Response to “Occupy Wall Street: How Should it be Covered Now”

Response to “Occupy Wall Street: How Should it be Covered Now“.

To: Arthur S. Brisbane
Public Editor of the New York Times

I find it amazing that these pundits, looking at a crowd of people carrying signs, come away scratching their heads asking, “what specifically do OWS demonstrators want?”

The conspiratorial questions about “who is the leader, who is really behind it” also show how far out of touch, and indeed, clueless, these members of the chattering classes truly are.

Let me tackle the first part of Tim Kelly’s list:

Who are the protesters?

A few groups are here.

1. Old New Leftists, now part of the establishment, going once more unto the breach.
2. First-time protesters, most idealistic young people.
3. Ideological extremists (a small, but visible minority).
4. War veterans, now home and un- or under-employed.

Who are the leaders?

The internet is the leader. There is no person who can be described as leading the movement. Intellectually, the movement is led by Noam Chomsky, probably more than any one other living figure.

Who’s really behind all this?

Adbusters started it. I think it amazed them and has long since left their control.

Who’s going to pay for the cleanup?

Presumably this will fall primarily to municipalities.

What do they hope to accomplish?

Reducing wealth and income inequality.
Enhancing civil rights.
Holding the richest and most powerful to account.

What can citizens do to take part in the protests, or avoid them?

Really? A former newspaper editor has no idea how to Google about “occupy wall street” plus (name of town) and either go there or not go there?

What is happening inside the camps?

I have been to the Boston settlement twice and I have found it peaceful, clean and orderly, with many thought-provoking discussions, books, tracts, and signs.

This degree of confusion and inability to observe the plainly obvious makes me think that, as in the story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, that these wealthy pundits and apologists for the plutocratic class quoted above, see only that which they wish to see and nothing more.

Copyright © 2011 Henry Edward Hardy

See also: To: His Lordship, the Right Honorable Richard John Carew Chartres, Bishop of London Re: Occupy London

David Brooks of the New York Times and the Occupy Wall Street movement

Regarding the Wall Street protests

Regarding the detention at UNDP Bahrain of three non-violent Human Rights protesters

Your Excellency Firas Gharaibeh, Deputy Resident Representative at UNDP,

I am writing to express my concern and consternation at the way the peaceful and non-violent protest of three citizens seeking freedom for their loved ones in detention in Bahrain today was handled. I am speaking of Asma Darwish, Sawsam Jawad, and Zainab Alkhawaja. Ms. Alkhawaja’s father, Abdulhadi Alkhawaja, is an internationally known human rights activist and is the former President of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and is currently a member of the International Advisory Network in the Business and Human Rights Resource Center chaired by Mary Robinson, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. He was taken along with Ms. Alkhawaja’s husband and brother-in-law in a raid by masked men on the night of April 9. He was brutally beaten into unconsciousness in front of his family before being abducted.

When Ms. Alkhawaja and her companions attempted to stage a non-violent sit-in at your office today, you called the Bahrani authorities and turned them over to them. If they are detained, raped, tortured, or murdered, you will be morally and legally responsible.

I want you to know that the whole world is watching. The whole world is watching *you*, your Excellency.

I look forward to your prompt reply.

sincerely,

Henry Edward Hardy
Somerville, MA, USA

UNDP Media Contacts
Women arrested in Hunger Strike in the UN Building – Manama
Bahrain arrests three women in UN sit-in, activist says
Three Bahraini women detained for ruckus in UN office
3 female activists arrested in Bahrain
Even in Custody, Bahrain Activists Use Twitter to Protest
Bahrain frees three women arrested for protesting at UN offices in Manama
Bahrain women arrested in sit-in released, says UN

Copyright © 2011 Henry Edward Hardy

Does politics belong in the classroom?

Prof. Stanley Fish has been discussing on his nytimes blog whether or how freely political opinions should be expressed by a teacher in the college or university classroom.

His initial blog entry is, Yet Once More: Political Correctness on Campus and the followup to which I have responded is, George W. Bush and Melville’s Ahab: Discuss!

Fish’s first post was a long response to Evan Coyne Maloney’s Indoctrinate U.

The basic thrust of Fish’s post seems to be that,

Academics often bridle at the picture of their activities presented by Maloney and other conservative critics, and accuse them of grossly caricaturing and exaggerating what goes on in the classroom. Maybe so, but so long as there are those who confuse advocacy with teaching, and so long as faculty colleagues and university administrators look the other way, the academy invites the criticism it receives in this documentary. In 1915, the American Association of University Professors warned that if we didn’t clean up our own shop, external constituencies, with motives more political than educational, would step in and do it for us. Now they’re doing it in the movies and it’s our own fault.

Yet Once More: Political Correctness on Campus

My response follows:

I would not entirely agree with the thesis that politics has no place in the Academy.

As teachers, can we not state that, for instance, “Torture is antithetical to every basic principle of the American democratic system”? Or contrariwise, “Corporal punishment has been a feature of the American system of justice since its inception, and even killing a prisoner who has been condemned to death after due process is held to be judicially and legally acceptable under federal and most state jurisdictions today”?

