Whitewashes Loomis Scandal

Posted on | December 19, 2012 | 55 Comments

University of Rhode Island Professor Erik Loomis

An assistant history professor whose angry Twitter rants against the National Rifle Association caused an online controvery this week “does not speak on behalf of the University [of Rhode Island],” the institution’s president declared yesterday.

Erik Loomis, a progressive blogger who teaches history at URI, was widely criticized for messages he posted on his Twitter social-networking account, calling the NRA a “terrorist organization” and saying he wanted the gun-right group’s CEO’s “head on a stick.” Loomis’s obscenity-laced tirade, inspired by last week’s school shooting in Connecticut, was highlighted by the non-profit group Campus Reform.

“The University of Rhode Island does not condone acts or threats of violence,” university president Dr. David M. Dooley wrote in a message sent yesterday. “These remarks do not reflect the views of the institution and Erik Loomis does not speak on behalf of the University. The University is committed to fostering a safe, inclusive and equitable culture that aspires to promote positive change.”

Dooley’s repudiation of Loomis’s comments came in the wake of widespread attention from conservative bloggers to a series of Twitter messages the professor sent Friday after a mentally ill man killed 20 children and seven adults in Connecticut before committing suicide.

“Loomis not only blamed [the NRA’s Wayne] LaPierre for the shooting in Newtown, Conn., but Republicans everywhere,” Laura Byrne of Red Alert Politics wrote. “[Loomis] proceeded to send multiple tweets dropping the F-bomb directed at the GOP, LaPierre and the NRA . . . Loomis advocated immediately politicizing this heart-breaking tragedy in another vulgar tweet containing the f-word.”

After Campus Reform’s Oliver Darcy reported Monday on the professor’s online rant, Loomis mocked Darcy as a “David Horowitz wannabe,” a reference to the former 1960s New Left radical who has become a prominent conservative intellectual and frequent critic of academic leftism. Loomis ridiculed his critics as “right-wing morons” who were too stupid to understand his comments as a “metaphor.”

Darcy’s report on Loomis’s comments quickly attracted notice from leading bloggers, including University of Tennessee Law Professor Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds and Cornell University Law Professor William Jacobson’s Legal Insurrection site, as well as American Thinker and others collected by the blog-aggregation site Memeorandum. Yet Loomis continued to treat the controversy as a joke, writing a sarcastic post at a liberal blog with the title, “Fame, I Wanna Live Forever,” remarking that “metaphor is really, really hard for conservatives to understand.”

However, as Loomis acknowledged, complaints about his violent rhetoric drew attention from Rhode Island State Police and required him to attend a meeting with a university dean. And his mocking attitude toward the controversy ended Tuesday after Michelle Malkin’s Twitchy site pointed out that Loomis had re-Tweeted an especially obnoxious message: “First f–ker to say the solution is for elementary school teachers to carry guns needs to get beaten to death.”

Twitchy also noted that in 2011, Loomis had condemned former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s use of “violent rhetoric.” Tuesday afternoon, Loomis deleted his Twitter account, and the University of Rhode Island president issued his statement — addressed to the “university community” — repudiating the professor’s messages.

After his remarks first provoked a public backlash this week, Loomis had claimed he was the victim of “right-wing intimidation.” Tuesday night, in a blog post that continued this theme, Professor Loomis was still attempting to shift responsibility for the controversy onto his critics: “I am too tired to post anything coherently. With the death threats, it’s been a bit crazy. I can assure all of you that I will not be intimidated.”

 

 

UPDATE: Professor Donald Douglas writes that, before Loomis deleted his Twitter account, it “was practically flooded with blood from all the violent tweets and retweets he’d been sending out. It looked literally as if he’d blown a gasket, losing complete control of his faculties. At that point it became no longer a free speech issue but a public safety issue.”

Indeed, Loomis seemed to be emotionally unbalanced.

UPDATE II: Erika Niedowski of the Associated Press writes a news article about dishonest one-sided whitewash of Professor Loomis’s demented and offensive comments. It is genuinely scandalous that Loomis is employed at taxpayer expense, but the AP evidently doesn’t want anyone to know what this deranged academic actually said.



 

UPDATE III: Michael Graham is “not a super-smart campus liberal like Erik Loomis” (and there is no lifetime tenure for talk-radio hosts).

Also, Easily Annoyed Law Blogger Is Easily Annoyed.

