aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Saturday, March 12, 2005
In defense of TiVo
Perhaps I was too quick to join the TiVo deathwatch. I hope so. PVRblog has a TiVo deathwatch rebuttal:
Frankly, the whole “TiVo-will-die” thing is getting a little old for me. I would like to see some dates from the critics about the estimated time of death; if they don’t get their act together by 2006 they’ll die? 2007? Tuesday?
Also, I assume the hacker community would come up with new guide data for the stand-alone units fairly quickly, so what would TiVo’s death actually mean to me as a customer? The only thing I can think of is I’d have $13 more a month, so maybe I should be rooting for their demise…
Let’s swap
I hadn’t heard about David Horowitz’s scary “Academic Bill of Rights” until reading a Media Matters piece about a made up story he’s using to flack it that’s been picked up and repeated in the mainstream media.
Then yesterday Michael Bérubé pointed to this at CNN:
Over the past two months, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Rhode Island and Tennessee have also started considering bills that would codify Horowitz’s ideas by, say, not allowing students to be punished with a bad grade for their views. Georgia’s senate passed a similar nonbinding resolution last year [B mine], while Colorado’s version was withdrawn after state-university administrators signed a pledge to ensure that “political diversity is explicitly recognized and protected.”
So Georgia’s already in this story.
The [Utah] senators were worried about “the drift of the campus,” says UVSC [Utah Valley State College] president Bill Sederburg, who fielded complaints from them about an Oct. 20 campus speech by Michael Moore, a student production of The Vagina Monologues and a course on queer theory in literature. “The legislators are saying ‘We don’t want the college to go too far and lose touch with the community.’ But we have an obligation to protect academic freedom.”
uh oh.
We have a queer theory course here and the theater department did a production of The Vagina Monologues just last week. I guess we’re lucky Michael Moore has never heard of us and won’t be speaking here anytime soon.
For those on the right, true freedom requires more diversity--which, to them, means more conservatives in faculty ranks. “If the system were fair,” says Larry Mumper, sponsor of the Ohio bill, “Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity would be tenured professors somewhere.”
Michael “Are you kiddine me?” Bérubé imagines it were so: Professors Limbaugh and Hannity chair their weekly committee meetings and hold office hours…
Meanwhile, here’s tonight’s lineup on the Renard News Channel:
7 pm The Bérubé Factor
8 pm “Informed Commentâ€Â� with Juan Cole
9 pm “Phun with Pharyngula” with P. Z. Myers
10 pm “Scribbling Woman” with Miriam Jones
11 pm “Preposterous Universe” with Sean CarrollLooks good to me! I just need some suggestions for guests on the Factor. Perhaps I could draw on this handy guide to the right-- but should I invite Tom DeLay, Zod, or the Glove?
