Noteworthy entries.

Mount Allison University Suspends Tenured Professor for Disagreeing With Woke Narrative on her Personal Blog

What are the horrible things that tenured Professor Rima Azar stated on her personal blog?

When a local activist named Husoni Raymond opined that New Brunswick is “systemically racist,” Azar applied her comparative understanding of Lebanon and Canada to argue that, in relative terms, her adopted home isn’t racist at all, but is rather “a young country” that “wants to save the world.” (As evidence, she pointed to the fact that Raymond himself had been lavishly honoured for his anti-racism work, which is hardly consistent with white supremacism.) In a similar vein, she has argued down activists who claim Canada is a “patriarchy” afflicted by rape culture. If you want to see “real rape culture,” she’s noted archly, take a look at “ISIS practices in Syria.” Azar also has called Black Lives Matter a “radical” movement, which is an unfashionable thing to say, but isn’t remotely inaccurate given BLM’s stated goals of creating a “global liberation movement” that will “dismantle capitalism,” abolish prisons, and erase national borders.

Who is Professor Azar?  Jonathan Kay describes her in a March 2, 2021 post at National Post:

When Azar eventually immigrated to Canada, she developed expertise in helping parents who face complex child-care needs, and has gone on to found or supervise numerous acclaimed support programs in New Brunswick. In her personal life, Azar is a foster parent, a polyglot (Arabic is her mother tongue), and a blogger who writes passionately about classical liberal values and Lebanon’s ongoing challenges. She’s also a proud Canadian — writing that the Maple Leaf “means the world to me,” even while still being “moved” by the sight of a Lebanese flag. If you know of a more intersectional Canadian, I’d like to meet them.

Professor Azar has now been suspended by her University. Because she dares to express her own thoughts, she will also be required to take equity, diversity and inclusion training. On her blog she mentions that she has set up a GoFundMe account to pay for her legal defense. She states:

 I now have been suspended from my job without pay, based on false allegations. We are in a pandemic and times are tough on all. This is why your support means the world to me. I am so grateful for my union’s continuous support in dealing with Mount Allison University. However, the reputational damage already done (defamation, attack to my character) has implications beyond my employer and workplace. I will use the funds raised to cover my personal legal defence fund. I love my students, job, colleagues, university, province, and beautiful country beyond words. My story is beyond academic freedom. I precisely chose to move to Canada for democracy/freedom of expression.  Why are we doing this to ourselves?

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John McWhorter Discusses Anti-Racism with Bill Maher

Linguistics Professor John McWhorter sat down with Bill Maher on a recent episode of Real Time to discuss "anti-racism." McWhorter describes himself as someone who is hearing things that don't make sense and his quest is to try to obsessively make sense of things like "anti-racism."  The interview was as intense as it was fast-moving. Several take-aways:

A) "Anti-racism" condescends to people who identify as "black," infantilizing them.

B) There is a great diversity of thought among those who identify as black, almost two-thirds of whom are middle class (or even higher earning), the majority of whom do not live in ongoing fear of being harassed or shot by the police,

C) None of this is to suggest that there isn't still racism, which needs to be addressed.

D) Wokeness is a religion where "whiteness" functions as "original sin" that afflicts even babies, a religion where Robin DiAngelo's misguided book, White Fragility is mistakenly being treated as "research" instead of second-rate literature that advocates for victimization;

E) People pretend to "atone" for "white privilege" by posting on FB that they are "doing the work." This solves nothing.

F) White Fragility is not representative of "the general black view of things."

G) There is no one "black view" of things - Also, "'Yes we can't'" has never been the slogan for black America and it's not now."

H) In the religion of Wokeness, advocates pretend that "racism has never been worse" than today, even in the 1960's and even during the 1850's. These are palpable untruths to any person who knows even a tiny bit of history. "Why is it un-black to address degree?"

I) It is childish for anyone to shut down opposing views to protect themselves from never being told that they are wrong. This "cathartic" approach will never change anything. We need meaningful engagement.

J) Social media has everyone "peeing in their pants," afraid to defer even minimally from Woke orthodoxy, which is making "mendacity" ubiquitous.

K) The fear of being honest and the fear to even tell a joke is "becoming almost everywhere. The only exceptions are people who are "weird like us and you don't mind being hated. But most people are not going to have that disease, and so we are stuck where we are."