PREVIOUSLY:


Category: Education, Rhode Island

LIVE AT FIVE: 12.19.12

Posted on | December 19, 2012 | 7 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
Inquiry Slams State Department Over Benghazi

The U.S. Consulate in Benghazi in flames

Panel sharply critical of failures at Foggy Bottom


Boehner Unveils Plan B As Fiscal Cliff Deadline Looms
Can Speaker sell millionaire tax hike to his own caucus?


Zuma Wins ANC Leadership Election By Overwhelming Margin
2983-991; vote secures Zuma’s position until 2019



POLITICS
Obama Backs Assault Weapon Ban

President comes out for incoherency as a domestic policy

Will support Feinstein’s attempt to reintroduce 1994 “assault weapon” ban

NRA Promises “Meaningful Contributions” To Prevent Another Newtown

Senator Leahy Sworn In As President Pro tempore

Lhota Quitting: Mayor Race Next Stop For MTA Boss

Hagel’s Comments On Israel Scrutinized

California Releases Draft Hydraulic Fracturing Regulations

Montana Supreme Court Denies Gay Couple’s Suit For Benefits

State Lawmakers Propose Steps To Control Guns



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Crude Prices Rise On Hopes For Budget Deal: NYMEX $87.51, Brent $108.24
UBS Agrees To $1.5 Billion In Fines Over LIBOR Rigging
Housing Market Builds (Some) Momentum
Mark Zuckerberg Donates $500 Million To Charity
Oracle Earnings Top Expectations, Shares Jump
Nielsen Agrees To Buy Arbitron For $1.26 Billion
National Geographic Turns Off Instagram Over New Terms
FTC’s Google Inquiry To Continue
Samsung Withdraws EU Suit Against Apple
Facebook About To Get Even More Annoying
Santa Ditches Google For Microsoft
Yahoo To End Music Service In China
Microsoft Urges Orphaned GMail Active Sync Users To Jump To Outlook.com



SPORTS
Gasol Returns As Lakers Survive Bobcats

Pau Gasol

Lakers actually win one, 101-100; Bobcats’ skid reaches 12


Jazz Survive Late Gaffe, Escape With Win Over Nyets


Will A’s Import Nakajima Pan Out In The Majors?

Despite Nine-Game Win Streak, Peyton Manning Says He’s Not Back Yet

Joakim Noah Notches Triple-Double As Celtics Get Buried In Chicago

Mets Hope D’Arnaud Will Be The Difference They Need Behind The Plate

How The Nationals Shaped The Market For Adam LaRoche



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Kate Upton Stripped For Antarctic Action!

Kate Upton Does Antarctica

A bikini in 35-below weather? Hardcore!

“Game Of Thrones” Gets Super-Sized Season Three

Ke$ha’s “Die Young” Plummets Down Charts After Newtown Massacre

Rihanna Buys $12 Million House In Pacific Palisades

“Gossip Girl” Revealed In Series Finale


TV Episodes, Movie Premieres Postponed After School Shooting; Tarantino Defends Movie Violence

Katie Holmes Celebrates Her 34th Birthday With Suri

Lindsay Lohan: I’m Too Broke To See A Shrink!

Clay Aiken Says “American Idol” Now All About The Judges

Beauty’s Ugly Loss To Trump



FOREIGNERS
Outrage Erupts In India Over Gang Rape On Bus; Angry Protests In New Delhi
Huge Turnout In ROK Presidential Election
Japan, PRC Set Course For Confrontation
Russia Sends Warships To Syria For Possible Evacuation
Gunmen Target Pakistan Polio Workers Again
Hugo Chavez Stable After Respiratory Infection
Iraqi President Talabani Suffers Stroke
Ireland To Legalize Abortion
Ahmadinejad Cancels Visit To Turkey



