And from the left, I'm Tim Waligore...

After talking about the situation in Palestine, John Stevenson says in this earlier post:

"The pro-Palestinians, just like the people they were defending, were not able to argue with him so they turned to what they, and their patron saints, are good at: terrorism and brute force to end the argument. Another group of thugs used force to settle and argument: the radical Black students under Amri [sic] Barksdale here at College."

This posting shows the true mark of idiocy. Stevenson is referring to an incident 9 years ago, when Amiri Barksdale '96 and several other people picked up issues of The Dartmouth Review distrubted in dorms. Maybe you disagree Amiri's rationale, but how in the world can Stevenson put these actions in the same category as suicide bombing? I don't think we should trivialize the lives of Isrealis by putting them on par with innocent issues of The Review. We could get into the details of that incident in 1993, if anyone really, really, really wants to. In one of my many conversations with Amiri, he told me that when someone would not let him by until he redistributed all the papers he had picked up, he moved them aside. If that is properly referred to as "force" on the level of bombing dance halls, we have lost all sense of moral perspective.

But in the spirit of Stevenson's often patronizing posts towards liberals, I will say, please John, I know you're more reasonable than this! Indeed, John can heed quality arguments on the other side, such as in this post: "I encourage all to read the Freshman Issue of the Free Press. The layout is beautiful and some of the writers on this blog (Laura, Karsten, Tim Waligore) have contributed articles (opening letter and one about women,the year in review and professor page, the history of review, respectively) to the edition." This comment brings up another point: I would not call myself a "writer" for this blog, who "contributed" to the Free Press first year issue. I would think the identification would go the other way around. I suspect it would too for Laura and Karsten, who did more than contribute to the Free Press: they were the co-editors of the first year issue and have been with the Free Press since its founding two years ago.

Finally, Stevenson refers to "the public intellectuals on this site." Although I admire John's optimism, this comment goes too far. Yes, we've had interesting discussion on this web log. But let's not be pretentious: we are a group of intelligent and curious current and recent undergrads, and a far cry from true public intellectuals, you know, the ones on Crossfire.


Posted by Timothy at 9:32 PM |