NYT Video -- Four Profs Going to Canada

Ooops! It's [italic]three[/italic] profs.

I'm really not awake yet.

Thanks for that link. I heard Timothy Snyder was leaving and being vaguely aware (sorry) of his writing, I thought Oh boy, it’s really getting serious now if he’s afraid for his life. Turns out it’s his wife who wanted to leave (can’t blame her) and she got a position at a Canadian university and he was able to join her. Note, he’s “on leave” from Yale, he didn’t quit. So I’ll go back to whistling in the wind.

The very best thing that could happen to this country is a bullet in Trump's head.

Buh bye! No one gives a fuck.

I agree, but then he'd become a martyr

The only thing the communists ever did that I agreed with was eradicating the intelligentsia. They are useless, real parasites. Of course, these three are oblivious to the fact that they helped create Trump and how they did so.

[quote]The very best thing that could happen to this country is a bullet in Trump's head

Seems fair given that he killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.

[quote] The only thing the communists ever did that I agreed with was eradicating the intelligentsia.

Then you should be fine. You will never be confused for one of them. A right wing troglodyte, maybe, but certainly not an intellectual.

glad that I blocked that asshole already

R5 You know, I used to think that, (back in 2016-7 when I suspected it would be as bad as it's been).

Now, I have two frames of mind:

1) So what?

2) I know it's a fantasy, but his demise might be like the Wicked Witch of the West. Once he's gone, the spell will be broken, the mental illness will pass, and the cultists will come back to real life.

All options must be pursued. However, make this a 1 way move.

Yall bailed on us when we need fighters.

We still have the make-up of the SC, r10.

Byee.

The British academic philosopher Kathleen Stock, who resigned from her position at the University of Sussex in 2021 and is known for her so-called "gender-critical" views, has her own cynical take on this:

[quote]Vaguely reminiscent of Captain Von Trapp eyeing up the Alps and about to launch into Edelweiss, he declares: “Things are very bad in this country. It’s an authoritarian regime…we are leaving for our kids primarily so they can grow up under conditions of freedom. I would love to live in the United States, but I want to live in the United States because it’s a place that is free.” Still, readers must understand that what Stanley is absolutely not doing is “moralizing or lecturing”: “that’s not my thing. I’m an intellectual. What I do is I describe reality as I see it.”

The invasion of America’s cringe academics

We don’t want their cowardly cosplayers

Many of us born post-1945 have wondered at some point how we might deal with an approaching fascist threat. Luckily, we have three preeminent American scholars of fascism to help advise us. And the answer from Professors Jason Stanley, Timothy Snyder, and Marcia Shore seems to be: run away.

Stanley, the philosopher-author of How Fascism Works, says he is leaving the States for Canada because of the oppressive political climate. Historian Shore, who writes about totalitarianism and is married to fellow historian Snyder of On Tyranny fame, pronounces herself “heartbroken at what has happened to my own country”. All three were at Yale, and soon will be at the University of Toronto; safely away from Trump’s targeting of DEI policies, and the recent slashing and burning of university funding. His rationale, insofar as anyone can discern it, is combatting antisemitism on campus, though what the exact connection is supposed to be is not entirely clear.

Stanley — mostly known on the internet for saying his former job title out loud — has been trying to get the word out in underground samizdat publications such as the Guardian and Vanity Fair. Interviewed in the latter, he likens the Trump regime to Nazi Germany four times. Vaguely reminiscent of Captain Von Trapp eyeing up the Alps and about to launch into Edelweiss, he declares: “Things are very bad in this country. It’s an authoritarian regime…we are leaving for our kids primarily so they can grow up under conditions of freedom. I would love to live in the United States, but I want to live in the United States because it’s a place that is free.” Still, readers must understand that what Stanley is absolutely not doing is “moralizing or lecturing”: “that’s not my thing. I’m an intellectual. What I do is I describe reality as I see it.”