BLOGS & STUFF
Michelle Malkin: Letter From a Young Video Gamer/Designer
American Thinker: NY Post – Second Amendment Is “Obsolete”
John McCormack: Does Harry Reid Still Oppose The “So-Called Assault Weapons Ban”?
Power Line: Sandy Hook – The Corrections Begin
WTOP: Governor McDonnell Says It’s Time To Discuss Arming School Officials
Weasel Zippers: Unions Take Credit For Gov. Snyder’s Veto Of Concealed Carry In Schools
Ramesh Ponnuru: Cass Sunstein And The Second Amendment
The Lid: State Department Report On Benghazi Issued – Embedded Here
NY Post: Hillary Clinton’s Head Fake
JustOneMinute: More Fun With Numbers At The Times
Volokh Conspiracy: Why Bans On So-Called “Assault Weapons” Won’t Diminish Mass Shooting Deaths
Israel Matzav: Senate Republicans To Oppose Hagel?
Moe Lane: Is Chuck Hagel A Stalking Horse For Michelle Flournoy At Defense?
NRO Corner: Roadblocks For Hagel
Jawa Report: “Fast And Furious” Gun Found At Site Where Mexican Beauty Queen Died
Lonely Conservative: SWATter Of Justin Bieber, Ashton Kutcher Arrested
Gateway Pundit: Ben Affleck May Run For John Kerry’s Senate Seat
Doug Powers: Boehner Suggests Tax Plan Originally Suggested By Pelosi; “Not A Serious Proposal”, Says…Pelosi
EAG News: Professor Blames Mass Shootings On “White Male Privilege”

Category: Live at Five

He’s a Lumberjack, and He’s OK: The Wobbly Scholarship of Erik Loomis, Ph.D.

Posted on | December 18, 2012 | 47 Comments

(Note: University of Rhode Island Assistant Professor of History Erik Loomis has recently established himself as a famous laughingstock of online political argument, using the excuse “metaphor” to claim that it’s OK to say that the National Rifle Association is a “terrorist organization” and that he wants NRA chief Wayne LaPierre’s “head on a stick,” prior to deleting his Twitter account. This inspired curiosity as to Professor Loomis’s academic qualifications. — RSM)

By “Badger Pundit“
Having recently delved a bit into Erik Loomis’s apparent craving for attention.  I thought I’d delve a bit into his scholarship in response to R.S. McCain’s tweet wondering what Loomis wrote about for his history Ph.D dissertation. McCain suggested the dissertation might be on “Historical Uses of Violent Obscene Language in Political Discourse.” I suppose he meant that in jest, but what I found was actually weirder. Loomis earned his Ph.D (with distinction!; C.V. here) writing about (in part) homosexual lumberjacks and castrated Marxists in the early 1900s (well, okay, only one castrated Marxist).

An abstract of Loomis’s 2008 dissertation, “The Battle for the Body:  Work and Environment in the Pacific Northwest Lumber Industry, 1800-1940,” is available here.

I downloaded the full dissertation and skimmed through it. I don’t recommend that you follow suit, unless — perhaps — you’re intrigued by homosexual lumberjacks, the lynching and castration of Marxists, and/or Marxist labor organizing generally.  And even then, it’s a dull, plodding read. (By contrast, I have to give Loomis credit for cranking out interesting tweets; too bad he recently deleted his Twitter account, so that all we can look forward to is the chance to peruse the archive of his past tweets, still available on Topsy.com.)

The dissertation’s basic story is pretty much what you’d expect of your typical leftist historian at an American university.  During the first century or so of trees being felled in the Northwest after the white man first arrived in force, the greedy capitalists raped the land and killed the gentle forest creatures, despite the best efforts of the ordinary, salt-of-the-earth lumberjacks who wanted to preserve the environment and save the animals. Plus, they wanted better pay and working conditions, of course.

Marxist unionists (with the Industrial Workers of the World, “I.W.W.”) seized on the situation early in the 1910s and sought to unionize the lumberjacks.  Their efforts were bearing fruit, but then World War I intervened. The government had an urgent need for spruce wood for its airplanes, so in an E – V – I – L conspiracy, it:  (1) forced the timber companies to give the lumberjacks basically everything they wanted, in terms of pay and working conditions; (2) forced the lumberjacks to join a government-established union; and (3) forced the lumberjacks to reject the Marxist unionists, and their I.W.W. But, the government did nothing to help save the earth or help the animals — all it cared about was winning the war by preventing disruption of spruce wood production!

The Marxist unionists weren’t happy with this, so as soon as the war was over, in the small town of Centralia, Washington, the Marxists staged an ambush of American Legion members who opposed them, using two snipers hidden in the hills — killing four of the Legionnaires (including two war heroes).  The town folk weren’t happy with this, so they lynched one of the Marxists and prosecuted the rest, getting them sentenced to long prison terms.  Thus died the chance for the Marxists to unionize the lumberjacks and thereby improve their pay and working conditions and save the environment and animals.  Eventually, in the mid-1930s, the AFL-CIO unionized the lumberjacks, but by that point environmental conditions in the forests weren’t a pressing issue; all the AFL-CIO focused on was pay and working conditions.  The bottom line is that despite the lumberjacks’ long-held wish to help save the earth and the peaceful forest creatures, they never got the union backing they needed to effectively advance this agenda against the greedy capitalists (and the E – V – I – L government forces).

