Amy Bishop Leftist Hate Politics

I've got a Memeorandum thread this morning, first time in a while.

It turns out just writing about the murdering proclivities of radical Obama-backing Harvard professors gets some folks on the radical left pretty angry.

Comrade Repsac3, Commissar of State Security, People's Commissariat for Internet Affairs, who I thought put his Donald-demonology to bed, must have instead been lurking in the shadows, waiting for a chance to pounce. Here's his post, "Why Donald Douglas is a Scumbag." Yeah, noticing that a Harvard scientist who murders her faculty collegues for failing tenure will engender some emotions like that from folks.

And recall that Comrade Repsac3 attracts some of the most bestial commenters on the web. Here's this from "The Original" (an attack monkey), who invested in a little hate-research over at RateMyProfessors:

What is truly pathetic about DD's RMP page is not the accusations of bias by several students but the number of shill posts obviously written by DD or an accomplice.

Note the number that give basic advice that any instructor would give - come on time; be prepared - and end in "...and you'll do fine." These are only the most obvious. Also notice the relatively large number of rating/comments and the middling scores. There is a strong extremity bias in student comments, especially in self-selected samples such as RMP. Instructors who do not shill tend to collect either relatively few ratings/comments or an above average count of positive/negative comments. Relatively large numbers of comments (as compared to the rates of others in the same department) and middling ratings is a tell-tale sign of balancing poor ratings/comments with shills. Spikes in the frequency near tenure or other decision dates are another tell-tale, as students are generally unaware of these.

Folks can follow Comrade Repsac3's links to RateMyProfessors to confirm The Original's suspicions. I don't read my evaluations, frankly. It's mostly disgruntled students getting their revenge. But Comrade Repsac gets his jollies over there, which helps kindle his warped hatred -- which is all he's got.

Anyway, I got a little additional attention for pointing out that leftists only politicize murders from which they can tar Republicans as evil racists. That explains the title of my post, "Amy Bishop Killed Minorities: Leftists Silent on 'Racist' Rampage; Victims' Families Ask, 'Why Was She Still Teaching?'"

Uber-hypocrite Steve M., who gets my name wrong while attacking me, responds to the race questions:

You know what? I have no freaking idea whether there was a racial motive in these killings. I know that, when you dig into the past, the intended pipe-bomb victim was white, and Bishop's brother was white. Maybe David Douglas has an explanation for how those crimes, if she's guilty of them, fits his new theory of racism. Maybe back then she was trying to eliminate the white race, one whitey every few years, as a revolutionary act. I sure hope he tells us. He has such insight into the criminal mind -- I'm dying to know."

Okay, dying to know?

Then I'll just direct little Stevie over to Dag Blog's entry, "Not About Tenure. Seriously" (with emphasis added):

Friday, at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, a biology professor named Amy Bishop murdered three of her colleagues and wounded three others. Two of the people she wounded are still in critical condition, and I offer my sincere hopes for their complete and swift recovery. The murderer had been denied tenure in the department, and media coverage has centered on the question of tenure. Tenure, that strange and exotic academic rite, is obviously the hook for this story, and the resulting coverage is appalling.

The New York Times headline for their story today (which doesn't deserve a link) is "At an Academic Pressure Cooker, a Setback Turns Deadly, Official Say." There's something appalling about the passive construction in that sentence, as if it's the "setback" that did the killing. But the story, with its emphasis on "the pressure-cooker world of academic startups" is worse. It also undermines its own angle: the killer's potentially lucrative biotech startup was going well. Meanwhile, Inside Higher Ed fautously links to an old article about faculty who have minor breakdowns after being turned down for tenure, as if one could compare a shouting incident or a distarught person climbing up an ivy trellis with cold-blooded murder. (No link for you either, IHD.) The general thrust of the coverage is that the tenure process is so painful and stressful that an otherwise normal person might snap and become violent.

Let me just say, as someone going through the tenure process: bullshit.

On the other hand, the media has had no interest at all in the question of race, although Bishop shot almost every non-white faculty member in the department. (She also shot and wounded two white victims, a professor and a staff member.) She killed both African-American professors in the department (one of whom was too junior to have had anything to do with Bishop's tenure decision). She killed the department chair, who was ethnically South Asian. A Latino faculty member was wounded. There may only be two non-white faculty left in the department. Whether she intended it or not, Amy Bishop effected a racial purge of the Alabama Huntsville biology department. But the press isn't interested in asking whether or not she intended it. Perhaps the question isn't exotic enough.

These murders are not about tenure. They are about Amy Bishop's moral failings. Those failings might or might not include racism. But a person who responds to a career setback by cold-bloodedly murdering three people, and attempting to kill three more, is not the victim of a difficult process. Amy Bishop is a horribly defective human being. Whatever complaints she may have had a week ago, she has forfeited any right to make them.

Jesus Christ!

Seriously. A "racial purge" of the entire Huntsville department! That's what I'm talkin' about!

But the silence on the left is splitting eardrums nationwide. You just can't talk about this stuff! A white Harvard leftist opens fire on a room full of minority professors and students. And we should just STFU and not politicize it? Okay. Sure. Those leftists sure got me beat in the moral equivalence department.

My heart and prayers go out the families of the dead.

Hat Tip: Kathy Shaidle.