Remember, September 11, 2001 was a mostly peaceful day of air travel. Out of thousands of commercial air flights scheduled that day, only four ended in fiery crashes.
And yet we considered that entirely unacceptable — and quite rightfully so! — and spent ten years of considerable effort to hunt down those responsible for it having been only "mostly" peaceful.
The accusation of Nazi has become the bellwether for progressive censorious thuggery. Could you fill a single school gymnasium with all the true Nazis in America? How many of today's high school graduates even know what a Nazi is or who we fought in WW2? Truth be told, given Mussolini's' definition of fascism, it is now becoming the dominant system on the planet and certainly advocated by statists of all electable parties and captured institutions thinly disguised as progressivism, public-private partnerships, stakeholder capitalism, etc.
I'm going to borrow that excellent rattle snake analogy.
Well yeah – if you’re gonna do it that way... 😉 ‘courage of your convictions’ includes defending those convictions openly. Insults and censorship are the refuge of those who don’t really believe in their convictions, actually cannot support them, or fear testing them at all. We see all three in the woke contingent, the progressive mindset that knows with certainty what is right, what is true, and what is best for you, but can’t let you think to the contrary. Thus the ultimate question – what are they afraid of?
I hope Substack has not buckled... sunshine is always the best answer. Shine it into every corner. As you point out, a snake in the open is not dangerous.
The question that Claudine Gay was asked by Rep. Stefanik was *not* whether calls for genocide against Jews might be "acceptable" to any reasonable or decent person or, if you will, university. If that were the question the answer would be unequivocally No.
The question was, "Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment: yes or no?" Those rules are set forth in a written document:
That document makes very clear that Gay's answer, "It can be, depending on the context" was correct, and that Stefanik's bullying and harassing insistence on "yes or no" was ignorant political grandstanding.
Otherwise, this is an excellent post that I fully support.
I don't think Stefanik thought Gay was misrepresenting Harvard's policy, nor was any hypothetical incorrectness of Gay's answers the reason so many people thought she should go.
I think what appalled Stefanik -- and many others besides -- was the fact that what Gay said *was* Harvard's policy, and that Gay was apparently pretty cool with it.
I mean, Gay *could* have said well, this is in fact our current policy, but you know what -- I think that's complete crap, it was clearly written by idiots, and I intend to change it forthwith. Had she done so, I think she (and Harvard) would have come out fine.
"In view of Harvard's current policies, a 'yes' or 'no' answer is not possible because several contextual factors are considered in deciding whether speech is discriminatory or harassing in violation of policy. However, it is my personal belief that ..." Is that the preface to your hypothetical suggested answer? Assuming Stefanik would have allowed Gay to get that far, would you, as hypothetical advisor to Gay, suggest something like, "the policy should be to make some statements per se punishable without any regard to context or precisely who is harmed, and how, by their utterance"?
Heck no. That's just more of the mealy-mouthed doublespeak that got her in trouble in the first place. "Duplicative language," forsooth. I gave you my suggestion above as to what I think she should have said. Plain and simple and true, which is what Stefanik wanted, and which it would be very reasonable to expect from someone in a leadership position.
If Gay wasn't capable of such direct and true speech in a moment of high pressure, she had no business in that job. That's why leaders get the big bucks and have the fancy office -- because they are expected to perform well under tough circumstances. If you're saying she couldn't hack the pressure, well then, she was clearly at her Peter Principle level already and the ultimate outcome should not surprise.
A good thought experiment is to imagine how Gay et al. would have answered had they been asked whether equivalent genocidal declarations would have been acceptable against, say, African Americans, Muslims, gays, etc. My guess is that they would have been paragons of moral clarity. (Caveat: I didn't watch the hearings in full, so perhaps someone did ask such a question.) But, so it seems, with Jews, there's lots of leeway for academic hairsplitting and equivocation.
In Alfred Hitchcock's "Rope," Rupert (Jimmy Stewart) is a pompous prep-school housemaster who has plied his students with Nietzschean nihilism and had them debate the circumstances under which murder is justifiable. In the film, he is horrified to learn that two former students took these discussions seriously. Today's academe is rife with such gamesmanship. Except that, by the end of the film, we understand that Rupert is a man of moral clarity who pretended to be otherwise for the sake of academic banter. I'm not confident that today's academic quibblers possess that much capacity for introspection.
> Plain and simple and true, which is what Stefanik wanted, and which it would be very reasonable to expect from someone in a leadership position.
It's a reasonable thing to expect from anyone and everyone.
"But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil." Situations like this just highlight the wisdom of these ancient words.
I think the problem many people had with Gay's (and Harvard's) was that is not how Harvard has acted in the recent past. They have dis-invited speakers because of what the speaker has said. They have rescinded the acceptance of a student because of what he said several years before -- and something he had repeated apologized for. There is a reason Harvard ranked dead last among all ranked universities in FIRE's College Free Speech Rankings.
The policy was okay on the face of it. It is just not how Harvard has acted in the recent past.
That is not my first problem with Gay's point of view. My problem is that she was representing an abhorrent viewpoint. Saying yeah it's probably OK that Jewish students are obliged to listen to people shouting outside their dorms, while they're trying to study, that everyone like them should be driven into the sea and killed, or should have to walk around some group holding up signs to that effect on their way to a final exam -- nope, that doesn't pass the smell test. I know moral cowardice and sleazy equivocation when I see it, and that's what that was.
There's a time and place for all things. If you want to call for the extermination of the Jews, that write a Substack and expound at length. I will defend your right to do so, and Substack's right to put it on the Internet to make money. If a Jewish student doesn't want to read such swill, he can close his browser, click an enticing ad featuring underdressed models, move on. Or he can gird his loins and write his own Substack suggesting everyone who thinks like that should be used for dangerous medical experiments. Free speech, huzzah. We'll count how many subscriptions each essay gets and learn something.
But a reverence for free speech does not extend to compelling Jewish students to run a gauntlet of ignorant hate on their way to calculus lecture, and a due regard for the value of a civil society -- where we all do not need to walk around armed and armored, physically and mentally, at all times, like it was AD 1100 in Saxony -- would have an administration put a firm stop to that, ejecting the offenders if necessary, on account of being a student at Harvard is a privilege, not any kind of right. They can stand around in Harvard Square, outside the gates, and hoot and holler all they want.
