to judge bad ideas is to look at how many Princeton philosophy and Columbia professors support it….
Columbia’s Bwog reports that a staggering 200+ Columbia faculty members have signed a petition declaring their support for Occupy Wall St.
Which falls on the heels of Cornel West’s visit last week:
I’ve been putting on my own type of counter-protest, but my friend Zach went into the thick of the action. Zach is anti-corporatism (as I suspect many rational people are) and he had this to write:
Few things could be more depressing than witnessing perfectly-justified outrage at American corporatism like the bailouts alongside demands for more corporatism. This is not a pro-democracy rally to liken to the Arab Spring, where people live under unspeakable despotism. In a sense, it was the cathartic airing of people with – for lack of a better term – ‘first-world’ problems.
The economic ignorance of the crowd was truly depressing. Many held signs to “Tax Financial Transactions!”: an idea to collect a tiny dividend on each of Wall Street’s stock trades. No one seemed concerned about the economic implications of such a proposal. If the State has done so much to insulate cronies in the past, why would we want it to collect more money by raising further barriers in financial markets? People chanted together, “How do we close the deficit? That’s easy, Eat the Rich!” With the national debt as high as it is, and entitlements soon costing unfathomable trillions, basic arithmetic appears beyond many protestors. Some people were advocating for a ‘Vanguard Party’ to impose – without any sugar-coating – a Stalinist, strong-State Communism on the U.S. This is a cheap fantasy for people well-fed and free of the horrors of the Stalinist regime.[…]
As I departed at the protest’s end I thought that there is something of a grand irony to Zuccotti Park serving as the final resting place for the march. John Zuccotti, whose internal correspondence I have read in the New York Municipal Archives, was a deputy mayor that worked to bring New York from the precipice of bankruptcy in the late 1970’s. The City joined arms with major financial interests that had gambled on municipal bonds to finance New York’s stagnating welfare state. Together, with some government unions, they found a way to, once again, sustain the city. Not long ago, the park used to be known by the name ‘Liberty Park.’
A fitting eulogy for self-proclaimed anti-corporatists, timidly begging for more corporatism.
I couldn’t have said it better.
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The Columbia Unicersity faculty, OWS and the “long march through the institutions.”
“To few Americans is Antonio Gramsci a familiar name. That is to be regretted because the work of the late Italian Marxist sheds much light on our time. It was he who first alerted fellow revolutionaries to the possibility that they would be able to complete the seizure of political power only after having achieved “cultural hegemony,” or control of society’s intellectual life by cultural means alone. His was an incremental, rather than an apocalyptic, revolution-the kind, that is, that we have been witnessing in the United States, and the Western world generally, since the 1960s.”
“Gramsci counseled his side to begin a “long march through the institutions,” by which he meant the capture of the cinema, theater, schools, universities, seminaries, newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and courts.”
http://www.virginiainstitute.org/viewpoint/2005_09_5.html
Columbia University also brought us global warming:
“A key objective of GISS research is prediction of climate change in the 21st century.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goddard_Institute_for_Space_Studies
Hansen is best known for his research in the field of climatology, his testimony on climate change to congressional committees in 1988 that helped raise broad awareness of global warming, and his advocacy of action to limit the impacts of climate change. In recent years, Hansen has become an activist for action to mitigate the effects of climate change, which on a few occasions has led to his arrest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_E._Hansen
” 200+ Columbia faculty ”
I’m surprised you could find anyone at Columbia that would not support it. Isn’t Columbia the one that wanted the Iran guy to show and give them the blessing of the Destroy America crowd.
Every time I think about opening my wallet for my alma matter, the idiot leftist brigade makes me donate elsewhere. But with their endowment, it won’t make much difference.
Thanks to my education, I do know who Gramsci is and looking around these days scares the hell out of me.