Why, you might wonder, after taking Mike S. Adams apart in a burst of posts a while back, have I neglected my fellow academic? There’s a good reason for that, which you can discover by reading S.Z.’s recitation of his latest column. This is one where he responds to a students poor excuses for failing his course by making lesbian jokes and bragging about killing pigs—a humanitarian’s and conservationists’s solemn duty, don’t you know, especially the part about gut-shooting them and leaving them in the brush to rot.
The simple reason is that he’s too contemptible for me to bear, except perhaps in small doses spread far apart.
There’s also just something wrong with that poor man’s brains.
That original article is just disturbing. Mainly for the follow up comments of ‘Yeah, you tell it like it is!’ What planet are these folk on?
Insane though he may be, he does made a general valid point: If you plan to complain about the grade you got, you should be able to back that claim up with more than “wah, my life was in the shitter”, and if your life really was in the shitter, then its position there should stand up to more than casual scrutiny.
I went to a military university. This concept of complaining about one’s grade is very foreign to me. Questionably sane professors are not, however.
Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but it certainly seems that wingnuts like Adams and Dembski have gotten even wingnuttier since the November election.
Can you imagine being stranded at sea in a lifeboat, without food, with Mike S. Adams?
So couldn’t this student appeal his grade to some board, citing this as evidence that Adams is unfairly targeting him/her?
People who express themselves like that are the prime reason I lobby against anti-assault laws. One good butt-whooping and he calms right down…
I’d be afraid to sit down to a huge Christmas feast with Mike S. Adams. If I belched, he’d squeak in terror and go for his guns.
And another thing, Adams: if you’re going to use gratuitous Monty Python quotes, at least quote them correctly.
People who say, for example, “vacuous, coffee-nosed, malodorous pervert”, instead of “vacuous, toffee-nosed malodorous pervert” are just nerd wanna-bes.
Wow, he sure is macho with all his guns and hunting and such. Seems like he makes too big of a deal about it though. I betcha his wife secretly beats him at home.
Apikoros,
Adams did not write that. What you read was a summary. In the original article, no Monty Python was used.
The summary was so outrageous, that I had to read the original to actually believe what was said. I am sorry I did.
I dont like students whining about grades, but this “person” was way off base in his tirade.
Whoops, my mistake. It was S.Z. who misquoted Python, not Adams. I’d bet Adams has never heard of them.
And the misquotes can presumably be attributed to the lingering mental lassitude caused by reading Mike Adam’s “column”. Sometimes this is a self-defense mechanism of an intelligent brain over-exposed to “teh stupid.”
“Just as soon as that boar cut across the open area I was hit with a huge surprise. Another 200-pound boar was right behind him. I kept my composure and fired a fatal shot into the first boar’s gut. He managed to run about thirty yards before I heard him crash in the woods. The second boar cut across my path and headed into a dry portion of the woods. I ran after him only about eight yards into the woods (until I got wrapped up in briars and brush). I had to let that sweating slab of bacon go and start the search for his dead companion.”
He gets in his car with a bunch of weapons, drives to a place where wild boars roam, puts himself in their midst, thereby artificially creating a dangerous situation, so that he can have a unequal confrontation (gun vs. tusk) with wild animals.
His idea of enjoying the outdoor and the natural world is to shed the blood of wild animals so that he can pump up his own ego. He is to me the lowest kind of human being.
I would say he stopped maturing entirely at about age 13.
“So couldn’t this student appeal his grade to some board, citing this as evidence that Adams is unfairly targeting him/her?”
I don’t know about getting the grade changed, but I wonder if there isn’t some academic code of conduct that Adams is violating.
The fact that Professor Adams’ superiors have yet to hang this moron up by his feet on a hook (figuratively or literally) because of his deplorable brain-diarrhea continues to boggle my little mind.
Ooh, how manly…
My philosophy on hunting: it isn’t intrinsically wrong, but if you’re not going to eat it, don’t shoot it in the first place.