If someone crashes a wedding in order to yell accusations of whoredom and drug-dealing at the bride, through a bullhorn, true or not, and urge the guests to strip her naked and beat her, a proper reverence for free speech does not compel the groom to merely smile through gritted teeth -- ejecting the boors forthwith, boot up the ass optional, is perfectly reasonable.
With respect to any inconsistency of Harvard's policy, that does not matter nearly as much to me, at least. I do not judge statements and viewpoints solely or even primarily on the basis of consistency. It's a secondary consideration, after we clear away the question of the morality or propriety per se. You might say I take to heart Emerson's famously acidic comment on an emphasis on consistency, and don't want to be plausibly accused of having a small mind.
Well, the transcript was not pre-edited for brevity ha ha. But I am often tempted to speak up when I encounter the modern fetishization of hypocrisy that has elevated it from venial to mortal sin:
For the most part I agree. There's also the fact that all of this is embedded in an environment where sporting an Israeli flag can bring on verbal ostracism and harassment, where professors feel free to menace "Zionists" in class, etc.--and where no such behavior is tolerated if aimed at any other group. (Maybe, as with Jews, "context" applies to Asians on today's campuses, too.)
I read the rules again because I had to glance and sign something similar at one time in the greater Boston area. I believe the context of harassment was met. If,as they teach in a class about micro-aggression, a listener is offended than it is a micro-aggression and can be considered harassment, how could calling for the murder of the Jews on campus not be harassment? This wasn’t about a classroom discussion about WWII and Germany, to give an idea of context. It was standing in the middle of the University calling for the death of a people and then physically intimidating them. If in fact that was the context it would have been very easy for Dr Gay to say depending on the context and the context of harassment was met. The three “Presidents” didn’t do that.
I am most appalled by Sally Kornbluth, because (1) MIT is my alma mater, and I would have hoped for better from them[1], and (2) because her predecessor was also a profound disappointment, what with his failure to take responsibility for his part in the shameful debasement and deception the Media Lab went through to get Jeffrey Epstein's money[2].
Now I hear they have also been discriminating against men for the last few decades in order to build an artificially sex-balanced class[3]. I mean, that's great for the dating prospects for MIT men, which had traditionally been poor, what with being socially awkward nerds *and* very few women around -- but my God how bitterly unfair to all the young men sacrificed on yet another sterile altar of social signalling.
I can't express how disappointed I am, in what I would have (apparently naively) though would be one of the last bastions of pure meritocracy -- a school which was so dedicated (in my experience) to pure empirical science and engineering. I've done my small share over the years directing highly talented young people interested in science and engineering to them. Now...I'm not so sure I ever will again. I won't say it's exactly like discovering your beloved father is a pedophile, but it's in that universality class.
----------------
[1] If nothing else, it has traditionally had an outsized representation of Jewish students and faculty.
[2] Well *after* his conviction for underage trafficking in Florida. They snuck him in to woo him, and carefully hid his presence from anyone they thought would be (quite reasonably) horrified. Former President Reif was complicit, albeit only tangentially and mostly after the fact, but when he was called out for it he immediately sank to Claudine Gay's moral standards and Sergeant Schulzed ("I knew nothing!") his way through it.
Just saw a related article. In brief, the author argues that Gramsci's long march through the institutions isn't turning out as its progenitors expected. Their strategy was to take over respected institutions and the docile American public would be let toward Cultural Marxism and all its trappings. Instead, they took over the institutions, but much of the public simply lost respect for and faith in the organizations. He concludes, "Where is this phenomenon likely to lead? It seems quite improbable that the trends in institutional faith will see any kind of dramatic shift (except, perhaps, further downwards). Such a race to the bottom signals something perhaps more revolutionary: a major reconfiguration or wholesale elimination of the scorned institutions themselves. It’s anyone’s guess which will be tossed on its ear first — universities, say, or Congress. But whether these institutional shifts occur through evolution or revolution will have major implications for the stability of society itself."
You are more precise, so thanks. But I'm still OK with my own wording. I meant acceptable within the rules of behavior established by Harvard. It's a binary--unacceptable behavior is punished, and acceptable behavior is not. I disagree that Stefanik's questions were either bullying or harassment. In my estimation, she performed a valuable service in demonstrating the moral vacuity and rhetorical ineptitude of the heads of three of the most prestigious universities in America.
Recently I applied for a job in public health. The health department was a newly created county health department and I was to be the first hired as a Community Health Educator. During my application interview I suggested that this new department was like a garden. And I posed a question - what is the difference between a garden and the wilderness? My answer - the gardener... And I likened the new department director to the gardener and myself to a gardener’s assistant. This seemed to be well received and I was hired. But I was not the typical gardener and in just over a year there were weeds in the garden who managed to choke me out of my job. I was accused of ridiculous offenses (14 separate complaints of which two were ‘substantiated’) and the HR investigation recommended no action against me along with a reeducation of the staff regarding workplace standards that had been violated by the weeds.
But how does one go about reeducating the weeds choking out the flowers trying to bloom on our campus gardens? One famous teacher suggested tossing them into the fire and be done with them. Are there practical alternatives to this?
Conversation assumes a willingness to converse. Exhaustive conversation assumes a willingness to converse exhaustively. I doubt that that is a possibility in these cases. I'm more inclined to insist on punish those who issue frivolous complaints. Operationally, that, admittedly, can be tough. And in today's ideology-infused HR departments, I'm quite sure it wouldn't be applied fairly.
The only real way to deal with weeds is to uproot them. If you break or cut off the visible part that grows above ground, they grow back and continue to grow back forever. But if you pull up the roots that nourish them, then the weed is gone forever.
Yes - quite so. But our analogy breaks down here, does it not, when we’re talking about ‘human’ weeds. Might our gardener find a way to transform them into flowers? Or at least somehow banish them from the garden to some patch of wilderness where they might serve some useful purpose?
This is irrelevant to the current discussion--and has NOTHING to do with your intentions--but be cautious about using the expression "human weeds." In 1923, Margaret Sanger said that a primary purpose of birth control was, "the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extirpation of defective stocks — those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization."
AGAIN, IT'S CLEAR THAT YOU WEREN'T TALKING ABOUT THIS. Just noting that "human weeds" has a sordid history and is something of a loaded term.