If you'd like to follow John McWhorter, you can find him on his own Substack Website, It Bears Mentioning.   Also, McWhorter often joins Glenn Loury for conversation at The Glenn Show on Patreon. 

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A Non-Carpenter Looks Closely at Carpentry

My deck boards kept rotting through, so I decided to switch to "no maintenance" composite decking, which comes with a 25 year guarantee. I fix a lot of things at my house, but I suspected that the joists were rotted out and that work is over my head. Luckily, my favorite carpenter, "Matt," had a couple days open. He allowed me to be his carpenter's helper for 12 hours yesterday.

It's amazing to watch a professional carpenter solve challenge after challenge, many of them not obvious to non-carpenters until pointed out. This was notably imperfect existing construction that needed to be torn out. I helped to cut material, make runs to the hardware store, and carry around a lot of material, including 60 lb joists. I was mesmerized by Matt's physical stamina and his thought process as much as his skills in fitting things together into a rock solid new deck and perfect new set of stairs. Even setting up requires unloading and moving probably 700 pounds of equipment off the truck. It also involves significant planning, because getting the job done uses up lots of supplies, including blades and bits. He needs to stock an entire workshop on his truck, including backup tools.

I got back to my routine today, but Matt does this every day. His job requires skills honed over a lifetime and constant physical exertion where mistakes can be expensive and sometimes dangerous. So kudos to those of you who do physically demanding high-skill work. These are people (including carpenters, plumbers, electricians, auto mechanics and many others) with a central role in keeping this country running. Maybe it's time to set aside a day in their honor . . .

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The High Cost of Breaking a Story that Changes the World

Matt Taibbi describes enormous price Glenn Greenwald is willing to pay to get the big story out. Taibbi's article is titled: "Why "Securing Democracy" Will Be Taught in Journalism Schools." Here is an excerpt:

Lastly: for all the quasi-psychiatric analyses of Greenwald in places like The New Yorker or New York magazine, none of them seem to grasp that being willing to be the object of intense public loathing is now a pre-condition of most serious investigative reporting.

The costs of publishing something really damaging were always high — think of the way the business turned on Sy Hersh after he published the “Family Jewels” story about the CIA in 1975 — but in the digital age, full-scale character assassination is usually just a beginning. The Car Wash story prompted the spreading of a wild forgery purporting to show a secret bitcoin payment by Greenwald to a Russian hacker for the archive. This turned into Bolsonaro’s son Flavio publicly insisting that “Glenn Greenwald may have paid a Russian hacker to invade the cell phones of Brazilian authorities,” followed by accusations of pedophilic predation, followed by Bolsonaro himself speculating that Glenn might need to “spend some time in the slammer here in Brazil.”

America’s social media smear artists can be proud that they share many thematic ideas with the Brazilian fascist. Bolsonaro is too dense to know the word “grooming,” but he insinuated that Greenwald and Miranda were “tricksters” who “adopted boys” to abuse them. Greenwald and Miranda’s lesson: “It is impossible to anticipate all the threats that you will face when confronting powerful governments.”

Even after all this, Greenwald could regularly be seen arguing the story’s merits with every after-midnight three-follower egg on Twitter, which drives some people crazy but is probably a big part of why the hacker-source picked him in the first place. Most whistleblowers are in jams, thrust into impossible situations that have cost them jobs, friends, even their families sometimes. They need someone willing to join them on the hated list, and in the Internet age, the number of such people is small.

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Ben Fainer’s Bracelet

Ben Fainer inspired me. With his wonderful Irish-Polish accent, he consistently spoke of the need to love and forgive others, despite the horrors he had been through. This included long perilous years during the holocaust, including time at the concentration camp at Buchenwald.  I was so glad Ben allowed me to tell his story. He sat patiently in his living room as I asked him lots of questions. I just noticed today that my video interview of Ben has now been viewed by almost 100,000 people.

And now, Ben's daughter Sharon Berry has a new story. It has been determined that while in captivity, Ben created a metal bracelet that was recently discovered on the grounds of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Apparently my video helped to make this determination. I invite you to "meet" Ben by watching his video, which I filmed in his living room in 2012, a few years before he died. For more about Ben's bracelet, see also this article from today's edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 

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