Hunters can be conservationists; in fact it’s in their interest to be. But this guy ain’t it.
Stanton – Adams is an associate professor, which I think means he’s probably got tenure (presumably someone will correct me if I got that wrong). Which (if so) means either UNC-W’s standards for tenure are a joke, or Adams played the “poor little me, I’m a victim of Liberal bias” card to the hilt.
See, that’s the problem with conservatives — they may not be all that smart, but they know how easily us lefties can be played by guilt.
Stanton, the reason they haven’t dumped Adams yet is because they’re probably afraid of David Horowitz making Adams the right wing academic cause celebre.
OK the kid deserved an F and got one. And if Prof. Adams wants to tell him face-to-face why, fine.
But holding him up to ridicule in such a public way and with such relish in his own stand-up-to-the-lib’ruls rhetoric is an exercise in self-indulgance so grand that he might need to start shaving his palms.
I guess you can have integrity without a shred of decorum, class or dignity. Who knew?
As an untenured faculty member at UNCW, I’d certainly claim our tenure standards are a joke. At least in my case, where it will all come down to “Do the students say they like you on end of course reviews?” Answers to that question have a striking correlation with answers to “Do the students say you’re easy on RateMyProfessor.com?”
There seems to be a certain mindset in the far reaches of Lower Conservativistan that, if someone does something wrong, they have whatever’s comnig to them, procedure be damned. For instance, ni the wake of the UCLA tasering incident, it seemed an awful lot of people were making an argument which basically boiled down to “the student is a total asshole and was being an asshole at the time”. Both of which may well be true, and neither of which justifies the actions taken.
It seems we’re seeing a similar sort of reaction here. I can well imagine this student is in fact a lying little shit (and if they aren’t, then there should be enough documentary evidence of hardship that Dr. Adams is going to eat his words). However, any instructor who’s been working a couple years should know about 20 ways to deflect bogus claims of hardship without explicitly insulting the student. You achieve the same result without hacking anybody off — that’s much better. It is abundantly clear from Adams’s rant that he thinks grades are for reward and punishment, not for assessment, and anyone who thinks that has no business assigning them.
And, of course, the irony of the situation is that Adams, in his attempt to definitively quash this protest, has actually given it teeth. If the student didn’t have a legitimate complaint before, they do now.
ch. . .ch. . .ch. . .
Ds NYN n ths thrws slss, bckslppng “cmmnty f rtnlsts” ndrstnd dms’ PNT, thr thn vlvng Sqd?
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N, wt. Tht’s wht y trkys d wth LL ppsng vwpnts!! Hw cnvnnt fr y!!
Like you, he’s an ignorant moron whose only point is the one on top of his head.
So, Hoody…what would his point be, then?
Or are you just bluffing (again).
I think I can summarize Dr. Prof. Mike’s point quite fairly:
I demonstrated my moral and physical courage by charitably throwing my table scraps to a poor black family, while you liberals, who only got into college because your families have money, expect leniency because of who your parents are.
If he wields his guns with the same penetrating accuracy displayed in his rhetoric, you’d have nothing to fear … although his self-laming might weigh on your conscience.
Hoody is a hit-and-run commenter. Don’t answer him. Don’t even try to read between the consonants.
PZ, have you seen that Mike Adams is now suing his school for denying him tenure? Any thoughts?
http://www.crosswalk.com/news/religiontoday/11536829/page1/
Apparently Mike thinks he’s a hero for being an asshole.
Hi, Daniel–
The article’s headline is misleading. He still has tenure as an associate professor, and as the saying goes, the university can’t do anything about it, short of finding a dead girl or a live boy in his bed.
What he’s complaining about is not getting the recognition of being outstanding that promotion to full professor carries with it. I’ll leave the irony of having to sue an institution to get them to recognize his outstanding-iness (pace Colbert) to better commenters than me to handle.