"It turns out just writing about the murdering proclivities of radical Obama-backing Harvard professors gets some folks on the radical left pretty angry."
Sorry no, Donald, that isn't it at all... Plenty of bloggers all across the political spectrum are discussing the case... ...but only a select few--all far right reactionaries, from what I've seen--are actively trying to turn a workplace shooting by a sick individual into something political... and now, racist.
"Comrade Repsac3, Commissar of State Security, People's Commissariat for Internet Affairs, who I thought put his Donald-demonology to bed, must have instead been lurking in the shadows, waiting for a chance to pounce. Here's his post, "Why Donald Douglas is a scumbag." Yeah, noticing that a Harvard scientist who murders her faculty collegues for failing tenure will engender some emotions like that from folks."
Again, it's the politics, stupid. While Donald offered nothing but one or two "RateMyProfessor" posts as evidence--(the same kind of "RateMyProfessor" posts that he admits below are "mostly disgruntled students getting their revenge," and yet are trustworthy enough to base a few posts on, when he can find one or two that support his chosen meme.) he implied in his initial post on the subject that Amy Bishop killed these people because she was a liberal. And yes, attempting to connect the murder of three people (and attempted murder of several others) to the woman's politics WHEN THERE'S NO EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER THAT THERE'S ANY SUCH LINK, just to try to score political points for "your" team, makes one a scumbag... or at the very least, a sad, sick, desperate individual. If one don't want to be looked on as a scumbag, one ought not act like a scumbag, I guess... Beyond that, there's little I can offer the guy...
And recall that Comrade Repsac3 attracts some of the most bestial commenters on the web. Here's this from "The Original" (an attack monkey), who invested in a little hate-research over at RateMyProfessors:
Why, Professor Douglas!! I thought the whole "attack monkey" thing was raaaasccccist... or is that one of those things that only you, Barack, and Hallie, as Halfrican Americans, can say without getting into trouble. (Jebus, it's so hard to keep up with the guy's ever-changing standards.)
What do you think Donald calls the "studies" he did at RateMyProfessor.com... Surely that wasn't "hate-research," was it? Because it's always different when Donald does it... (The king of "OK for me, but not for thee", he is.)
--- snippage of The Original's theory that Donald pads his RateMyProfessor.com ratings with dummy reviews. I wouldn't put it past the guy--he has got quite the ego, and goes to great lengths to defend himself when it gets bruised--but I have no evidence of his doing so, and it's beyond the scope of this post, besides. ---
Folks can follow Comrade Repsac3's links to RateMyProfessors to confirm The Original's suspicions. I don't read my evaluations, frankly. It's mostly disgruntled students getting their revenge. But Comrade Repsac gets his jollies over there, which helps kindle his warped hatred -- which is all he's got.
To be fair, what I actually did was comb through some of Donald's reviews and pick a few that supported my hypothesis that Donald's political bias affects his classroom performance--which is the same thing Donald did (or perhaps it was one of his fellow reactionaries--I have no proof that Donald did the combing, personally, though the effect is the same, since he used what that reactionary found in exactly the same way, regardless). One former student said Amy Bishop was "a liberal from "Hahvahd", and that was enough for Donald to write a post implying that liberalism played some part in the tragedy (so suck on that all you von Brunn/Roeder -accusing nihilists!! Liberals kill, too!).
Anyway, I got a little additional attention for pointing out that leftists only politicize murders from which they can tar Republicans as evil racists. That explains the title of my post, "American Power: Amy Bishop Killed Minorities: Leftists Silent on 'Racist' Rampage; Victims' Families Ask, 'Why Was She Still Teaching?''"
Can Donald Douglas be more oblivious to the irony of some of the things he says?
It is true that liberal bloggers will always be more likely to post about a conservative ideology-inspired crime, and conservatives will always be more likely to point out the crimes inspired by liberal ideology. "Family values" conservative sex scandals. Liberal bigotry. Anti-choice wacko who kills an abortion provider while the doctor is in church, with his family. Eco-terrorism.
