Saturday, September 28, 2013

David Petraeus

Corey Robinson has a nice post at "Crooked Timber" about the recent public confrontation of David Petraeus by a group of young people.

Especially nice is a quote from Adam Smith.

http://crookedtimber.org/2013/09/22/voldemort-comes-to-cuny/#more-30865

I have not carefully read all of the comments, but I'm not much taken by the way some of them were about right-left issues:  If we lefties allow that to be done to people on the right, then we can expect it by people on the right against us......

That seems to me a mistaken way of thinking.  It suggests a sort of symmetry that doesn't exist.
After all, isn't one point which emerges from this example that the "right" precisely do have the police on their side?

Petraeus is a bloody murderer and has no business teaching in a university.  Defenses of his "academic freedom" are a joke. He's not an academic.

The students are right to be outraged. The little bit of verbal abuse he may have endured is nothing compared to the suffering Petraeus has caused. 

When administrators criticize the students, they are also refusing to re-examine their decision to put Petraeus in a place where he doesn't belong.

Yes, he should be allowed to speak for himself--at the Hague......

No comments:

Post a Comment