Goodbye Dixie, with love ...

Or, other schools could take a hint from the Ole Miss chancellor and stop playing offensive songs. I suspect if you tried to make the FAMU band stop playing the cover of a rap song offensive to women, you'd really hear the freedom of speech argument made.

 

Maybe they should switch over to "The Souths Gonna Do It Again" by Charlie Daniels

 

Freedom of speech isn't absolute. In the Southern Conference, for example, the PA announcer reads a statement before every basketball game that enumerates the league's code of fan conduct. That code includes, among other things, a prohibition on yelling racially offensive things at players, coaches and officials. If you yell such things, you are subject to ejection from the facility. It's understood. I'd hope nobody would challenge such a policy.
But back to the Ole Miss thing: Am I right that the university's response has been to stop playing the song rather than ejecting those who chant the phrase in question? If that's all Ole Miss is doing, there really isn't much of an argument here.

 

Just in the interest of adding info -- I posted this video of Fox's Shepard Smith telling students to cut it out a while ago.

http://www.sportsjournalists.com/forum/posts/2650362/

 

Strawman?

 

Pretty much. We're talking about what was done at Ole Miss here. Last I checked, the Ole Miss chancellor only has control over what happens at his school.

 

By the way, I love the unintentional humor in Zag defending racist speech when he was the one calling Mike Vick's detractors racists on another thread. And yes, I am oversimplifying what he wrote, but that was a part of it.

 

Bravo.

 

Bravo what?

 

Well, whaddya know, the Politics board lives. (Sorta.)

The first Ole Miss home football game I covered was in '94. The Rebs lost to Auburn.

Reporters are on the field, the game ends, and they play a more traditional version of "Dixie" as the Ole Miss players trudge across the field, to the corner of the stadium, where the Starnes Center is (not the indoor practice facility like today).

Fraternity boys in their starched white shirts and ties wave their little Confederate flags, their pretty dates next to their sides, while the band plays this highly objectionable song, at least to a significant portion of the population. This is, they tell us, "tradition."

They later started playing, "Dixie 2000," I'm told, and then "Dixie, With Love," with the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" mixed in. Whatever. The war is over. The right side won. The war has been over a long, long time.

Ole Miss is a great place, a great school. They are obviously trying to do the right thing.

Good for them.

 

Bravo calling out a poster on his hypocrisy. I agree with the poster.

These statements are even better :

<quote> I apologize if I called them "anti-intellectual". I think stupid or moronic works better.

You can hold all the crackpot opinions you want--just don't expect them to carry any validity outside your own head. </quote>

In a thread about intolerance and closed-mindedness. I guess you missed the irony.

 

There' no irony at all. Sounds like you're another graduate from the Zag School of Reading Comprehension

If you believe that creationism --or any form of religious belief--has any standing in the scientific community, you're a proud member of Idiot America. You can believe in the flying spaghetti monster for all I care---just don't insult people's intelligence by pretending it has any kind of intellectual respectablity. It is, by it's nature, anti-intellectual.

This has nothing to do with tolerance. It's about this relatively recent phenomena--you can blame radio talk shows and the internet probably---that maintains ALL opinions are equally valid and that we should give crackpots some sort of intellectual respectability. They used to sit in the corner, drool. and talk to themselves. Now they have book deals.

I think the tipping point for all this was Fredo saying that creationism should be taught in the schools so students know both sides of the debate.

Well, I'm sorry but there are not two sides to a scientific debate when you bring fairy tales to the party.