But that isn't what this is about. Amy Bishop isn't the liberal equivalent of Scott Roeder. He killed in pursuit of his extremist understanding of socially conservative principles. She killed--as far as we know, anyway--because she believed that she deserved tenure, and if she didn't get it, screw 'em all!! (Maybe a clearer picture of her motivation will emerge, eventually.) I agree that it wasn't the denial of tenure that was to blame--any more than being opposed to abortion was to blame for Scott Roeder's crime--but some kind of sociopathy or insanity within her.
Donald is doing nothing if not being a "rightist" politicizing a set of murders with which he can tar liberals as being similarly evil... ...and racists... ...and hypocrites, taboot. In short, he's doing the very thing he's railing about liberals doing. And he refuses to see it, no matter how often or how clearly it's pointed out to him.
And Donald, one more thing. It's not racist (or bigoted) to kill minorities. It's racist (bigoted) to kill minorities BECAUSE they're minorities. BIG difference. So unless you have any evidence that she was targeting the minorities, you're talkin' out of your ass, with the fervent hope that some of THIS shit will stick to the proverbial "Blame liberals" wall. Fat chance.
Uber-hypocrite Steve M., who gets my name wrong while attacking me, responds to the race questions:
That the guy got Donald Douglas' name wrong has little bearing on the veracity of his reply. (If there were no brain farts & typos, Donald would have to invent them, because they seem to make up the majority of his "tactical elan." Maybe as far as Steve is concerned, Don looks like a David. Maybe Steve knows a guy named David Douglas, and just typed it, too busy paying attention to the substance of his reply--you know, the subject at hand. Whatever the reason, everyone reading what Steve wrote--including Donald--knew who Steve was referring to, and Donald's "woe is me, he got my name wrong" is a cheap distraction from the fact that Donald never bothers to explain WHY he believes Steve is a hypocrite, or provide EVIDENCE to that effect. It's an attempt at the fine art of distraction, but Donald is a crappy magician.
You know what? I have no freaking idea whether there was a racial motive in these killings. I know that, when you dig into the past, the intended pipe-bomb victim was white, and Bishop's brother was white. Maybe David Douglas has an explanation for how those crimes, if she's guilty of them, fits his new theory of racism. Maybe back then she was trying to eliminate the white race, one whitey every few years, as a revolutionary act. I sure hope he tells us. He has such insight into the criminal mind -- I'm dying to know."
Okay, dying to know?
Then I'll just direct little Stevie over to Dag Blog's entry, "Not About Tenure. Seriously" (with emphasis added):
OK... So Donald, by virtue of quoting another person at another blog, is about to explain how Amy Bishop's alleged crimes--including the shooting of her white brother and the attempted bombing of a white professor at Harvard--fit Donald's theory of racism as motive.
Friday, at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, a biology professor named Amy Bishop murdered three of her colleagues and wounded three others. Two of the people she wounded are still in critical condition, and I offer my sincere hopes for their complete and swift recovery. The murderer had been denied tenure in the department, and media coverage has centered on the question of tenure. Tenure, that strange and exotic academic rite, is obviously the hook for this story, and the resulting coverage is appalling.
The New York Times headline for their story today (which doesn't deserve a link) is "At an Academic Pressure Cooker, a Setback Turns Deadly, Official Say." There's something appalling about the passive construction in that sentence, as if it's the "setback" that did the killing. But the story, with its emphasis on "the pressure-cooker world of academic startups" is worse. It also undermines its own angle: the killer's potentially lucrative biotech startup was going well. Meanwhile, Inside Higher Ed fautously links to an old article about faculty who have minor breakdowns after being turned down for tenure, as if one could compare a shouting incident or a distarught person climbing up an ivy trellis with cold-blooded murder. (No link for you either, IHD.) The general thrust of the coverage is that the tenure process is so painful and stressful that an otherwise normal person might snap and become violent.
Let me just say, as someone going through the tenure process: bullshit.
On the other hand, the media has had no interest at all in the question of race, although Bishop shot almost every non-white faculty member in the department. (She also shot and wounded two white victims, a professor and a staff member.) She killed both African-American professors in the department (one of whom was too junior to have had anything to do with Bishop's tenure decision). She killed the department chair, who was ethnically South Asian. A Latino faculty member was wounded. There may only be two non-white faculty left in the department. Whether she intended it or not, Amy Bishop effected a racial purge of the Alabama Huntsville biology department. But the press isn't interested in asking whether or not she intended it. Perhaps the question isn't exotic enough.
