Congressman's shooting and relationship (if any) to current political situation

It has been a while.  I didn't know if I would ever come back to this blog.  I have not received any emails or contacts so I assume no one has been reading.  I made an effort to reach out to other people who have been denied tenure and while I am grateful for the few replies and comments I did receive, it appears that this it just not the platform for doing this.

But, I have a blog set up.  And it is pseudo-anonymized.  I'm sure that anyone who really wanted to find out my identity could but really, is it that important?  Perhaps a more real issue is how I personally feel about anonymous content on the web.  In general I'm against it.  But I felt that in this case there was value to be gained, because tenure denial is such an enormous stigma, people who've been through it often never speak of it again.


Again, I have this blog set up.  So I might post occasionally if things cross my mind that I find myself wanting to write about.  Since the tenure-denial thing seems to be pretty much dead material now, I might post on other topics too.

Which brings me to the shootings this weekend, of whom the primary target apparently was Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, but there were many other victims as well.  This event, and the political discussion around it, reminds me of the Amy Bishop story.   Again, the same issues are being laboriously batted back and forth, in this case in the setting the current left-right political wars.  And it surprises me how dense people are sometimes.  Especially, right now, those on the left for, first, jumping too fast to try to make political gain out of this, and second, not being careful enough in their attacks.

We've been over this again and again.  No reasonable person would EVER seriously think that something like Sarah Palin's crosshairs led directly to this shooting.  Of COURSE NOT!  (Yes, I'm yelling).  Those of you on the right with your aggrieved victim poses I can see you all now.  Or hear you, in advance, because I have listened to thousands of hours of right wing political talk radio.

BUT, to completely deny that the underlying rightwing political attacks had NO bearing, that is insane.  What the left needs to attack, at a time like this, is not the event itself (the killings) but the things that the right is still now currently saying.  They do say that we (the left) are borderline traitors, that we hate America, that our main aim is for bad things to happen to this country.  They do say that we are implicitly murderers for supporting abortion.  They do say that we are Godless and work to destroy Christianity.   You need only turn on the radio to hear these things.

Those are the things that should be attacked at a time like this.

In fact, the best option, in terms or political warfare, at a time like this, is to publicly very scrupulously absolve the right from any direct, immediate blame.  That kind of position, in the long run, gains you traction, especially since they would never do the same thing on their side.  But, I still have a hard time convincing my liberal friends of this.

The voices of tenure denial

I have been accumulating some links related to tenure denial; see the link to my delicious page on the right side of the blog.  There is plenty of content on the web about cases related to discrimination (real or alleged), political and religious issues, etc.  There is relatively less related to those who were just denied tenure period.  By the way, one thing I have not mentioned is the legal work I did through my tenure denial--maybe that is a long enough story for a whole blog entry--but the conclusion I came to in that research was that civil suits challenging tenure denials that don't have any allegations of systematic class discrimination or political/religious bias probably have an extremely, extremely low chance of succeeding.

Please, if there is anyone out there reading this (and it is far from clear there is) send me anything you have related to this issue.  Notable is Rob Knop's blogging about his tenure denial and what he has done since then. He has been one of the few to come out publicly about what has happened to him.  It is all the more brave since, as I have noted several times before on this blog, one thing you learn about tenure denial is that basically the best thing you can do afterward is to as completely as possible hide or at least cloud what happened.  That's why I started this blog, as a place to voice things that I felt were completely impossible otherwise.  If there are others of you out there, please contact me.  My whole aim is at anonymity here so one can speak candidly about the issues.