In general, pretty much a waste of paper and computer storage space, though probably not the worst liberal claptrap ever produced by an American history Ph.D candidate.  However, three parts of Loomis’s dissertation caught my attention, because they suggest that weird, sometimes violence-supportive, ideas are hardly new to Loomis (in other words, it seems he exhibited a weird streak in his writing even before Twitter; Twitter just gave him a more visible outlet).

1. For some reason, Loomis can’t resist talking about early 20th century homosexual lumberjacks, and the anal sex they preferred (over oral sex).  I mean, after reading pages 155-56 I immediately thought of the Monty Python “Lumberjack Song” (video here; lyrics here).  And I felt I needed a shower, too. Here’s the key excerpt (bottom of p. 155 and top of p. 156) (citations omitted):

“The Wobblies [Marxist unionists] claimed that workers spread these diseases [syphilis and other STDs] to one another through men using contaminated blankets, but homosexuality in the camps seems a more likely explanation, though neither union or lumber industry publications ever discussed this.
Historian Peter Boag discusses in great detail the history of homosexual men in the Pacific Northwest of the early twentieth century.  Boag shows us that working-class men, including loggers, looked to find a partner that could cut through their loneliness and misery, share sex, and provide companionship as they moved around the West.  Usually these relationships consisted of an older man and a younger man where the older man generally dominated and took care of the younger.  Boag asserts that these men generally preferred anal sex, as opposed to the oral sex often practiced by the middle-class gay subculture thriving in the Northwest’s cities.  Given that males dominated the population of the Northwest throughout its industrial expansion after 1890 it is not surprising that so many loggers made partners of other men.

2. For some reason Loomis can’t resist spending three pages (pp. 191-93) discussing whether or not the town folk of Centralia castrated the Marxist who was involved in the ambush before they lynched him.  I guess this is one of Loomis’s few opportunities to talk about “genderized” discourse. Here are the key excerpts from that discussion:

“[N]o one could match Wesley Everest’s manhood. The Wobblies defended Everest’s manhood with intense vigor because they wanted to make him a martyr but also because they believed the mob had castrated him before killing him thus stripping him of the ultimate symbol of his manhood.”
* * *
“Wesley Everest’s alleged castration raises ideas about gendered bodies.  Whether Everest’s murderers actually castrated him is in doubt.  But soon the legend sprung up that the mob had castrated Everest, a notion promulgated by John Dos Passos in his novel, 1919.   . . .  [T]he Wobblies used the idea of castration, the ultimate demanning of the body, to further their agenda about manhood, the body, and the environment. For the I.W.W., Everest’s testicles held the core of working-class manhood.

3. In his discussion of the Marxists’ deadly ambush of the American Legion members in Centralia (pp. 195-200), one gets the strong sense that Loomis is rooting for the Marxist assassins (perhaps no surprise, given recent developments).  I didn’t notice any criticism of the Marxists for staging the ambush, but I did notice Loomis going into some detail about why the Marxists felt their ambush justified. Further, Loomis portrays the overwhelming contemporary newspaper opinion against the Marxists as perhaps indicative of xenophobia, and as reflecting the public’s view that Marxist unionists weren’t patriotic (because, Loomis to his credit notes, of the minor detail that they had been against the U.S. winning the war).   Loomis implies that the effort of the Legionnaires “to get their side of the story out” (p. 198) was some sort of propaganda effort even though it mostly involved pointing out that the two Marxists who hid in the hills as snipers, so they could kill the four Legionnaires, didn’t face the Legionnaires “straight on.” (P. 199).

I can’t say I enjoyed reading Loomis’s dissertation, which struck me as basically aimless and uninteresting, and contributing little if anything to the study of U.S. history. ( I fear for our current generation of students if Loomis is typical of modern professors.).  But I did think it worthwhile to take a look at the dissertation, and write this up, for the perspective it may supply in evaluating Loomis’s recent activities.  Thanks to R.S. McCain for suggesting an inquiry into Loomis’s dissertation.

Category: Education

Herbert Marcuse, Wile E. Coyote and the Auto-Beclownment of Erik Loomis, Ph.D.