I don't think you can, if you take a head-on approach, of trying to persuade people to alter their philosophical viewpoint by argument. That pretty much never works, and, besides which, I rather suspect most people who visibly adhere to these philosophies do so out of squalid practical concerns -- because it makes them part of the right crowd, because it useful to the career, because it disobliges someone or some demographic from which they want distance or independence. Since they didn't come to these philosophies via rational consideration, you can't argue them out of those philosophies by rational consideration. Furthermore, to the extent the philosophies are adopted for practical reasons, nothing will change until the practical reasons change.
Which is I think where one would need to start. That is, the wider culture needs to (ironically) reduce its tolerance for the folly of youth. We need to stop treating 28-year-old PhD students as functionally equivalent to 13-year-olds yelling "fuck" at Thanksgiving dinner because they want to shock Mom. We need to return to a standard where by age 18 at the latest, let us say, you are expected to act like a courteous and reasonable adult, and you cannot indulge antisocial or narcissist idiocy in public free of significant social consequence.
It would probably help considerably to find a way to return the costs of college education to the student and family more directly than they are now, also, particularly (also ironically) the many who are massively subsidized for middle class white guilt reasons.
A single typical 50-minute lecture at a modestly expensive college costs $225 in direct (tuition) costs, plus probably another $100 in living costs, plus probably $250 in opportunity costs (the money a person *could* be earning if he wasn't in college). If *I* was sitting in a big room listening to someone talk, along with 150 others, and it was costing me $10/minute -- well, I would make damn sure what he was saying was directly applicable to improving my well-being substantially and pretty soon. It would have to be very practical and very focussed stuff. Tell me how to solder circuits, how to finagle the tax code, how to impress a beautiful woman, how to speak Spanish, how to program a computer -- yeah, that works. But I would have zero patience for someone charging me that much of my hard-earned cash to ramble on about funky sociological theories or encourage intellectual onanism.
But *how* to return a very real feeling of *cost* to the experience of the student is a bear of a problem. Students by nature are poor, young people are by nature terrible at anticipating the burden of paying off a loan (as well as too inexperienced to fully grok the Life Is Awfully Short fact that time is a terrible thing to waste), and there are genuinely people whose study it would do us good (as a nation) to subsidize.
Maybe you just take everyone who graduates HS with an adequate GPA, who would qualify for some college or other, and you divide the tax money we spend on higher education on them. Send 'em a check on their graduation day. Here's $50,000 in cash, in an envelope marked "College Fund," but nobody's going to audit how you spend it, so do as you please. I kind of feel even callow 18-year-olds would suddenly be a lot more picky about where higher-education dollars were spent. (Plus if college weren't the right approach, if they were better at entrpreneurship, say, we would have encouraged *that* instead with some useful seed money.) Would even the average high-school senior *really* part with his actual real money, right there in his pocket, to merely listen to some bitter churl blather on about microaggressions and the correct use of neo-pronouns? I find it doubty.
Adam Smith thought teachers should be paid by students individually, rather than by universities: "The discipline of colleges and universities is in general contrived, not for the benefit of the students, but for the interest, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters. Its object is, in all cases, to maintain the authority of the master, and whether he neglects or performs his duty, to oblige the students in all cases to behave to him as if he performed it with the greatest diligence and ability. ... No discipline is ever requisite to force attendance upon lectures which are really worth the attending, as is well known wherever any such lectures are given."
Weren't they, originally? Since the university originated in the monastery, and the original source of income was tutoring the scions of dukes how to read and write. I seem to vaguely recall Planck or maybe Helmholtz having it rough because all his lectures sailed over his students' heads and nobody wanted to pay to be made equal parts baffled and humiliated...
But we can already see a problem there in what is already happening: I get from many of my old friends in the academy that today, in an era of declining enrollments and budgets, it is necessary to truckle to the whims and hysterias of the students far more than one might like. It would be a shame if the academy degenerated into only teaching that which pleaseth the wet behind the ears. The idioms of Taylor Swift and philosophy of Roblox, while Austen and Adam Smith moulder -- one fears if not Idiocracy a culture too shallow to wet above one's spiritual metatarsals. Bah.
It seems to me the real beneficiaries of education, and those who can judge its value and price best, are the future incarnations of students. We need the greatest economists and physicists[1] to figure out a way for each of us at age 45 to fund and direct the education of our 18-year-old selves.
Yes. If I remember correctly, Smith said he dreaded the thought that professors might one day be paid salaries, rather than having to sell their qualities to students. I agree with your concerns, and my answer is that the problem is homogenizing educations. If one wishes to attend a university that teaches Taylor Swift rather than Jonathan Swift, I'm fine with that--as long as we don't have accreditation boards and the Department of Education insisting that Taylor must be a part of every school's curriculum. When I was in college, I knew of other institutions whose policies seemed to be "pay your tuition, get a degree--and, apparently, employers were pretty good at recognizing them for what they were. BTW, I did write a column on the rhetoric of Taylor Swift. :) I actually found it to be a strangely interesting subject. https://graboyes.substack.com/p/the-rhetoric-of-swift-taylor-not
> No discipline is ever requisite to force attendance upon lectures which are really worth the attending, as is well known wherever any such lectures are given.
Was this "well known" in Adam Smith's time? Because it certainly isn't today; we know that people today will require "no discipline" to attend things that are *entertaining,* which is very much not the same thing as valuable.
The Framers of the Constitution believed in the competition of ideas as surely as they believed in market competition, but I think they also believed as you noted that social norms also placed boundaries on what could be said. Let the ideas flow, and you’ll thousands listening to one speaker, hundreds to another, and a handful to a third. As long as listeners remain lawful, without torches and destruction, we should be ok. By the way, combining your clear thinking prose with your artistic ‘eye’ with Midjourney is outstanding. A great hook to remember the rattlesnake and the focus of the post.
You tickle my curiosity. Free markets were certainly part of our national DNA from fairly early on, but I realize that I don’t specifically associate that idea with the Founders and Framers — except insofar is it is a corollary to Liberty in general. But I recall that in the original specs, the federal government’s only source of revenue was tariffs.
Has anybody written anything accessible about the development of economic thought in early America?
