A Short Course in the "Logic" of Bigotry--And the Indivisible Will to Take a Stand Against it

Photo, Wendy Lynne Lee, 2.3.17

The following is a comment posted in the regional newspaper, The Press Enterprise, call-in feature "30 Seconds." The caller identifies herself as Evy Lysk--a frequent flier whose anti-Islamic, racist, misogynist bigotry has a long and well-established history:

"Travel ban motovates BU protest. Student calls Trump moves "reminiscent of Nazi Germany." Save yourself and drop out of college Jessa Wood. You have been brain-washed by your liberal professors. I'll tell you who's moves reminiscent of Nazi Germany. It's ISIS. To Professor M. Safa I asked you way back. "Do you support sharia law?" I never did get an answer. Miss Wood ask him is he for Sharia Law. If you don't get an answer then that should tell you he is for it. Sharia law does not give women rights--that law kills women. Miss Wendy, yes wear a hijab, but have it cover you whole face and make America beautiful again. Go Trump!"

Let's analyze Ms. Lysk's comment:

Setting aside the poor grammar, misspellings, and the fact that she does not know Professor Saracoglu's name, Ms. Lysk does offer us an opportunity to sharpen our capacity to detect fallacies, unwarranted assumptions, and very poor logic.

1. Lysk claims that BU Professors are "liberal." But she neither defines what "liberal" means, nor does she offer any evidence other than that BU community members orchestrated a very successful protest, one, in fact, whose numbers were significantly under-reported by the Press Enterprise at 100, when the actual number was far close to 300. She appears to assume that BU professors organized the protest--flatly false--and that BECAUSE they did so, BU students must be "brain-washed." This assumes, of course that BU students are children. False, and that BU professors have some sort of magical "brain-washing" power. False. BU students organized this action--with very little time and to very powerful effect. They should be applauded for their initiative and discipline. BU is fortunate indeed to have such thoughtful and committed student citizens.

Photo, Wendy Lynne Lee, 2.3.17

2. While not bothering to check his correct name, Lysk refers to BU history Professor Safa Saracoglu as a defender of Sharia Law. But like "liberal," she fails to define what that means---she simply assumes we all know it's bad. To be clear, I am neither defending nor decrying Sharia Law--but it is question-begging to assume your audience knows and understands to what you're referring without any additional definition or clarification. The overwhelming likelihood is that, given Ms. Lysk's past history and references, she is appealing to a far right wing website like Infowars or NewsMax--neither of which are remotely credible sources for, well, anything.

3. Lysk commits fallacy of appeal to ignorance: She claims that because professor Safa Saracogluu did not answer her very likely loaded question about Sharia Law, that this means he supports it. But no such conclusion follows--and absence of evidence (his not providing an answer) is NOT EVER evidence for some other claim (such as, he supports Sharia Law). This is simply Lysk's way of making an accusation for which she has no evidence whatever--and it assumes a definition of Sharia she has not provided. In short: Lysk set a trap, and Professor Saracoglu didn't take her bait.

4. She then claims that Sharia Law "does not give women rights." But rights are NOT given. Rights are recognized, and Ms Lysk's own view of women's rights is made clear in the very next line where she refuses to address me as Professor Lee--a fact she has been aware of for at least 15 years. Indeed she does refer to "Professor Safa," but not to "Professor Lee." This makes very clear her own patent sexism, a fact confirmed by her claim that I should wear a hijab to cover my "whole face." In other words, I'm a legitimate target for ridicule because, according to Lysk, I'm an ugly woman--one not deserving of the recognition of human rights. This, of course, is ad hominem: attack the person instead of their argument--and it is the common recourse of the assailant who has nothing else to offer in defense of their claim.

Photo, Wendy Lynne Lee 1.3.17

Lastly, it's very unclear what Lysk's claim is other than "Go Trump!" But that's not a claim--it's just an exclamation, one as groundless as her comment.

Nonetheless, this is precisely the kind of frenzied, irrational, and bigoted fodder that far right supremacist groups like this one feeds on. 

White Nationalist Recruitment Posters Reported on Kutztown University Campus as Part of National Campaign | Raging Chicken Press

The point is not merely that Lysk is a racist and sexist bigot--she makes that clear on many occasions in 30 Seconds. The point is that she knows she has an audience for this horse-pucky--and that audience put a fascist into the White House.

That audience would ban Muslims from entering the United States because they are Muslims--and it has a president who will utilize every nefarious means at his disposal to fulfill that promise.

