Indiana U. Administrator Charged With Anti-Semitic Vandalism

One hopes that this will put an end to the series of disturbing incidents at IU.

@ waterstm He IS turning himself in–sounds like he understands himself to be guilty, and perhaps your sorrow would be better spent elsewhere, maybe somewhere where it won’t be mistaken for mocking those of us who oppose anti-Semitism.

He is certainly not an “administrator.” This headline is quite misleading. And of course, he is not representative of the wonderful students, staff, and faculty at Hutton.

Gotta love the grammar police.

keevche – please explain how Jometzgar’s grammar is flawed. I would love to take your freshman logic course. I’m sure I would learn a lot.

Jay

I meant logic not “grammar”. My bad. We need a do over button here!

Mr. Zacharias’s guilt or innocence is a matter for a court of law to decide, so people shouldn’t be so quick to jump to conclusions because an arrest warrant has been issued. I’m quite sure his attorney advised him to turn himself in, something which certainly should not be construed as an admission of guilt. For all anyone knows from what has been reported, he may simply have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Since the local news had already picked up the story line, I suppose that excuses the CHE for reporting something this speculative, but people need to recognize it is still much too soon to assume the police have nailed the actual perpetrator. The real news is that Bloomington has someone, or some group, going around doing this kind of stuff. That certainly does not reflect well on the city, and by extension, IU.

It continues to amuse me to read how limited some people seem to be in their reading ability. Those who must have words be stable and complete and singular unto themselves, so that “than” cannot ever be “then” or “infer” cannot be interpreted as what an author means even when the reader can only comprehend “imply,” surely cannot read anything other than what they always already see, and when what they read is not what they physically see, then they infer and imply and sometimes say something’s wrong with the author of what they read.

I agree with cwinton about what the real news is. And I think it is news, since it is not a common occurrence at IU, and it is a disturbing occurrence at IU.

Keevche and Kelman, perhaps what you need is a intro. course in linguistics, unless of course you’re still speaking Proto-Sanskrit or wish we all were?

Language gets its meaning from the contextS in which it is used, among them the textual context and the context of the utterance, in this case the article and discussion — or have you entirely forgotten the substance of this discussion (you know whether or not a fellow who turns himself in should be automatically considered guilty? “Oh that”, I imagine you saying…)

As for the logic you hang your hat on, I believe it’s the old Aristotelian logic, which:

1. never applied to language (for instance, remember that all Indo European languages use double negatives. The only reason we are not supposed to do so in English is because the Victorians decided it wasn’t logical, just as they decided to put little skirts around piano legs because they thought they were indecent (I mean isn’t it logical that if you call something a “leg” it’s bound to be one?)

2. logic has made leaps and bounds since Aristotle (this hand in hand with math with which it is deeply entertwined). His premisse was that a thing cannot be right and wrong at the same time. We now know that it is the opposite because we are limited in our perception and thus have to use our imagination to fill in the gaps (you know like the famous experiment of the staircase that isn’t really one but which is nonetheless seen as a staircase by our brain….)

A case in point is that everything we know about Aristotle’s logic is both right and wrong. His notes were smuggled out to an island by one of his students who then burried them for safekeeping. Years later the Romans unearthed them, or rather what was left of them after nature had her way with them, and someone filled in the many blanks and gave them the form we know today (it’s in SCIENCE IN TRANSLATION by Scott Montgomery –a book that all scholars and the general public would benefit from reading, and would also greatly enjoy….)

My goodness, you ‘smart’ people really give me a chuckle! You can take a simple black and white picture and turn it into a mess with all the nonsensical debate about nothing…