Yes, there is- only I’ve not been able to quickly locate it (my wife likes to rearrange my collection). The thread is the presence of Scottish descended folks in the colonies ( if I recall correctly) that were professors and students (I think Alexander Hamilton was in this group) at Princeton and other universities that were well acquainted with Adam Smith and John Locke and combined thoughts on Natural Law and free markets and said ‘why not apply this to ideas? giving us freedom of the press, and why not apply this to our faith, giving us freedom of religion. The way the author explained it made compelling sense.
Thanks for the comments--and especially your appreciation for the snake! I do put a fair amount of work into the topmost image of each article. For me, it's an important component of the piece.
Excellent. Back in the day that’s what I expected from a “universe” -ity education. Hear, discuss, etc, other thoughts, ideas, ideals to expand the mind. Explore the universe of thought.
Another important point is this highlights that what we see today is not new.
Excellent essay sir. I've been concerned about this ridiculous dust-up over Substack. Thank you for writing about it. As you no doubt know, speech codes in the house of medicine have exploded and are becoming not only oppressive but dangerous.
Indeed, medicine has really bought into this stuff -- an boy is that dangerous. Though not unprecedented. Medicine also loved eugenics. Western medicine also had a 1600-year speech code that said "If you contradict Galen, we'll burn you at the stake."
I listened somewhat carefully to the questions that Stefanik asked and the answers. Stefanik asked about the Universities code of conduct and she was answered with a recitation of the 5th amendment. If a student proposed that genocide of the Jews was appropriate on the Boston commons or on Memorial drive than the 5th Amendment and context could be considered, but it was clear the question was about the code of conduct and that is also clear.
Suggesting the genocide of a group currently and clearly committing genocide DOES have a certain "balance," though, wouldn't you say? Or maybe the real group isn't Jews. Or Gazans, for that matter ...
Here is a real world example of how removing the rattler off a rattlesnake can (or could have been) deadly.
In the early 2000's our young family of 5 children and mom and dad were on our way to the Colorado mountains for a week of camping, biking, fishing and other fun. But I had a RE closing down in the Denver metro on the way. So, while I was inside an office building watching over the document signings, the wife and kids (ages 2-11) were out in the sparse parking lot playing. The office building we were in was located across a road from a quite large state park with lots of open space and brush and wildlife. There happened to be quite a bit of road construction/widening going on nearby. And most of the tough, hard labor on these construction sites was provided by Mexican immigrants.
As it turns out, some young men from Mexico are quite adept at catching rattlesnakes with their bare hands and in turn, they enjoy removing the rattles as a prize. Don't ask me how they do this. I suppose they do it for the rush and the challenge. Our family lived outside the Denver area on some acreage so we occasionally had to deal with these quite deadly snakes. As a result, I had trained my five to always be watching and LISTENING for that chilling sound. It is quite unique and hair raising.
During the closing my eldest burst into the closing room and breathlessly stated that she thought there was a rattler out in a planter box right below where the kids had been playing. I asked, calmly, was it making any noise? She replied, no, but it was coiled and looked like one as it had a triangular shaped head. I assumed she, being only 10, had simply misidentified a bull snake, which is harmless, with a rattlesnake, which is deadly, particularly to children with small bodies and small vascular systems.
But to be on the cautious side, I walked out to inspect. Low and behold, it was indeed a rattler coiled and quite angry, right below the retaining wall my children had been playing on, including my youngest who was barely old enough to walk.
I quickly assessed that I needed to put the rattler down as it was a dire danger to anyone who might come upon it before it grew its next skin and some new rattles, which could be several weeks. These were the days before concealed carry (at least for me) so I didn't have a pistol to do the job. No shovel, no hoe (please, no Don Imus jokes here, K?), really nothing that would help me kill the snake without putting myself in harms way.
So, I took out my pocket knife and proceeded to cut a branch from a nearby bush, sharpened the bigger end, and approached the snake. My plan (lol) was to try and stab the snake thru the top of the head while it remained coiled. Well, that didn't work out too well, for as soon as I got close enough with my improvised spear, the snake struck. Didn't get me but I nearly wet myself. But now I had a better plan. A viper is at its most vulnerable right after extending its body to strike. So, the snake recoiled and I induced another strike, this time stabbing the snake right thru the top of the head. Quite the lucky spear thrust.
I brought the snake out onto the parking lot and like a good naturist, I decided that it was only fair that he and I have it out fairly, man to snake, so to speak. So, I placed him on the smooth pavement (snakes can't really move well on smooth surfaces, there is nothing to push off on) and promptly ran over him with our suburban.
By the time I had stabbed the snake, quite a crowd of folks had formed from inside the offices. All were women. I can confidently state, that had my wife and children had not been present, I could have probably gotten laid by half of them.
So, moral of the story? Don't squelch free speech and don't mess with a red neck with a pocket knife.
Great story! I'm reminded of Australian YouTuber and medieval weapon enthusiast Shad Brooks (aka. Shadiversity) talking about the time when, as a teen, he was at home alone with his siblings and someone found a deadly Australian snake in the backyard. With no adults around, he felt it was his responsibility to put the snake down before it could bite anyone, which he accomplished with the aid of a large shovel and a sword. (Apparently he's been into medieval weapons from an early age!)
Hear hear! Why people don't understand and accept this point is beyond me.
Are you allowed to say that? :)
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
— Upton Sinclair
Love this
I wasn't aware Substack had truckled.
Is there such thing as "mostly free" speech?
Kinda like "mostly peaceful" riots.
Remember, September 11, 2001 was a mostly peaceful day of air travel. Out of thousands of commercial air flights scheduled that day, only four ended in fiery crashes.
And yet we considered that entirely unacceptable — and quite rightfully so! — and spent ten years of considerable effort to hunt down those responsible for it having been only "mostly" peaceful.
The accusation of Nazi has become the bellwether for progressive censorious thuggery. Could you fill a single school gymnasium with all the true Nazis in America? How many of today's high school graduates even know what a Nazi is or who we fought in WW2? Truth be told, given Mussolini's' definition of fascism, it is now becoming the dominant system on the planet and certainly advocated by statists of all electable parties and captured institutions thinly disguised as progressivism, public-private partnerships, stakeholder capitalism, etc.
I'm going to borrow that excellent rattle snake analogy.
> Could you fill a single school gymnasium with all the true Nazis in America?
Per Scott Alexander, probably a gymnasium but not a stadium. https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/
Borrow away!
Currently outrunning Nazi by over a length: anti-Semite.
