Robert Mugabe finally resigns: Daily Bullshit, November 20-22, 2017

benfell

Updates

  1. Originally published, November 21, 11:34 am.
  2. November 22, 11:11 am:

Zimbabwe

Gabriele Steinhauser and Bernard Mpofu, “Mugabe Resigns as Zimbabwe’s Leader After 37 Years, Parliament Speaker Says,” Wall Street Journal, November 21, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/zimbabwe-launches-impeachment-process-against-mugabe-1511279070

Sexual harassment and assault

I’m trying to remember that because I opposed Hillary Clinton,[1] I’m the misogynist here. Last year, I quoted[2] Liza Featherstone:

Hillary Clinton’s mudslinging and slut-shaming campaigns against women who claimed to have had consensual sex with her husband are well documented. In his memoir, George Stephanopoulos, quotes Hillary Clinton as saying of one such woman [Connie Hamzy], “We have to destroy her story.” Hillary biographer Carl Bernstein describes Hillary directing an “aggressive, explicit” campaign to discredit Gennifer Flowers, an actress who said she had a long affair with Bill Clinton. She referred to Flowers as “trailer trash.” In a tough 2008 essay for Slate, Melinda Henneberger and Dahlia Lithwick wrote that Clinton “consistently relates to and protects and stands with the oppressors in the gender wars … she invariably sees [Bill] as the victim, preyed upon by a series of female aggressors.”[3]

And, as if “offenses ranging from groping to exposing his genitals to rape”[4] were ever okay, James Carville said, “There is no doubt the ground has shifted between that time and now. There’s no question this is a different environment, probably for the better.”[5]

But oh yes, I’m the misogynist.

Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Sen. Al Franken accused of inappropriate behavior by a second woman,” November 20, 2017, https://www.jta.org/2017/11/20/news-opinion/politics/sen-al-franken-accused-of-inappropriate-behavior-by-a-second-woman

Open access journals

[W]e are getting fleeced. The major scientific publishers enjoy profit margins in excess of 30 percent. Such profits are stratospheric, well over the average for every business sector of the Fortune 500. Publishers are getting rich on the backs of underfunded academic libraries and the unpaid labor of academics who serve as editors, reviewers, and authors.[6]

Then there’s “open access,” meant to solve this problem. However, this “does not eradicate the paywall, but instead moves the cost burden in front of researchers themselves”[7]:

[O]pen access is clearly not freely open to the scholars who are required to pay exorbitant fees to publish their results, often out of their own pockets. Graduate students who wish to publish two open-access articles a year in the journals of their choice might need to use more than a quarter of their annual income to do so, if they don’t have large grants to cover the fees. One journal that is exclusively open access required graduate students to provide copies of personal bank statements in order to be considered for a fee reduction. That same journal also has denied fee reductions to students who don’t have external funding and who earn less than $20,000 a year.[8]

All this is one aspect of a malaise that prominently appears in the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed. (Vitae is a project of the former.) It seems like everything is going wrong in academia, from the problem of adjuncts, to the neoliberal reduction of education to job training, to a renewed privileging of quantitative over qualitative inquiry, to arbitrarily delimited ‘disciplines,’ to violence stemming from national political polarization, to, here, publishing.

Andrew V. Suarez and Terry McGlynn, “The Fallacy of Open-Access Publication,” Vitae, November 17, 2017, https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1948-the-fallacy-of-open-access-publication

Unauthorized migration

We obviously do not know what Haitians will do as they lose temporary protected status.[9] I don’t see how one reaches a conclusion other than that the Trump administration is creating a new class of unauthorized migrants to scapegoat. And all I can say is that this antipathy toward the other is breathtaking and, to me, unfathomable.

Alicia A. Caldwell, “Judge Permanently Blocks Trump Order on Sanctuary Cities,” Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/judge-permanently-blocks-trump-order-on-sanctuary-cities-1511234813

Alicia A. Caldwell and Arian Campo-Flores, “Trump Administration Ends Humanitarian Protections for Haitians,” Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-administration-ends-humanitarian-protections-for-haitians-1511229004

  1. [1]David Benfell, “Updated (again and again and again): Damnation by faint praise: Sanders claims to be more electable than Clinton,” Not Housebroken, March 6, 2016, https://disunitedstates.org/2016/03/06/damnation-by-faint-praise-sanders-claims-to-be-more-electable-than-clinton/↩
  2. [2]David Benfell, “Yes, Hillary Clinton must answer for Bill Clinton’s sexual assaults,” Not Housebroken, October 10, 2016, https://disunitedstates.org/2016/10/10/yes-hillary-clinton-must-answer-for-bill-clintons-sexual-assaults/↩
  3. [3]Liza Featherstone, “Hillary Clinton’s Faux Feminism,” Truthout, February 28, 2016, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/35006-hillary-clinton-s-faux-feminism“↩
  4. [4]Karen Tumulty and Katie Mettler, “Abuse allegations have revived scrutiny of Bill Clinton — and divided Democrats,” Washington Post, November 17, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/abuse-allegations-have-revived-scrutiny-of-bill-clinton–and-divided-democrats/2017/11/17/3d1711c8-cba4-11e7-b244-2d22ac912500_story.html↩
  5. [5]James Carville, quoted in Karen Tumulty and Katie Mettler, “Abuse allegations have revived scrutiny of Bill Clinton — and divided Democrats,” Washington Post, November 17, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/abuse-allegations-have-revived-scrutiny-of-bill-clinton–and-divided-democrats/2017/11/17/3d1711c8-cba4-11e7-b244-2d22ac912500_story.html↩
  6. [6]Andrew V. Suarez and Terry McGlynn, “The Fallacy of Open-Access Publication,” Vitae, November 17, 2017, https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1948-the-fallacy-of-open-access-publication↩
  7. [7]Andrew V. Suarez and Terry McGlynn, “The Fallacy of Open-Access Publication,” Vitae, November 17, 2017, https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1948-the-fallacy-of-open-access-publication↩
  8. [8]Andrew V. Suarez and Terry McGlynn, “The Fallacy of Open-Access Publication,” Vitae, November 17, 2017, https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1948-the-fallacy-of-open-access-publication↩
  9. [9]Alicia A. Caldwell and Arian Campo-Flores, “Trump Administration Ends Humanitarian Protections for Haitians,” Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-administration-ends-humanitarian-protections-for-haitians-1511229004↩

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.