Can we not say, “The evidence for global warming is regarded as conclusive by an overwhelming international consensus of scientists” as well as, “Solar incident radiation is the principle contributing factor to global warming in accordance with Boltzmann’s Law and the primary factor mediating this is the albedo of the earth, and any radiative forcing from CO2 in the atmosphere is negligible by comparison”?

Is it not precisely so that such opinions can be voiced without fear of retribution that we have tenured positions in the academic structure? If one prevailing political, scientific, or social view is defined culturally as “objective” and no other views are permitted to be advanced or advocated by a teacher in a classroom setting, then where is the great “marketplace of ideas” of which the classroom is a preeminent exemplar? As the Supreme Court held in Keyishian v. Board of Regents, (385 U.S. 589, 605-606 [1967], supreme.justia.com/us/385/589/case.html ):

‘Our Nation is deeply committed to safeguarding academic freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned. That freedom is therefore a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom. “The vigilant protection of constitutional freedoms is nowhere more vital than in the community of American schools.” Shelton v. Tucker, supra, at 487. The classroom is peculiarly the “marketplace of ideas.” The Nation’s future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth “out of a multitude of tongues, [rather] than through any kind of authoritative selection.”‘

Thank you for your interesting post and enjoyable and weighty blog, Prof. Fish.

See also: The Universities Under Attack …

I would further note that after 1915 the political “cleaning up” of leftist radicals such as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman took the unpleasant form of the Palmer Raids in 1919, indeed an interesting and fraught comparison to draw with our present political situation.

Copyright © 2007 Henry Edward Hardy

Open Letter to the Ann Arbor Democratic Party

Open Letter to the Ann Arbor Democratic Party

Surely the right to enthusiastically applaud a political speech is Constitutionally protected speech; if not then there is no freedom of speech whatever left in this country.

We are a Democratic Party, and many of us would call ourselves Liberals; but where even the mildest and most socially unexceptionable forms of dissent such as applauding a political speech are suppressed then there is neither Liberty nor Democracy.

sincerely,

Henry Edward Hardy

Copyright © 2007 Henry Edward Hardy

An Open Letter to Rich Sheridan regarding the proposed insertion of spam by the Wireless Washtenaw Project

The following was written in response to the pricing plan for Wireless Washtenaw.

Rich Sheridan has served on the steering committee of the Wireless Washtenaw Project for some time. Rich is someone for whom I have done work in the past and I am surprised by his poor judgment and lack of knowledge of the issues in this particular instance.

An Open Letter to Rich Sheridan regarding the proposed insertion of spam by the Wireless Washtenaw Project:

Rich,

Thanks for the interesting conversation today regarding Wireless Washtenaw. You told me, “The Internet was built by business”. When I disagreed and asked you if you had ever heard of Prof. Jon Postel, you finally (after asking the third time) admitted you had not heard of him. Here’s a link to the wikipedia article on Prof. Jon Postel.

Here’s Jon Postel’s tribute page from the Information Sciences Institute at USC.

When Jon died, he received the some of the most moving tributes from around the world that I have seen for any person, recent or historical. Many of the founders of the Internet are among the eulogists recorded at the Internet Society pages about Jon.

The Internet did not come about through the profit motive. Not at all. The Net is possibly the single most complex and valuable piece of engineering ever accomplished by humans, and it came about through the efforts of selfless individuals working for the betterment of all mankind. People like JCR Licklider, Bob Kahn, Larry Roberts, Steve Crocker, Vint Cerf, and Dr. Postel are the people we should be seeking to emulate personally and professionally.

To take the surplus value in the Net created by all these selfless patriots and try to monetize it in the way that 20/20 is doing through the public face of the Wireless Washtenaw project, is not a good thing. Having third parties who just happen to own one of the dozen or so routers between sender and receiver insert into the datastream their own or third-party ads degrades the Net for both sender and receiver, and breaks the unwritten compact whereby anyone with an upstream router on the Net passes along third-party traffic in a manner similar to a common carrier, without intercepting or interfering by, for instance, adding spam advertising content to that communication. This principle is sometimes referred to as “Net Neutrality”.

There are also legal issues revolving around this approach to funding Wireless Washtenaw regarding the Electronic Communications Privacy Act 18 USC § 2510.

Also pertinent is the General Prohibition Against Traces and Traps 18 USC § 3121.

I also think this deliberate insertion of spam into the network may fall afoul of the Michigan statue Fraudulent Access to Computers, Computer Systems, and Computer Networks, MCL 795.791 et passim.

What you all are talking about doing with this Wireless Washtenaw “free” service is filling the web browsers of people using the free, public service with third-party spam. Adding banner ads to a content provider’s web page without their consent or inserting interstitial ads between content provider and subscriber is leveraging the intellectual property of that content provider without their permission. This is analogous to sneaking into the Washtenaw News warehouse on S. Industrial and slipping additional advertising into the Sunday Times inserts without their permission. This Wireless Washtenaw “free” service with spam added is not a public service at all, but a fundamental attack on the integrity, security and utility of the Net itself.

sincerely,

Henry Edward Hardy

see also: Seven Questions on ‘Net Neutrality’ for Ann Arbor City Councilman Ron Suarez

Copyright © 2007 Henry Edward Hardy