Which do you think will be applied to me (both have)?
Superb statement of why free speech matters, with many important examples that help make the case.
Many thanks.
Well yeah – if you’re gonna do it that way... 😉 ‘courage of your convictions’ includes defending those convictions openly. Insults and censorship are the refuge of those who don’t really believe in their convictions, actually cannot support them, or fear testing them at all. We see all three in the woke contingent, the progressive mindset that knows with certainty what is right, what is true, and what is best for you, but can’t let you think to the contrary. Thus the ultimate question – what are they afraid of?
I hope Substack has not buckled... sunshine is always the best answer. Shine it into every corner. As you point out, a snake in the open is not dangerous.
Yeah, they seem to have buckled.
The question that Claudine Gay was asked by Rep. Stefanik was *not* whether calls for genocide against Jews might be "acceptable" to any reasonable or decent person or, if you will, university. If that were the question the answer would be unequivocally No.
The question was, "Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment: yes or no?" Those rules are set forth in a written document:
https://provost.harvard.edu/files/provost/files/non-discrimination_and_anti-bullying_policies.pdf
That document makes very clear that Gay's answer, "It can be, depending on the context" was correct, and that Stefanik's bullying and harassing insistence on "yes or no" was ignorant political grandstanding.
Otherwise, this is an excellent post that I fully support.
I don't think Stefanik thought Gay was misrepresenting Harvard's policy, nor was any hypothetical incorrectness of Gay's answers the reason so many people thought she should go.
I think what appalled Stefanik -- and many others besides -- was the fact that what Gay said *was* Harvard's policy, and that Gay was apparently pretty cool with it.
I mean, Gay *could* have said well, this is in fact our current policy, but you know what -- I think that's complete crap, it was clearly written by idiots, and I intend to change it forthwith. Had she done so, I think she (and Harvard) would have come out fine.
"In view of Harvard's current policies, a 'yes' or 'no' answer is not possible because several contextual factors are considered in deciding whether speech is discriminatory or harassing in violation of policy. However, it is my personal belief that ..." Is that the preface to your hypothetical suggested answer? Assuming Stefanik would have allowed Gay to get that far, would you, as hypothetical advisor to Gay, suggest something like, "the policy should be to make some statements per se punishable without any regard to context or precisely who is harmed, and how, by their utterance"?
Heck no. That's just more of the mealy-mouthed doublespeak that got her in trouble in the first place. "Duplicative language," forsooth. I gave you my suggestion above as to what I think she should have said. Plain and simple and true, which is what Stefanik wanted, and which it would be very reasonable to expect from someone in a leadership position.
If Gay wasn't capable of such direct and true speech in a moment of high pressure, she had no business in that job. That's why leaders get the big bucks and have the fancy office -- because they are expected to perform well under tough circumstances. If you're saying she couldn't hack the pressure, well then, she was clearly at her Peter Principle level already and the ultimate outcome should not surprise.
A good thought experiment is to imagine how Gay et al. would have answered had they been asked whether equivalent genocidal declarations would have been acceptable against, say, African Americans, Muslims, gays, etc. My guess is that they would have been paragons of moral clarity. (Caveat: I didn't watch the hearings in full, so perhaps someone did ask such a question.) But, so it seems, with Jews, there's lots of leeway for academic hairsplitting and equivocation.
In Alfred Hitchcock's "Rope," Rupert (Jimmy Stewart) is a pompous prep-school housemaster who has plied his students with Nietzschean nihilism and had them debate the circumstances under which murder is justifiable. In the film, he is horrified to learn that two former students took these discussions seriously. Today's academe is rife with such gamesmanship. Except that, by the end of the film, we understand that Rupert is a man of moral clarity who pretended to be otherwise for the sake of academic banter. I'm not confident that today's academic quibblers possess that much capacity for introspection.
> Plain and simple and true, which is what Stefanik wanted, and which it would be very reasonable to expect from someone in a leadership position.
It's a reasonable thing to expect from anyone and everyone.
"But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil." Situations like this just highlight the wisdom of these ancient words.
I think the problem many people had with Gay's (and Harvard's) was that is not how Harvard has acted in the recent past. They have dis-invited speakers because of what the speaker has said. They have rescinded the acceptance of a student because of what he said several years before -- and something he had repeated apologized for. There is a reason Harvard ranked dead last among all ranked universities in FIRE's College Free Speech Rankings.
The policy was okay on the face of it. It is just not how Harvard has acted in the recent past.
That is not my first problem with Gay's point of view. My problem is that she was representing an abhorrent viewpoint. Saying yeah it's probably OK that Jewish students are obliged to listen to people shouting outside their dorms, while they're trying to study, that everyone like them should be driven into the sea and killed, or should have to walk around some group holding up signs to that effect on their way to a final exam -- nope, that doesn't pass the smell test. I know moral cowardice and sleazy equivocation when I see it, and that's what that was.
There's a time and place for all things. If you want to call for the extermination of the Jews, that write a Substack and expound at length. I will defend your right to do so, and Substack's right to put it on the Internet to make money. If a Jewish student doesn't want to read such swill, he can close his browser, click an enticing ad featuring underdressed models, move on. Or he can gird his loins and write his own Substack suggesting everyone who thinks like that should be used for dangerous medical experiments. Free speech, huzzah. We'll count how many subscriptions each essay gets and learn something.
But a reverence for free speech does not extend to compelling Jewish students to run a gauntlet of ignorant hate on their way to calculus lecture, and a due regard for the value of a civil society -- where we all do not need to walk around armed and armored, physically and mentally, at all times, like it was AD 1100 in Saxony -- would have an administration put a firm stop to that, ejecting the offenders if necessary, on account of being a student at Harvard is a privilege, not any kind of right. They can stand around in Harvard Square, outside the gates, and hoot and holler all they want.
If someone crashes a wedding in order to yell accusations of whoredom and drug-dealing at the bride, through a bullhorn, true or not, and urge the guests to strip her naked and beat her, a proper reverence for free speech does not compel the groom to merely smile through gritted teeth -- ejecting the boors forthwith, boot up the ass optional, is perfectly reasonable.
With respect to any inconsistency of Harvard's policy, that does not matter nearly as much to me, at least. I do not judge statements and viewpoints solely or even primarily on the basis of consistency. It's a secondary consideration, after we clear away the question of the morality or propriety per se. You might say I take to heart Emerson's famously acidic comment on an emphasis on consistency, and don't want to be plausibly accused of having a small mind.
