[I]t’s only certain groups that we’re told must have their actions or interpretations of the world placed outside the bounds of general standards of truth or knowledge, because somehow their consciousness is so fragile or alien that it cannot survive in anything other than a sheltered safe space of its own. If there is or are “Native American epistemolog(ies)” as Saitta suggests, it’s been produced in dialogue, not in isolation; it is part of the world we made together, not alien from it. Other ways of being and seeing don’t need separate-but-equal standards created solely on their behalf in order to exert a powerful humbling force on positivistic or empirical visions of scholarly truth.

As I suggested earlier, people who make that direct comparison [of any opponent to a Nazi] really don’t understand a great deal about the Nazis or Julius Streicher in general. And as I said, it tends to stop discussion because how to you respond to the accusation. It’s a kind of 'have you stopped beating your wife?' accusation. There’s no way to respond to that without in some way giving credence, and so, what do you say when someone says you’re a Nazi, you’re the new Hitler? 'Well, no, no I’m not?' The very defense in some ways gives it a kind of prominence.

And as I said, it also polarizes political discussion to the point where it’s very difficult to talk reasonably to someone who thinks you’re a Nazi or out to commit genocide or whatever.

So yeah, what it does is it rallies. It’s a technique of propaganda that the Nazis were very good at themselves. That is, you accuse your enemy of every possible offense and you don’t care if it alienates the enemy because you’re not really speaking to them. You’re speaking to your own followers. Your own followers cheer, “Yeah, he’s really giving it to ‘em.” The enemy is outraged but you’re not trying to convert them. The Nazis weren’t trying to convert the Jews. Okay? They didn’t want to. They wanted to get rid of them. So they didn’t care what the Jews thought about their rhetoric. They only cared about whether or not it worked on the target population.

We noted (or at least alluded to) this phenomenon back in February in our essay "The Imam of Indigenism" and in June '05 in "Ward Churchill's Ghost Dance."

After 15 years in academic life, I have concluded that the vast majority of faculty members are like the vast majority of any comfortable professionals in a corporate capitalist empire: Morally lazy, usually cowardly, and unwilling and/or unable to engage with critics. I say that with no sense of superiority; I can look at my own life and see examples of such laziness and cowardice.

I find much of the university with which I am familiar (the humanities and the social sciences) to be populated with self-important and self-indulgent caricatures. Much of the intellectual work is trivial, irrelevant, and/or flabby. Most components of the contemporary U.S. university have been bought off, and bought off fairly cheaply. As a result it is, in the words of my friend Abe Osheroff, the institution is generally "a fucking dead rock."

Elizabeth Hoffman is the poster girl for the Peter Principle in academic administration. After rising to her level on incompetence as president of University of Colorado for $400,000 a year, the brilliant powers that be at Iowa State somehow think they are going to buy LESS incompetence for $275,000 -- the salary she will be paid to step down to the second-highest level of incompetence she can attain in administrative academia -- ISU provost.