Posted on | December 18, 2012 | 22 Comments

The epic saga of University of Rhode Island Assistant Professor of History Erik Loomis shall live long in blogospheric lore. Twitchy is taking a victory lap over the professor’s unfortunate metaphorical seppuku: He had to delete his Twitter account, but not before Tweeting this:

“I love teaching books on the history of sexuality. I talked about dildos in a completely appropriate way in class today.”

Yeah: The taxpayers of Rhode Island (and the parents of university students) are paying Erik Loomis to teach kids the history of dildos.

Do you need a Ph.D. to do that? Where do you get a doctoral degree in Historical Dildology? Are there federal research grants available?

Humor aside, Instapundit exposes Loomis’s pretzel logic:

The anti-NRA syllogism seems to work this way: (1) Something bad happened; (2) I hate you; so (3) It’s your fault.

This is how people “think” when the object is not to find truth, but to justify their own prejudices. This is the dangerous logic of scapegoating. The characteristic viciousness of the Left stems from a radical certainty of their own moral and intellectual superiority and, by the obverse, the inferiority of the Right:

These destructive tactics are the radical offspring of what Frankfurt School intellectual Herbert Marcuse advocated in his notorious 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance”:

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.

Elsewhere in the same essay, Marcuse denounces “pure” or “non-partisan” tolerance, which he describes as the “active, official tolerance granted to the Right as well as to the Left, to movements of aggression as well as to movements of peace, to the party of hate as well as to that of humanity.”

When you think of yourself (as Loomis most surely does) as an apostolic soldier in the Righteous Army of Peace and Humanity, doing battle against the forces of Hate, there is no such thing as “fairness,” nor any rule of conduct that can limit your action. This mentality is expressed in the radical slogan, “By Any Means Necessary.”

This necessarily involves the de-humanization of one’s antagonists, a degradation of moral standards — excusing dishonesty and malicious action, so long as it is done on behalf of the Sacred Progressive Cause — and inevitably results in thuggery on behalf of “social justice,” a movement whose actions exemplify the very opposite qualities of “peace and humanity” that progressives claims to be pursuing.

This was how the idealists of the 1960s ended up, in the 1970s, being apologists for the bloody reign of Pol Pot in Cambodia, and supporting domestic terrorists like Bill Ayers and Kathy Boudin.

Without any real moral principles, judging everything only by its political expediency, they exempt themselves from judgment, even while harshly judging the demonized Other whom they target with transparently invalid smears. The Wheelerization of Steven Crowder was one recent example of this, as is the “argument” offered by Scott Slemmons, a commenter at Erik Loomis’s blog:

Maybe if you Malkinites weren’t such anti-America McVeigh-fanboys, people wouldn’t hate you so much.

Notice the ridiculous name-calling — “Malkinites”? — and the attempt to do a guilt-by-association between (a) critics of Loomis and (b) 1990s terrorist Timothy McVeigh.

Question: When did Michelle Malkin ever endorse the 1995 Oklahama City bombing, or anything like it? The standards of acceptable discourse among Loomis’s admirers are no standards at all. You will perhaps not be surprised to learn that Scott Slemmons is a comic book blogger.

Who could possibly admire someone like Erik Loomis, Ph.D? Who could consider him an acceptable teacher of impressionable youth? His anger issues mark him as an intemperate person with a near-infinite capacity for making a fool of himself, yet see his university duties:

Courses Taught:

  • HIS 141 – History of the United States to 1877
  • HIS 339 – Emergence of Industrial America, 1877-1914
  • HIS 364 – U.S. Environmental History
  • HIS 365 – Civil War and Reconstruction
  • HIS 441 – Topics in U.S. History (U.S. West)
  • HIS 495 – Senior Seminar

This amoral monster is entrusted with instructing student from their freshmen to their senior year. Why was the second-rate intellect hired? Here’s a significant hint:

Flashback: Erik Loomis criticized
Sarah Palin for ‘violent rhetoric’

Hating Republicans is the ultimate resumé-enhancer in academia. Any dimwit can advance if he has the “correct” political views.

UPDATE: He’s a Lumberjack, and He’s OK: The Wobbly Scholarship of Erik Loomis, Ph.D. — Guest Post by Badger Pundit.