You've said, in far greater detail, what I was briefly getting at in my nearby comment beginning "For the most part I agree ..."
Well, the transcript was not pre-edited for brevity ha ha. But I am often tempted to speak up when I encounter the modern fetishization of hypocrisy that has elevated it from venial to mortal sin:
https://www.likevillepodcast.com/articles/2020/8/14/our-obsession-with-hypocrisy-a-selection-from-neal-stephensons-the-diamond-age-2000
I like the long version. :)
For the most part I agree. There's also the fact that all of this is embedded in an environment where sporting an Israeli flag can bring on verbal ostracism and harassment, where professors feel free to menace "Zionists" in class, etc.--and where no such behavior is tolerated if aimed at any other group. (Maybe, as with Jews, "context" applies to Asians on today's campuses, too.)
I read the rules again because I had to glance and sign something similar at one time in the greater Boston area. I believe the context of harassment was met. If,as they teach in a class about micro-aggression, a listener is offended than it is a micro-aggression and can be considered harassment, how could calling for the murder of the Jews on campus not be harassment? This wasn’t about a classroom discussion about WWII and Germany, to give an idea of context. It was standing in the middle of the University calling for the death of a people and then physically intimidating them. If in fact that was the context it would have been very easy for Dr Gay to say depending on the context and the context of harassment was met. The three “Presidents” didn’t do that.
I am most appalled by Sally Kornbluth, because (1) MIT is my alma mater, and I would have hoped for better from them[1], and (2) because her predecessor was also a profound disappointment, what with his failure to take responsibility for his part in the shameful debasement and deception the Media Lab went through to get Jeffrey Epstein's money[2].
Now I hear they have also been discriminating against men for the last few decades in order to build an artificially sex-balanced class[3]. I mean, that's great for the dating prospects for MIT men, which had traditionally been poor, what with being socially awkward nerds *and* very few women around -- but my God how bitterly unfair to all the young men sacrificed on yet another sterile altar of social signalling.
I can't express how disappointed I am, in what I would have (apparently naively) though would be one of the last bastions of pure meritocracy -- a school which was so dedicated (in my experience) to pure empirical science and engineering. I've done my small share over the years directing highly talented young people interested in science and engineering to them. Now...I'm not so sure I ever will again. I won't say it's exactly like discovering your beloved father is a pedophile, but it's in that universality class.
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[1] If nothing else, it has traditionally had an outsized representation of Jewish students and faculty.
[2] Well *after* his conviction for underage trafficking in Florida. They snuck him in to woo him, and carefully hid his presence from anyone they thought would be (quite reasonably) horrified. Former President Reif was complicit, albeit only tangentially and mostly after the fact, but when he was called out for it he immediately sank to Claudine Gay's moral standards and Sergeant Schulzed ("I knew nothing!") his way through it.
[3] https://fairadmissionsmit.org/
I don't think I've ever seen a COMMENT with FOOTNOTES in it.
Carl is thorough. :)
Just saw a related article. In brief, the author argues that Gramsci's long march through the institutions isn't turning out as its progenitors expected. Their strategy was to take over respected institutions and the docile American public would be let toward Cultural Marxism and all its trappings. Instead, they took over the institutions, but much of the public simply lost respect for and faith in the organizations. He concludes, "Where is this phenomenon likely to lead? It seems quite improbable that the trends in institutional faith will see any kind of dramatic shift (except, perhaps, further downwards). Such a race to the bottom signals something perhaps more revolutionary: a major reconfiguration or wholesale elimination of the scorned institutions themselves. It’s anyone’s guess which will be tossed on its ear first — universities, say, or Congress. But whether these institutional shifts occur through evolution or revolution will have major implications for the stability of society itself."
https://www.aier.org/article/the-gramscian-march-trips-up/
You are more precise, so thanks. But I'm still OK with my own wording. I meant acceptable within the rules of behavior established by Harvard. It's a binary--unacceptable behavior is punished, and acceptable behavior is not. I disagree that Stefanik's questions were either bullying or harassment. In my estimation, she performed a valuable service in demonstrating the moral vacuity and rhetorical ineptitude of the heads of three of the most prestigious universities in America.
Recently I applied for a job in public health. The health department was a newly created county health department and I was to be the first hired as a Community Health Educator. During my application interview I suggested that this new department was like a garden. And I posed a question - what is the difference between a garden and the wilderness? My answer - the gardener... And I likened the new department director to the gardener and myself to a gardener’s assistant. This seemed to be well received and I was hired. But I was not the typical gardener and in just over a year there were weeds in the garden who managed to choke me out of my job. I was accused of ridiculous offenses (14 separate complaints of which two were ‘substantiated’) and the HR investigation recommended no action against me along with a reeducation of the staff regarding workplace standards that had been violated by the weeds.
But how does one go about reeducating the weeds choking out the flowers trying to bloom on our campus gardens? One famous teacher suggested tossing them into the fire and be done with them. Are there practical alternatives to this?
I think the only real answer is exhaustive conversation.
Conversation assumes a willingness to converse. Exhaustive conversation assumes a willingness to converse exhaustively. I doubt that that is a possibility in these cases. I'm more inclined to insist on punish those who issue frivolous complaints. Operationally, that, admittedly, can be tough. And in today's ideology-infused HR departments, I'm quite sure it wouldn't be applied fairly.
The only real way to deal with weeds is to uproot them. If you break or cut off the visible part that grows above ground, they grow back and continue to grow back forever. But if you pull up the roots that nourish them, then the weed is gone forever.
Yes - quite so. But our analogy breaks down here, does it not, when we’re talking about ‘human’ weeds. Might our gardener find a way to transform them into flowers? Or at least somehow banish them from the garden to some patch of wilderness where they might serve some useful purpose?
Perhaps, but my focus was on the roots, rather than the weeds, for a reason. And the roots aren't human beings; they're ideas, typically policies.
Very well said!
This is irrelevant to the current discussion--and has NOTHING to do with your intentions--but be cautious about using the expression "human weeds." In 1923, Margaret Sanger said that a primary purpose of birth control was, "the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extirpation of defective stocks — those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization."
AGAIN, IT'S CLEAR THAT YOU WEREN'T TALKING ABOUT THIS. Just noting that "human weeds" has a sordid history and is something of a loaded term.