That audience holds that the drowned child of the Syrian refugee is less valuable than the child of a wealthy white real estate mogul.

That audience will remain silent as the new president makes it impossible for citizens to know whether their new puppies came from puppy mills.

That audience will allow the president to sell off the country's national parks as private drilling sites to his cronies.

That audience thinks reservations are the natural condition of Native Americans, and would just as soon see the bravery and citizenship personified in the siege at Standing Rock crushed as give up driving their Jimmies.

That audience confirmed the far-right charlatan and donor Betsy DeVos for education czar, a religious ideologue poised to destroy public education and use tax dollars to rape the separation of church and state. DeVos is more concerned about Grizzlies attacking classrooms than she is about whether children become literate. Come to think of it--far better for the Trumpledites that we remain illiterate and ignorant. That's what makes DeVos perfect for education secretary.

That audience celebrates ignorance as a virtue.

That audience silenced Elizabeth Warren for daring to read a letter written by Coretta Scott King that lays out the bigotry of Jeff Sessions who, if confirmed as Attorney General of the United States, is likely to preside over the most racist and repressive voting restrictions the country has ever seen.

That audience would foul its water and air beyond reclamation in order to deny climate change.

That audience mouths "Energy Independence" and "jobs" as if these were magic-bean words--even after the evidence is made clear to them that hydrocarbon exports will weaken national security.

That audience made a CEO of Exxon-Mobil and "Friend of Putin" its Secretary of State.

That audience would rather be ruled by the autocracy/kleptocracy of a psycho-maniacal child-king via Twitter than do the hard work of actually being citizens.

That audience would allow the complete militarization of the police--making our communities effective fiefdoms of martial law.

That audience mistakes power for justice--at the absolute peril of the latter and the ultimate self-defeat of the former.

I could of course go on. But this is surely sufficient to show how important it is we remain not merely vigilant but insurgent against this tyranny.

Perhaps Lysk thinks a desiccated environment dominated by uber-wealthy white guys is a suitable life.

I do not.

And I will resist the violent illogic of the Trumpledite Autocracy until that moment sanity returns to our civic discourse and to our country.

Wendy Lynne Lee


For more photographs of the inaugural Indivisible action at Bloomsburg University, please see:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/wendylynnelee/albums/72157679824860996

Letter to Benjamin Bratton: "We Need to Talk about TED"

Dear Professor Bratton,

I wanted to take a moment to say "Thank you!" for "We need to talk about TED" (http://www.bratton.info/projects/talks/we-need-to-talk-about-ted/). Someone I care about was recently invited--and under fairly arbitrary and little-vetted circumstances--to give a TEDx talk (http://www.ted.com/). I was immediately suspicious, in part because I have worked--indeed, fought--for years to keep the humanities at my institution from being suffocated by TED-like substitutes for substantive, engaging, pedagogy--the sort you wished could go on lots longer than 18 minutes. I have taught philosophy at Bloomsburg University for nearly 21 years--and being witness to the erosion of the liberal arts in higher education has led many of my generation of academics to wonder whether the humanities education necessary to equip citizens to do the hard work of a democracy is simply dying on the vine--or was more mythology to begin with.

I tend to the latter.

Several years ago my own administration sought to institute a "transformation" of our general education requirements. The "new" Gen-Ed offers students a kind of TEDx experience of a "humanities" represented to them as a menu of "McCredits" on their way to job-focused majors cast as the "real" purpose of higher education. "[T]aking something with value and substance and coring it out so that it can be swallowed without chewing,"--that is exactly what our new "humanities" is posed to become--and it has driven me to think about early retirement from a profession I otherwise love. I aggressively led the charge to retain the integrity of our liberal arts programs (and was more grateful than ever for tenure)--but against the TEDx allure of "quick, cheap, easy, packaged McKnowledge" there seems to be little defense. Now I have gone "gorilla" and I very deliberately craft courses that offer students texts and tools for the critique of the institutions--government, corporate, "educational"--that would convince them that "freedom" is a row of "Duck Dynasty" CD choices at Walmart, or that education is just a necessary evil on the way to a career you can stand until the weekend arrives--when you drink 'til Monday, then do it all again. Last semester I taught an entire lovely term on The Communist Manifesto and its implications for the 21st century--good and bad. It was a blast. We all actually learned something. But like our new "humanities" programs, TEDx isn't about learning--that would involve real thinking and the possibility that one might be wrong--and you don't get all that much spiritual confirmation out of that.

