UPDATE! Further to Katie Short's letter to Mark's Mailbox (scroll down) about her daughters' run-in with Mireille Miller-Young, and Roger Kimball's observations below, the University of California "Sex Work" Studies professor has now been charged:
University of California at Santa Barbara Associate Professor Mireille Miller-Young was charged with one misdemeanor count each of theft, battery and vandalism in the March 4 incident, Santa Barbara County District Attorney Joyce Dudley announced Friday.
Professor Miller-Young, who "specializes in black cultural studies and pornography", told cops, yeah, she did it and so what:
In the report filed by campus police, she claimed she had a "moral right" to act in the manner she did.
Thrin's father, William Short, said he would have expected an academic to engage in thoughtful debate with someone she disagreed with.
"She was free to engage in a rational dialogue with them," Short said after learning the professor had been charged. "Instead, she chose to bully them, steal and destroy their property, and hit and scratch my daughter. After doing so, she said she thought she was setting a good example for her students."
Laura Rosen Cohen comments:
Actually, the exit question is:
Does The University of California-Santa Barbara allow those with criminal records for battery teach at their fine institution?
Serious question.
I look at it this way. If I go into a bar and yell "Hey, asshole!" in some guy's face and he slugs me in the kisser, most judges and juries would figure that I had to some degree or another brought it upon myself. But, if I yell "Hey, asshole!" at a cop and he slugs me, they will not extend the same indulgence: It is part of what it means to be a police officer that one does not rise to glib provocations.
Likewise, if you disagree about an issue with someone passionately opposed to you and she doesn't take it too well, that's one thing. But when a "university professor" confronted by an opposing view immediately resorts to assault and battery and destruction of property, that person is not a teacher, and should not be employed as one. Because to accept the right of people to disagree and to argue their corner is part of what it means to be an "educator".
Or ought to mean.
Why is Professor Miller-Young such an inarticulate thug? Well, maybe it's because she's not really a professor, a scholar, a master of any genuine academic discipline. As Laura notes:
"Dr. Miller-Young has published in numerous academic journals and books including Blackness and Sexuality, Pornification: Sex and Sexuality in Media Culture, C'Lick Me: A Netporn Studies Reader, Meridians, Sexualities, Colorlines Magazine, Ms. Magazine, Re-Public.com, The New York Times, and , a sex worker magazine. With Constance Penley, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, and Tristan Taormino, she is an editor of The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (The Feminist Press, 2013)."
If you've spent your entire adult life having that stuff taken seriously, it's no surprise your critical-thinking skills and debating technique are so evolved that your first reaction to a 16-year-old girl who disagrees with you is criminal battery.
***
Before we move on to the thrills of a new week, here's some postscripts to the old one:
~Over the weekend, I mentioned the poor bloke in Britain who called the Female Genital Mutilation Helpline thinking it was a helpline to help you find someone to genitally mutilate your female. This rang a bell with the Great Australian Wag Tim Blair:
It's a life-imitates-art moment. Observe this scene from Sacha Baron Cohen's The Dictator.
Well, worth a click to see General Aladeen's reaction at the mention of the Rape Center. "You have a center for rape? Great! Let's go!"
Whether or not life imitates art, it's certainly imitating the alarmist hackery of America Alone. From the lads at my old haunt the (non-Aussie) Telegraph, "Islamic Law Is Adopted By British Legal Chiefs":
Solicitors told how to draw up Sharia-style wills penalising widows and non-believers.
From that mutilation-minded dad's point of view, how far down the line can NHS-funded clitoridectomies be?
~SteynOnline reader Katie Short wrote to Mark's Mailbox telling the story of how her pro-life daughters had been set upon at the University of California Santa Barbara by Mireille Miller-Young, Professor of "Sex Work", and had their sign seized and trashed. Roger Kimball adds:
She appears to teach four courses: "Women of Color," "Sexual Cultures Special Topics," "Feminist Research and Practice," and "Sexualities." She holds a Ph.D. in "American History and History of the African Diaspora" from New York University. The title of her dissertation, a book version of which is forthcoming from Duke University Press, is "A Taste for Brown Sugar: The History of Black Women in American Pornography." She has contributed to such organs as , "a quarterly magazine by and for sex workers and those who support their rights," Colorlines, a magazine with "articles concerning race, culture, and organizing," and the New York Times, a paper that — well, you know. Dr. Miller-Young, again according to her web page, "has won several highly regarded grants and awards," possibly for her contributions to C'Lick Me: A Netporn Studies Reader and The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure.
In other words, Dr. Miller-Young is a typical specimen of homo academicus (or perhaps I should say, mulier academica), circa 2014. The non-stop racial grievance mongering. The anaphrodisiac obsession with gutter sex. The bad prose. The cutesy nods to pop culture. The reflexive left-wing politics. The angry, intellectually nugatory posturing. It's all a dime a dozen in the trendy precincts of the university today. Dr. Miller-Young is as dreary and predictable a representative of the low-wattage, affirmative-action branch of that enterprise as any cultural pathologist could wish for. Would you let her loose on your delicately brought-up daughter?
To which millions of Americans shriek: Yes!!! Whatever it costs!!!!!
