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Friday, November 22, 2002
TNR's &c makes a dubious comparison between a Yale divestment guy and Ehud Barak. &c cites YDIC alumni chair Richard Swenson's arguments about Ehud Barak: In an October letter he wrote to the Yale Daily News protesting an upcoming lecture by Ehud Barak, Swenson described the former prime minister as a "war criminal." "It is an ominous day for human rights," Swenson wrote, "when such a person is given a platform to speak at Yale, and doubly so when the subject, of all things, is ethics."
&c follows this up with, "Some might say the same of Swenson." Really? Is Swenson a war criminal. No no, in fact, &c continues, Swenson, before creating the punk band the Plasmatics in 1978, was a porn impresario in New York. Under the sobriquet "Captain Kink," Swenson was the proprietor of Captain Kink's Sex Theater, a live sex show in Times Square. Umm...pornography is not a war crime(warning: I didn't fact-check this assertion). So what on earth does Swenson's earlier actions have to do with his protesting Barak?Evidently he has since lost some of his early enthusiasm for the importance of free speech.
I didn't see anything about free speech in Swenson's argument, did you? Sounds like the boys at TNR just wanted to sex up their blog.
Steven I. Weiss 11:17:00 AM
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