I was particularly impressed by your question "But have you ever wondered why so little of the future promised in TED talks actually happens?" I think the question is not as much whether some of the ideas are right or wrong--some seem very compelling; others inspiring-sounding, but too vague to be meaningful, others just plain insipid. I think the question is whether actually creating the conditions for change is what TED is about at all. I think the answer here is plainly NO. Part of what makes the whole TED world-view, if it makes sense to call it that, so ready-for-satire is that, it stinks of a weird kind of Noblesse Oblige--important smart folks (or folks who are invited to think of themselves as important--however smart) who hold forth for 18 minutes on something that IS potentially of great value, allegedly making it more accessible to a wider audience--but without having pointed out that what's being made so available has been "cored out," potentially distorted, watered-down, bastardized, and sanitized to the point where all that's left is a sandwich of sound bytes that tastes sort of good, but once its gone, it's just, well, gone. That, I think, is naught but a prescription for, as you put it "civilizational disaster."

I think you're right on the dollar when you suggest that on the TED "worldview" if we talk long enough about world-changing ideas, the world will change--and that this is demonstrably false. I could not know this more clearly in my own life as an organizer in the Pennsylvania anti-extreme fossil fuel extraction movement. We have lots of "talkers"--many who REALLY have had some horrific experiences with the gas companies destroying their lands, their wells, their property values. It's not my aim to demean this. But if I have learned anything it's that however compelling are these stories, however galvanizing, they don't actually offer us meaningful avenues of real change. That argument for real change requires that folks do a LOT more than tell their stories, including telling them as a TEDx talk. It's easy-peasy to nod approvingly about how fucked-up things are, and then go out to dinner at an Olive Garden. It requires that we take risks, that we undertake the inconvenient, the unpopular, the sometimes turgid and not much for sexy work of, say, movement building, door to door, municipality to municipality if what we want is real change. And, as you imply, coming out of an 18 minute talk feeling like things are all OK is more akin to the manipulations and extortions of, say, EST than it is to any really meaningful communication.

Honestly, I don't want folks to feel good. I want them to get off their asses and DO something. There's nothin' about TEDx that I can see that gets folks to THAT.

Quite to the contrary.

I have lots more to say about your essay--I just really enjoyed it--in that sort of dark, vindicating sort-a-way. But I'll suffice for now with just a couple of one (or two)-liners on the specifics;

About T- for-Tech: It seems to me that critical theorists like Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and to some extent Jean Baudrillard make similar points about "cultural de-accelleration"--and that this too is right on. "Placebo technoradicalism" is just that, a largely blind faith in the techno-fix without much by way of any critical evaluation of what the tech is for--other than insuring we can just do faster, cheaper, more of the same. In this respect, much of that tech is deployed to inherently conservative ends--and some of it--improved surveillance tech, for example, is deployed (quite literally) to both conservative and arguably fascistic ends. "Our machines get smarter and we get stupider."

Yup. Ditto for E-for-Economic.

And on the other side of this, I have had some really testy interaction with the eco-primitivists--Derrick Jensen (Endgame)--who insist that if we simply "return" to some mythical ideal of our "roots" sans high tech that all will be well. Of course, as Jensen argues, someone will need to blow up the Hoover Dam to get THAT ball rolling, and it can't be him. He's the "visionary." As per usual, other folks get to do the dying--and we don't wanna talk about that; it's not the stuff of a TED-Kumbaya moment. I find both of these perspectives absurdly naive (and snotty), and both seem to think no further than a "we" who looks like an "us" that's pretty damn white, pretty damn privileged, and pretty damn male. Makes my blood boil.

"The placebo is worse than ineffective, it's harmful." This, I think, is the most important point you make--TED and TEDx are not just distracting--they're distracting in ways that encourage us to remain complacent--to just "carry on" re-posting on our FB pages, checking our cell phone news apps. And even worse--it encourages those suckered by the TED worldview to settle for, as you put it "affectation" over substance, Mc'Knowledge over the productive discomfort of critical evaluation, sitting on our asses while "others" do the messier work of change. All the while the climate warms, GMOs continue to dominate access to (bad) food, factory farming proceeds with nary a whimper from the dinner party at Olive Garden, and folks are comforted by stupidities like "if you've got nothing to hide, you needn't worry that your government surveils you" and the like--by the truckload.

So, thanks Professor Bratton--your essay wasn't exactly cheery, but it made me feel less like I'm the crazy.


Wendy