~Following my centenary salute to Budd Schulberg, Scott Johnson adds a few observations of his own:
Kazan also directed A Face in the Crowd. Playing Lonesome Rhodes, Andy Griffith turns in a performance of astonishing ferocity. The film reflects the concerns of Schulberg and Kazan over the uses to which television might be put by a glib demagogue. In one memorable scene, Rhodes gives the dauntingly square Senator Worthington Fuller a lesson in how to transform himself into a presidential candidate through the medium of television.
Rhodes is introduced by his sponsor General Haynesworth, manufacturer of the worthless Vitajex pick-me-up tablets. General Haynesworth advises Fuller that he needs a slogan like "Time for a change," "The mess in Washington" or "More bang for a buck." Rhodes takes it from there. It's a hilarious scene that remains timely fifty years later.
Indeed. Although the strange thing is that these days when someone runs on "change" or "the mess in Washington", instead of finding it "hilarious", we hail him as the greatest orator of all time. That's what happens when you entrust your children's education to Professor Miller-Young.
~Last Wednesday I weighed in on that Malaysian plane. Mother Jones says the reason we haven't found it is ...climate change:
Scientists say man-made climate change has fundamentally altered the currents of the vast, deep oceans where investigators are currently scouring for the missing Malaysian Airlines flight.
It would have washed up in the Maldives, but of course rising sea levels have already washed away the Maldives, so there's nowhere left for it to wash up on. It'll probably drift straight through the ice-free South Pole and end up on a beach in the North-West Passage. If you're a climate scientist, the important thing to remember is, whatever the story, it's all about you.
(As I write, the Malaysian Prime Minister is announcing that, according to Britain's Air Accident Investigation Unit, Flight 370 was lost over the southern Indian Ocean.)
~Speaking of which, on Saturday I quoted Powerline's John Hinderaker on climate models:
A model in itself is evidence of nothing. The model obeys the dictates of its creator. In the case of climate models, we know they are wrong: they don't accurately reproduce the past, which should be the easy part; they fail to account for many features of the Earth's present climate; and to the extent that they have generated predictions, those predictions have proven to be wrong.
Tom Nelson notes science journalist David Appell's devastating response:
Hinderaker is the kind who will always be fellating someone -- at the moment he's a Koch-blowing liar. He choose his side and he's on his knees for the money. It's an old story. Why bang my head against his wall?
Mr Nelson wonders: Is this defamation? It probably would be if Appell had said it about Mireille Miller-Young, Professor of Sex Worker Studies, since (as the DC Superior Court would say) it gets to the heart of her "academic integrity". But I doubt John Hinderaker will be minded to sue. What's more striking is that the fellatio fantasy (unlike Barry Bickmore's Steyn stripper fantasy) occurs in the middle of what appears to be an epic personal-crisis meltdown post by David Appell:
No one is reading. No one is commenting. The deniers will comment only where the other deniers will safely reinforce their misapprehensions. Cowards...
Maybe I'm just living in the wrong time. When I was a kid growing up in southwestern Pennsylvania, I went on several trips to Gettysburg. In a way I can't explain, I've often thought I was meant to live in that time, in the mid-1800s, and I still think that. It was simplier. It was quiet. It got dark when the sun when down, and then you went to bed.
I don't think Gettysburg was that quiet in the mid-1800s. At any rate, I've always done my best to send a bit of traffic Mr Appell's way. Over the weekend, I Tweeted his post about my "invincible ignorance" (as did Mann and his Mann-child, approvingly), and I've linked over the last couple of months to his merciless dissection of me as a know-nothing Shirley Temple groupie and many other observations. I'm sorry nobody's reading or commenting any more. I've personally found Mr Appell a far more agreeable warm-monger than, say, Barry Bitchmore or Michael E Mann. Unlike Mann, he's not a pansy ReTweet blocker.
But I've noticed something about these chaps. At the very top of the warm-mongering totem pole, they're awfully insecure: Mann seems to spend half his day deleting even mildly dissenting comments from his Facebook page, and the rest of it coming up with ever more flaccid hashtags - #KochMachineDenier, etc. One can understand why, exhausting as it must be, it's worth the effort to him: he's protecting a highly lucrative brand. For Mann's celebrity pals like Jessica Alba, "climate activism" is a fashion accessory. But, lower down the warmist totem-pole, the chaps seem just as insecure as Mann but without any of the compensations, and more than a little over-emotional about the whole business. I think this is a natural consequence of assuming you're in the business of "saving the planet" - as opposed to, say, something more do-able such as running for school board or the recreation commission and saving your town or grade school. It doesn't seem entirely psychologically healthy to assume one can "save the planet".
At any rate, it seems to have soured David Appell on a lot more than "climate science":
I'm just tired of all the extremists on both sides, and their lies.
You know who I miss? Billy Joel. I saw him once in Madison Square Garden. Earlier in the day we went up to the top of the World Trade Center, and I took a picture of my girlfriend Ellen in a spiffy blue hat, with Manhattan blowing in the background. And then the four of us got stoned at the concert, and then we slept in the dirty vinyl seats on the early morning train back to New Jersey.
"Manhattan blowing in the background"? Like John Hinderaker? That's a lot of Koch brothers.
You know who I miss? Tony Orlando. I shall tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree for David Appell, who seems a decent sort. But the over-emotive demagoguery of the climate crowd - Denier! Denier! Fellater! Denier! - takes its toll.
[UPDATE: In the grey morning after, Mr Appell appears to have deleted his meltdown.]