Thank you for this useful admonition . This bit of history was unknown to me. I will pay attention to this caution in the future…
No reason you should have known. It's an obscure quote unless you happen to write a lot on eugenics, as I do.
I don't think you can, if you take a head-on approach, of trying to persuade people to alter their philosophical viewpoint by argument. That pretty much never works, and, besides which, I rather suspect most people who visibly adhere to these philosophies do so out of squalid practical concerns -- because it makes them part of the right crowd, because it useful to the career, because it disobliges someone or some demographic from which they want distance or independence. Since they didn't come to these philosophies via rational consideration, you can't argue them out of those philosophies by rational consideration. Furthermore, to the extent the philosophies are adopted for practical reasons, nothing will change until the practical reasons change.
Which is I think where one would need to start. That is, the wider culture needs to (ironically) reduce its tolerance for the folly of youth. We need to stop treating 28-year-old PhD students as functionally equivalent to 13-year-olds yelling "fuck" at Thanksgiving dinner because they want to shock Mom. We need to return to a standard where by age 18 at the latest, let us say, you are expected to act like a courteous and reasonable adult, and you cannot indulge antisocial or narcissist idiocy in public free of significant social consequence.
It would probably help considerably to find a way to return the costs of college education to the student and family more directly than they are now, also, particularly (also ironically) the many who are massively subsidized for middle class white guilt reasons.
A single typical 50-minute lecture at a modestly expensive college costs $225 in direct (tuition) costs, plus probably another $100 in living costs, plus probably $250 in opportunity costs (the money a person *could* be earning if he wasn't in college). If *I* was sitting in a big room listening to someone talk, along with 150 others, and it was costing me $10/minute -- well, I would make damn sure what he was saying was directly applicable to improving my well-being substantially and pretty soon. It would have to be very practical and very focussed stuff. Tell me how to solder circuits, how to finagle the tax code, how to impress a beautiful woman, how to speak Spanish, how to program a computer -- yeah, that works. But I would have zero patience for someone charging me that much of my hard-earned cash to ramble on about funky sociological theories or encourage intellectual onanism.
But *how* to return a very real feeling of *cost* to the experience of the student is a bear of a problem. Students by nature are poor, young people are by nature terrible at anticipating the burden of paying off a loan (as well as too inexperienced to fully grok the Life Is Awfully Short fact that time is a terrible thing to waste), and there are genuinely people whose study it would do us good (as a nation) to subsidize.
Maybe you just take everyone who graduates HS with an adequate GPA, who would qualify for some college or other, and you divide the tax money we spend on higher education on them. Send 'em a check on their graduation day. Here's $50,000 in cash, in an envelope marked "College Fund," but nobody's going to audit how you spend it, so do as you please. I kind of feel even callow 18-year-olds would suddenly be a lot more picky about where higher-education dollars were spent. (Plus if college weren't the right approach, if they were better at entrpreneurship, say, we would have encouraged *that* instead with some useful seed money.) Would even the average high-school senior *really* part with his actual real money, right there in his pocket, to merely listen to some bitter churl blather on about microaggressions and the correct use of neo-pronouns? I find it doubty.
You make a lot of sense here, especially about cents…
Adam Smith thought teachers should be paid by students individually, rather than by universities: "The discipline of colleges and universities is in general contrived, not for the benefit of the students, but for the interest, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters. Its object is, in all cases, to maintain the authority of the master, and whether he neglects or performs his duty, to oblige the students in all cases to behave to him as if he performed it with the greatest diligence and ability. ... No discipline is ever requisite to force attendance upon lectures which are really worth the attending, as is well known wherever any such lectures are given."
Weren't they, originally? Since the university originated in the monastery, and the original source of income was tutoring the scions of dukes how to read and write. I seem to vaguely recall Planck or maybe Helmholtz having it rough because all his lectures sailed over his students' heads and nobody wanted to pay to be made equal parts baffled and humiliated...
But we can already see a problem there in what is already happening: I get from many of my old friends in the academy that today, in an era of declining enrollments and budgets, it is necessary to truckle to the whims and hysterias of the students far more than one might like. It would be a shame if the academy degenerated into only teaching that which pleaseth the wet behind the ears. The idioms of Taylor Swift and philosophy of Roblox, while Austen and Adam Smith moulder -- one fears if not Idiocracy a culture too shallow to wet above one's spiritual metatarsals. Bah.
It seems to me the real beneficiaries of education, and those who can judge its value and price best, are the future incarnations of students. We need the greatest economists and physicists[1] to figure out a way for each of us at age 45 to fund and direct the education of our 18-year-old selves.
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[1] In case time travel is required.
Yes. If I remember correctly, Smith said he dreaded the thought that professors might one day be paid salaries, rather than having to sell their qualities to students. I agree with your concerns, and my answer is that the problem is homogenizing educations. If one wishes to attend a university that teaches Taylor Swift rather than Jonathan Swift, I'm fine with that--as long as we don't have accreditation boards and the Department of Education insisting that Taylor must be a part of every school's curriculum. When I was in college, I knew of other institutions whose policies seemed to be "pay your tuition, get a degree--and, apparently, employers were pretty good at recognizing them for what they were. BTW, I did write a column on the rhetoric of Taylor Swift. :) I actually found it to be a strangely interesting subject. https://graboyes.substack.com/p/the-rhetoric-of-swift-taylor-not
> No discipline is ever requisite to force attendance upon lectures which are really worth the attending, as is well known wherever any such lectures are given.
Was this "well known" in Adam Smith's time? Because it certainly isn't today; we know that people today will require "no discipline" to attend things that are *entertaining,* which is very much not the same thing as valuable.
The Framers of the Constitution believed in the competition of ideas as surely as they believed in market competition, but I think they also believed as you noted that social norms also placed boundaries on what could be said. Let the ideas flow, and you’ll thousands listening to one speaker, hundreds to another, and a handful to a third. As long as listeners remain lawful, without torches and destruction, we should be ok. By the way, combining your clear thinking prose with your artistic ‘eye’ with Midjourney is outstanding. A great hook to remember the rattlesnake and the focus of the post.
You tickle my curiosity. Free markets were certainly part of our national DNA from fairly early on, but I realize that I don’t specifically associate that idea with the Founders and Framers — except insofar is it is a corollary to Liberty in general. But I recall that in the original specs, the federal government’s only source of revenue was tariffs.
