Another blue professor at Davis!

 WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2023

Goodbye, calabazas: We hated to see Halloween go. It takes with it the start of the end to the daily pleasure we've taken from our neighborhood's displays of winter squash.

As we noted yesterday, we're especially indebted to those cultivars which are "extremely variable in size, shape, and color," which may be the calabazas. They seem to exist to provide visual pleasure and to do little else. Here's the quote from Atticus Finch which those cultivars call to mind:

Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy...They don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.

So too with the cultivars of winter squash which aren't orange and round. They don't do one thing but create visual surprises for us to enjoy. In our view, it's a sin to walk by such cultivars without stopping to admire their work.

On the other hand, this:

We've been listening to many deeply counterproductive discussions of events in Israel and the Gaza Strip. We're thinking now of discussions we've watched on Morning Joe and on Deadline: White House, right there on our own tribe's channel.

We expect to focus on those discussions in our dispatches next week. For today, we'll direct you to a tragic column by the Washington Post's Charles Lane.

Like the Atlantic's Graeme Wood, Lane watched the IDF's presentation concerning the savagery of the October 7 killings. Headline included, here's Lane's account of what he saw:

What I saw when I watched videos of the Hamas attack

[...]

What was revelatory—what you really do have to see and hear to believe—is the attitude of the terrorists. They are having the time of their lives. Some whoop with delight over dead civilians lying on a highway. A team of gunmen brings a dead Israeli soldier back to Gaza and stands triumphantly over his body, as a crowd spontaneously rushes forward to kick and stomp the corpse. Young, heavily armed members of Hamas’s elite Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades pose for a video selfie, shouting in Arabic, “that’s how it’s done.” (The embassy provided translations.)

Surely, the most chilling part of the film is an audio-only clip: a terrorist calling home to tell his parents that he is in Israel and killing Jews—10, he boasts, including a woman whose phone he is using. “Their blood is on my hands,” he cries, joyously. “Your son’s a hero.”

Sadly, tragically, this sort of behavior is a familiar part of human behavior down through the annals of time. Even in modern times, murderous behavior of this type isn't unique to Hamas.

Beyond that, people may tend to respond in predictable ways to behavior of that type. Here was Michelle Goldberg, just last week, with this account of the behavior of another professor at Cal Davis:

With War in Israel, the Cancel Culture Debate Comes Full Circle

[...]

Part of me shudders to view the unfolding catastrophe in Israel and Gaza through the provincial lens of America’s cancel culture debate. In some ways, that debate has now come full circle, because pro-Palestinian voices were being censored long before the phrase “cancel culture” existed, one reason the left was unwise in recent years to prevaricate about the value of free speech. But if someone as evenhanded as Thrall now finds his talks being dropped, we’re in an especially repressive period. And in a time of war, particularly a war shrouded in fiercely competing narratives, free speech is more important than ever.

I don’t like the fact that the statement Nguyen signed gestured only vaguely at Hamas’s slaughter of Israeli civilians. In calling off his Friday evening appearance, 92NY, a Jewish organization, was playing by rules much of the left established, privileging sensitivity to traumatized communities ahead of the robust exchange of ideas. And supporters of Israel are hardly alone in creating a censorious atmosphere; particularly on college campuses, it is Zionists who feel silenced and intimidated. A professor at the University of California, Davis, is facing investigation by the university for a social media post calling for the targeting of “Zionist journalists,” which said, “They have houses with addresses, kids in school,” and included emojis of a knife, an ax and three drops of blood.

If you want to get the full context, you'll have to read the full column. The highlighted passage follows on yesterday's post about another professor at Cal Davis—the one who said that a good way to get rid of police is to shoot them in the back.

Concerning the behavior of this second professor, we read the column to which Goldberg linked. As it turns out, the professor in question "received her PhD in the history of consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz." 

At times like these, we humans are wired to identify the Others and to seek war with such beasts. Along the way, our blue tribe can be quite unwise too. It seems to us that we blues should try to get a bit more clear about that tragic fact. 

Blue pumpkins are there to bring us joy. Blue professors can go off the tracks!