<nettime> All Capital's Children: Thanking bruinalumni.com

[Nicholas Ruiz <nr03 {AT} fsu.edu>]

All Capital's Children:  Thanking bruinalumni.com

Nicholas Ruiz III


?Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? - Who will watch the watchers?? 
-Decimus Junius Juvenalis or Juvenal. Roman rhetorician and satirical 
poet (1st to 2nd cent. A.D.)


The blood of our earth has gone rancid.  Thus the holy seek to 
replenish it, in their pious good faith and all.  The creation of lists 
has long been the first step in such crepuscular campaigns.

Such a self-declared 'long-term project' as the listed "exposure of 
UCLA's most radical professors," that of bruinalumni.com's the 
"UCLAProfs" website, has at its core a desire to resume the listmaking 
centuries of medieval thinking.  Listmaking has a long history, no?  
Censoring, banning , burning, etc.  It continues today. (1)

What is for sale in the gimmick of bruinalumni.com is a point of view 
without dissent; paradoxically, such right-leaning dissent is that 
which they accuse the 'rads" of UCLA of suppressing.  I do not know any 
of these professors--but I do know that academic freedom allows for the 
expression of any point of view, anywhere, anytime, anyplace--politics 
notwithstanding.  What bruinalumni.com really desires is the death of 
academic freedom--and more dangerously--the freedom of expression, that 
is, the right that allows the webposting of their refuse.  A rather dim 
strategy by any standard.

Without exception, today we acknowledge that all are Capital's 
children, vying for preferred currencies and denominations, accepting 
the rules of the metaphysical game.  Do we despise bruinalumni.com for 
their medieval preference?  Or marvel at the persistence of the 
vestigial trace they represent?  Perhaps a bit of both.  Perhaps this 
is all about God.  As Milan Kundera reminded us twenty or so years ago:

"The dispute between those who believe that the world was created by 
God and those who think it came into being of its own accord deals with 
phenomena that go beyond our reason and experience.  Much more real is 
the line separating those who doubt being as it is granted to man (no 
matter how or by whom) from those who accept it without reservation. (2)

Reality is in dispute on bruinalumni.com.  At any rate, we can thank 
bruinalumni.com for doing all of the legwork in putting together a nice 
reading list for the rest of us, no?


(1) See online: Beacon For Freedom of Expression: 
http://www.beaconforfreedom.org/  (2) Milan Kundera, The Unbearable 
Lightness of Being, New York; Harper and Row (1984), p247

-- 
Nicholas Ruiz III
ABD/GTA
Interdisciplinary Program in the Humanities
Florida State University
Editor, Kritikos
http://garnet.acns.fsu.edu/~nr03/





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