 

Category: Education

Why the Creepy Little Weirdo Did It

Posted on | December 18, 2012 | 27 Comments

We now have the first clear suggestion of a motive:

NEWTOWN, Conn. –  The gunman who slaughtered 20 children and six adults at a Connecticut elementary school may have snapped  because his mother was planning to commit him to a psychiatric facility . . .
[The creepy little weirdo], targeted Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown after killing  his mother early Friday because he believed she loved the school “more than she  loved him,” said Joshua Flashman, 25 . . .
“From what I’ve been told, [the creepy little weirdo] was aware of her petitioning the court for  conservatorship and (her) plans to have him committed,” Flashman told  FoxNews.com. “[The creepy little weirdo] was apparently very upset about this. He thought she just  wanted to send him away. From what I understand, he was really, really angry. I  think this could have been it, what set him off.”
A senior law enforcement official involved in the investigation confirmed  that [the creepy little weirdo’s] anger at his mother over plans for “his future mental health treatment” is being looked at as a possible motive for the deadly shooting.

News organizations keep trying to bestow post-massacre fame on the creepy little weirdo. I’ve decided to stop cooperating with that agenda.

Category: California, Crime

Is It ‘Metaphor’ to Suggest Erik Loomis Should Be Sodomized by Orangutangs? UPDATE: Is Professor ‘Head on a Stick’ Now Under State Police Protection?

Posted on | December 18, 2012 | 46 Comments

Who knows? Maybe he’d enjoy it. At any rate, University of Rhode Island Assistant Professor of History Erik Loomis seems to consider colorful language acceptable in political discourse, so that it’s OK to say that the National Rifle Association is a “terrorist organization” and that he wants NRA chief Wayne LaPierre’s “head on a stick,” among other thought-provoking figures of speech:

A professor of history turned to Twitter over the weekend to call for the death of National Rifle Association (NRA) CEO Wayne LaPierre, branding the gun rights group he heads as a terrorist organization.
A professor used twitter over the weekend to call for the death of the NRA’s CEO.
“[I] want Wayne LaPierre’s head on a stick,” Erik Loomis, a professor at the University of Rhode Island (URI), tweeted.
It “looks like the National Rifle Association has murdered some more children,” he added.”
Can [we] define NRA membership as dues contributing to a terrorist organization?” he  asked in a separate tweet.
Loomis’ comments come on the heels of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, which left 20 young children and six faculty members dead.
The professor contended Democratic lawmakers should exploit the tragedy to force more restrictive gun control measures into law.
“You are goddamn right we should politicize this tragedy,” Loomis tweeted. “[F]uck the NRA.”
“Dear Republicans, do you know the definition of family values?” he continued. “It’s not having our kids FUCKING SHOT AT SCHOOL! Fuck the NRA.” …

See, the problem here is not that Erik Loomis is on Twitter. The problem is that you’re too stupid to understand academic literature:

Dear right-wing morons, saying you “want someone’s head on a stick” is a metaphor. I know metaphor is hard for you to understand.

Dear rightwingers, to be clear, I don’t want to see Wayne LaPierre dead. I want to see him in prison for the rest of his life. #nraterrorism

Erik Loomis deleted that Tweet already, and also deleted a Tweet in which he claimed to be the victim of a “right-wing intimidation campaign.” He apparently deleted his entire Twitter account. Because he’s a Ph.D., and you’re too stupid understand what a “metaphor” is.

UPDATE: Before he deleted his Twitter account, University of Rhode Island Assistant Professor of History Erik Loomis re-Tweeted this message from another blogger:

First fucker to say the solution is for elementary school teachers to carry guns needs to get beaten to death.

So we can add “needs to get beaten to death” to the repertoire of progressive metaphors that are approved by University of Rhode Island Assistant Professor of History Erik Loomis. However, if you criticize University of Rhode Island Assistant Professor of History Erik Loomis with such colorful metaphors, he might call the cops:

Being attacked by a David Horowitz wannabe for saying I wanted to see Wayne LaPierre’s head on a stick has led to a world of fun, ranging from a meeting with the Rhode Island State Police last night to people inundating the University of Rhode Island community with warnings of their murderous colleague in their midst.

What kind of insult metaphor does he mean by “David Horowitz wannabe,” and to whom does this phrase refer?

UPDATE II: It appears from comments at University of Rhode Island Assistant Professor of History Erik Loomis’s blog that his “meeting with the Rhode Island State Police last night” was perhaps not because he called the cops, but that someone call the cops on him.

Perhaps they were worried the professor might commit seppuku.

Metaphorically, of course.

Category: Education, Rhode Island
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