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<p>I do feel I have to say this now. I respect the moderation of
this list, so I did not make a big deal of it when Murat bounced a
contribution of mine early Wednesday morning. The rejection:
"While your post writes about a seismic event, it is completely
off the topic of<br>
this week's event." My response was to Alan's heartfelt lament
about the events of Tuesday night, and there have been Trump
related, political responses since then. To be fair, maybe I was
off topic if we parse hard enough, an activity I am totally not
interested in in any case.<br>
</p>
<p>The post was very controversial indeed, about the important need
to protect people right now, and to organize community self
defense as the first priority. By Thursday, one of my students (a
woman of color, though you might have guessed that) had already
had rocks thrown at her car by a white man in another car who was
yelling something incomprehensible through closed windows and road
noise. Her response to the incident is most inspiring! I found her
in the undergrad computer lab the following day - a national
holiday - working on her parallel compute project. She told me, we
can't let them take away our education! I nearly broke into tears.<br>
<br>
My point is, maybe we are not really ready for what is about to
happen. We don't want to discuss some very hard realities that
exist on the ground. By "we" I mean specifically the kinds of
liberal intellectuals and artists who inhabit this list. And
especially I mean those most like myself: whites who feel less
under the gun (literally) today than our brothers and sisters who
are currently active targets. Not that I know exactly what to do,
I admit. I just have some ideas, maybe worth rejection as ideas,
and my post was a call to think through a very hard situation in a
very serious way that as I perhaps indicated, will be
uncomfortable to most. Assuming that I might have had a legitimate
point of view, I will leave it to the list moderators to decide if
that post has any merit.<br>
</p>
above all stay safe,<br>
Brett Stalbaum<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 11/13/2016 10:54 AM, Murat
Nemet-Nejat wrote:<br>
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<div>Hi everybody, since the beginning of the month, every
time someone encountered an idea or subject, or image one
disagreed with, the reaction has been one of outrage and
dismissive withdrawal or one-liners instead of engaging with
the adverse statement or object, maybe assuming that other <b>might</b>
have a legitimate point of view. This is extremely
unfortunate</div>
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