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My Complaint Letter to My College

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Olex

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I have recently saw another same old brainwashing on one of web pages of my college, and finally got fed up, and sent a complaint letter to my college's departments.

I'm reprinting it here.

To whomever this concerns,

I'm deeply offended by a quote shown on the main web page of University of Louisville Libraries.

I have taken a screen shot and uploaded it to my web space at UofL.

This quote was present there as of Sunday, March 24, 2008.

http://library.uofl.edu/

http://ox.slug.louisville.edu/~o0lozi01/offending_quote.png

If you look at bottom right corner, you will find a quote that reads:

"as long as you find a group of people that are deprived... that don’t have the opportunity for education... for a job... you’re going to have the people who will destroy, the people who will loot, and the people who say to themselves, ‘well, I'm gonna have some of the worlds goods."

This quote implies that a person, to whom a job was denied, is almost morally justified to resort to force.

I was recently denied a position at Microsoft, because they thought they could find a better candidate than me.

I am an international student, and United States government restricts my individual rights by not allowing me to freely accept job offers from American businesses. And their only "justification" is that I didn't happen to have been born on US soil.

However, I did not resort to force, and in my view, it would be utterly immoral for me to use force.

Martin Luther King said himself that one shouldn't use force to resolve problems.

I was led to believe that the University of Louisville does not promote violence and using force to resolve problems.

So, how come your main library web page shows a radically different view?

Is this something endorsed by UofL?

Is such quote really represents what UofL is all about?

I'm highly offended by the above quote. I think it spits in the face of every just moral person who realizes that using force to solve problems is immoral.

I hope the quote is taken down from a public website of public organization such as University of Louisville.

Thanks you,

Oleksandr

--

Oleksandr Lozitskiy

"If you are not sure that what you are doing is morally right, your self-esteem will suffer greatly." -- Me

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Great job! I am interested in reading the response to this.

I would remind the librarians that their professional forebears died to try and save the library at Alexandria from destruction by mindless barbarians. How can they dishonor that proud legacy by making any excuse for that very behavior?

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I think you could be making too much of it. I don't know who said this or what the context was, but note the phrasing "...don’t have the opportunity...". This is hardly the same as your unsuccessful job application at Microsoft, where you surely had the opportunity to get that job, but were not selected.

Citing the likelihood that civil disobedience will ensue if people are held down by, say, a brutal dictatorship, is not the same as advocating violence. It is simply a warning that to eliminate the opportunities people have to better themselves, bad things will happen.

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Additionally, some congratutations would be in order, I think, given the fact that if you go to the library page today, you can't find that quote.

I think you could be making too much of it. I don't know who said this or what the context was, but note the phrasing "...don’t have the opportunity...". This is hardly the same as your unsuccessful job application at Microsoft, where you surely had the opportunity to get that job, but were not selected.
I don't see even a shred of evidence to support that. When leftist intellectuals speak of "opportunity", then never are speaking of legal impedements, they are talking of a person's failure to get what they want. Walls was not talking about dictatorships.

If you want the context, you can read the 1977 interview with Murray Atkins Walls here; as you can see, she was providing apologetics for the Detroit riots. See also p. 41 to get a better grasp of her concept of "opportunity" in the context of the perceived necessity of excluding white students in order to give blacks an "opportunity".

Citing the likelihood that civil disobedience will ensue if people are held down by, say, a brutal dictatorship, is not the same as advocating violence. It is simply a warning that to eliminate the opportunities people have to better themselves, bad things will happen.
There's a simple word that describes that concept -- "threat".
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When leftist intellectuals speak of "opportunity", then never are speaking of legal impedements, they are talking of a person's failure to get what they want. Walls was not talking about dictatorships.

If you want the context, you can read the 1977 interview with Murray Atkins Walls

That was quite the arcane link you dug up there :P I did flip through it a little but I couldn't find the specific quote.

Seems like you know something about this Walls. Was she an advocate for violent civil disobedience? I'm guessing not, but I'd like to see what you're basing this assumption on. Most civil rights advocates repudiated violence. I have to say that to make that quote out to be condoning the initiation of force to resolve grievances is a pretty fantastic distortion. It's just the realistic recognition of cause and effect, not an implicit "threat." If I told you that ignoring your termite problem would have devastating consequences for your house, that is not a threat.

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I have to say that to make that quote out to be condoning the initiation of force to resolve grievances is a pretty fantastic distortion. It's just the realistic recognition of cause and effect, not an implicit "threat." If I told you that ignoring your termite problem would have devastating consequences for your house, that is not a threat.

Especially since termites have volition and live in a society in coexistence with humans that is based on an expected mutual respect of individual rights...

Actually, termites might be a good analogy after all. Imagine if you lived in a steel house and termites petitioned the government to force you to include wood structures in your housing so that they had "opportunities".

Edited by musenji
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