Has anybody written anything accessible about the development of economic thought in early America?
Yes, there is- only I’ve not been able to quickly locate it (my wife likes to rearrange my collection). The thread is the presence of Scottish descended folks in the colonies ( if I recall correctly) that were professors and students (I think Alexander Hamilton was in this group) at Princeton and other universities that were well acquainted with Adam Smith and John Locke and combined thoughts on Natural Law and free markets and said ‘why not apply this to ideas? giving us freedom of the press, and why not apply this to our faith, giving us freedom of religion. The way the author explained it made compelling sense.
Try “Common Sense Nation” by Robert Curry. I think this is the book that explains it.
Thanks! That book certainly looks worth reading even if it’s not the one you were thinking of.
Lots have written on it, but I'm not sure who best to recommend. I'll ask a friend and get back to you.
Thanks for the comments--and especially your appreciation for the snake! I do put a fair amount of work into the topmost image of each article. For me, it's an important component of the piece.
Excellent. Back in the day that’s what I expected from a “universe” -ity education. Hear, discuss, etc, other thoughts, ideas, ideals to expand the mind. Explore the universe of thought.
Another important point is this highlights that what we see today is not new.
In re Substack, they seem to be holding fast. And unsurprisingly the problem is a bit overblown (h/t Instapundit): https://www.dossier.today/p/new-york-times-journalist-rage-quits?utm
Yeah, but the seem to have buckled to some extent.
Excellent essay sir. I've been concerned about this ridiculous dust-up over Substack. Thank you for writing about it. As you no doubt know, speech codes in the house of medicine have exploded and are becoming not only oppressive but dangerous.
Indeed, medicine has really bought into this stuff -- an boy is that dangerous. Though not unprecedented. Medicine also loved eugenics. Western medicine also had a 1600-year speech code that said "If you contradict Galen, we'll burn you at the stake."
Nice column. Also, nice pic of rattlesnake.
Thanks on both counts!
It's a travesty, both in the larger free speech context, and in the fabrications of the allegations.
https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2024/01/12/auto-draft-203-n604678
Great link. Thanks.
I listened somewhat carefully to the questions that Stefanik asked and the answers. Stefanik asked about the Universities code of conduct and she was answered with a recitation of the 5th amendment. If a student proposed that genocide of the Jews was appropriate on the Boston commons or on Memorial drive than the 5th Amendment and context could be considered, but it was clear the question was about the code of conduct and that is also clear.
I think you mean the FIRST amendment.
Suggesting the genocide of a group currently and clearly committing genocide DOES have a certain "balance," though, wouldn't you say? Or maybe the real group isn't Jews. Or Gazans, for that matter ...
Who, whom - ever a problem.
Sorry correct 1st
Here is a real world example of how removing the rattler off a rattlesnake can (or could have been) deadly.
In the early 2000's our young family of 5 children and mom and dad were on our way to the Colorado mountains for a week of camping, biking, fishing and other fun. But I had a RE closing down in the Denver metro on the way. So, while I was inside an office building watching over the document signings, the wife and kids (ages 2-11) were out in the sparse parking lot playing. The office building we were in was located across a road from a quite large state park with lots of open space and brush and wildlife. There happened to be quite a bit of road construction/widening going on nearby. And most of the tough, hard labor on these construction sites was provided by Mexican immigrants.
As it turns out, some young men from Mexico are quite adept at catching rattlesnakes with their bare hands and in turn, they enjoy removing the rattles as a prize. Don't ask me how they do this. I suppose they do it for the rush and the challenge. Our family lived outside the Denver area on some acreage so we occasionally had to deal with these quite deadly snakes. As a result, I had trained my five to always be watching and LISTENING for that chilling sound. It is quite unique and hair raising.
During the closing my eldest burst into the closing room and breathlessly stated that she thought there was a rattler out in a planter box right below where the kids had been playing. I asked, calmly, was it making any noise? She replied, no, but it was coiled and looked like one as it had a triangular shaped head. I assumed she, being only 10, had simply misidentified a bull snake, which is harmless, with a rattlesnake, which is deadly, particularly to children with small bodies and small vascular systems.
But to be on the cautious side, I walked out to inspect. Low and behold, it was indeed a rattler coiled and quite angry, right below the retaining wall my children had been playing on, including my youngest who was barely old enough to walk.
I quickly assessed that I needed to put the rattler down as it was a dire danger to anyone who might come upon it before it grew its next skin and some new rattles, which could be several weeks. These were the days before concealed carry (at least for me) so I didn't have a pistol to do the job. No shovel, no hoe (please, no Don Imus jokes here, K?), really nothing that would help me kill the snake without putting myself in harms way.
So, I took out my pocket knife and proceeded to cut a branch from a nearby bush, sharpened the bigger end, and approached the snake. My plan (lol) was to try and stab the snake thru the top of the head while it remained coiled. Well, that didn't work out too well, for as soon as I got close enough with my improvised spear, the snake struck. Didn't get me but I nearly wet myself. But now I had a better plan. A viper is at its most vulnerable right after extending its body to strike. So, the snake recoiled and I induced another strike, this time stabbing the snake right thru the top of the head. Quite the lucky spear thrust.
I brought the snake out onto the parking lot and like a good naturist, I decided that it was only fair that he and I have it out fairly, man to snake, so to speak. So, I placed him on the smooth pavement (snakes can't really move well on smooth surfaces, there is nothing to push off on) and promptly ran over him with our suburban.
By the time I had stabbed the snake, quite a crowd of folks had formed from inside the offices. All were women. I can confidently state, that had my wife and children had not been present, I could have probably gotten laid by half of them.
So, moral of the story? Don't squelch free speech and don't mess with a red neck with a pocket knife.
Quite a story! Never realized that my little epigram might serve as literal, practical advice.
Great story! I'm reminded of Australian YouTuber and medieval weapon enthusiast Shad Brooks (aka. Shadiversity) talking about the time when, as a teen, he was at home alone with his siblings and someone found a deadly Australian snake in the backyard. With no adults around, he felt it was his responsibility to put the snake down before it could bite anyone, which he accomplished with the aid of a large shovel and a sword. (Apparently he's been into medieval weapons from an early age!)
What's an