These murders are not about tenure. They are about Amy Bishop's moral failings. Those failings might or might not include racism. But a person who responds to a career setback by cold-bloodedly murdering three people, and attempting to kill three more, is not the victim of a difficult process. Amy Bishop is a horribly defective human being. Whatever complaints she may have had a week ago, she has forfeited any right to make them.
There you have it. According to Donald, this crime was (or at least might've been) motivated by racism because non-white people died. And when non-white people die, racism's to blame. (Don Douglas, as Al Sharpton.) But what of the question Steve asked Donald, about Amy's alleged white victims? You know, the one Donald was supposed to be using this quote to answer?
Donald?
Mr Douglas?
Al?
Not a creature stirring, not even a mouse...
I'm telling you, Donald is a piss poor magician.
Jesus Christ!
Seriously. A "racial purge" of the entire Huntsville department! That's what I'm talkin' about!
But the silence on the left is splitting eardrums nationwide. You just can't talk about this stuff! A white Harvard leftist opens fire on a room full of minority professors and students. And we should just STFU and not politicize it? Okay. Sure. Those leftists sure got me beat in the moral equivalence department.
As usual, Donald's "STFU" link doesn't actually show anyone telling Donald to STFU. In fact, I'm pretty sure it was Donald himself who issued the only STFU in this debate, saying "Might I suggest that the dude just STFU, since he's obviously eating big crow at this point." Facts can be such stubborn things...
The fact is, killing non-white folks is murder, but it's not in and of itself racist. Killing non-white folks is only racist if they're killed BECAUSE they're not white. And no matter how much Donald spins & twists, there's no evidence of that.
To whatever extent there was a "racial purge" of the biology department at Huntsville, it's because that was the makeup of the biology department at Huntsville. If the professors had primarily been men, it would've been a "sexist purge." If the majority of the professors had been lefthanded, Donald might call it a "southpaw purge."
In spite of Donald's implications, no one--not even Donald--is saying that Amy Bishop chose to fire at the people who were not white first. All the reports I've read--including ones posted (& thus presumably read and understood) by Donald at American Power--say she simply chose the person next to her, and then the person next to him, and so on, in order, without regard for who they were individually.
The only reason minorities were shot is same reason that only biology professors were shot. They were the people in the room at the time. If one of the professors had brought his spouse from the PoliSci department to the meeting, there's a good chance that a PoliSci professor might've been shot (or shot at), as well. In fact, one gets the impression that Bishop was anything but discriminatory in choosing her victims. If she was picking and choosing only those who her warped mind was telling her deserved killing--whether it was the non-white folks, the men, the professors with the most seniority or power over tenure decisions, or the ones who were wearing brown shoes--the number of injured & dead might be lower.
As several of us keep saying to Donald & his reactionary friends, it is not ok to cry out "liberal extremist" or "racist" when there is zero evidence in support of those things as motives or contributing factors. Politicizing the murders of three people for partisan gain is repugnant, and the people who would sink so low as to do so deserve to be called out. I stand by what I said at the outset; Donald Douglas' willingness to make the deaths of these three professor's into some ploy for partisan advantage is just one of the things that makes me believe he is a real scumbag at heart. Good men just don't do that sort of thing.
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Relevant links:
American Nihilist: Why Donald Douglas is a scumbag
American Nihilist: American Power Scumbag Doubles Down
No More Mister Nice Blog
Amy Bishop…(The Sanity Inspector)
It’s liberal racism: Right wing still deperately trying to connect murderer Amy Bishop’s politics to shooting � thump and whip
The Mahablog � Why Sarah Palin Is a Goddess
(Lotta needless and speculative commentary by the author at this one, but she aggregates more of the straight news pieces on the case than anyone else I've seen): University Diaries � amy bishop
Not About Tenure. Seriously. | dagblog.com
‘Oddball’ portrait of Amy Bishop emerges - BostonHerald.com
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