In some ways, this is just true to modern liberal form, whether on Left or Right. If something displeases you about the culture that surrounds you, opt out; then dramatically overplay the horror of the thing you disliked, in some kind of psychological compensation for incipient shame. See also: moving to a nice suburb because London is “just so dangerous” these days, but without specifying where it is dangerous, exactly, or for whom; or self-consciously embracing a nonbinary identity in order to reject oppressive gender norms à la Judith Butler (“I am enjoying the world of “they”, she declares, like a Victorian surveying a new vista on a Grand Tour). But a problem for the Left here is that they are officially supposed to value solidarity with the oppressed. The more you talk up how horrific something is, the more you look like a coward for leaving other poor sods to it.

Weary as many of us are of self-aggrandising cosplay, still, the response to Trump’s bizarre university policies is truly something to behold. It is perhaps predictable that Stanley would react as he has done, not being previously well-known among colleagues for keeping a cool head. But at least he and his fellow would-be refugees are directly affected, or know people who are. What is even more over the top is the response of European onlookers, sympathetically channelling US histrionics at a distance.

You're linking to taht right wing libertarian shitrag, R14? Don't you have Jacob Rees-Mogg's dick to suck?

I'm a Dutch guy living in Ireland, R15. I don't suck British dick, least of all British Tory dick.

Yes, I sometimes read UnHerd, and I also happen to subscribe to The London Review of Books, The New Statesman, The New York Review of Books, GRANTA, Jacobin, Les Inrocks, de Groene Amsterdammer, and so on. UnHerd is not quite the publication you think it is--it shares some writers with a center-left publication like The New Statesman, including Wolfgang Münchau, Lee Siegel, and Yanis Varoufakis.

[quote]UnHerd was launched in 2017 ‘to challenge herd mentality wherever we see it’. At first the website read like a more sedate version of the Telegraph’s opinion pages and struggled to make an impact. But since 2019, when ConservativeHome founder Tim Montgomerie was replaced as editor and Freddie Sayers joined as executive editor (he is now editor-in-chief and CEO, as well as publisher of the Spectator), it has become harder to pigeonhole. If anything defines UnHerd, it’s a general disquiet with modernity and a political sensibility broadly in line with Blue Labour’s blend of cultural conservatism and scepticism about neoliberalism. The website shares its proprietor’s hostility to the ‘woke’ – cancel culture in universities is a recurring theme – but is hardly a straight reflection of Marshall’s worldview. Sayers has said that it doesn’t have ‘a political ideology. I prefer to think of it as a mood: sceptical, anti-establishment, heterodox.’ One journalist told me he had stopped writing for UnHerd after being pushed to include irrelevant attacks on ‘liberal elites’ in his copy (a source at the site said that ‘sounds very unlikely’, pointing out that Terry Eagleton and Yanis Varoufakis are regular contributors.)

R15: read widely and learn to evaluate each piece of writing on its individual merit. It's not a bad thing.

R10 Are you talking about Lindsay Graham and Tim Scott from South Carolina?? Did you know Tim Scott is gay? and black?? He, himself doesn't seem to know that. I wonder if he sees

I know who you're talking about, starting with Clarence the talking (fill in the blank). His middle name is Uncle.

You've gotta be strategic. One douche-bag at a time!

Re: UnHerd. Those of you branding it "right-wing libertarian" clearly know nothing about the site. There's a new generation of media outlets that are harder to pigeionhole, and UnHerd is one of them. You simply haven't caught up. There's more out there than The National Review on one extreme end and The Socialist Worker on the other. UnHerd is mostly anti-establishment and publishes a full spectrum of opinion for critical readers: pro-Labour, pro-Tory, anti-Labour, anti-Tory, critical of Democrats, critical of Republicans, pro-religion, anti-religion. Some articles are by left-wing thinkers who want to overthrow the capitalist system, some are anti-globalization, some are by non-partisan military or international relations experts, some by philosophers, some by cultural critics. In the past year, they've published articles critical of the Britpop movement, of Spotify, of Elon Musk, and articles both supporting Kneecap and vilifying them. It's a nice change from the predictable Giardian, which is known for never publishing anything outside its ideological remit.

Stock's article, linked above, shows that you can despise the Trump administration and understand its dangers while also being skeptical of the motivations of those fleeing that administration for political reasons.

*Guardian