Comedy Banned At Harvard, Looking Down From the Ivory Tower

The smartest man in the room seldom has a sense of humor. In the film Loser, a professor having an affair with a 17-year-old female student is portrayed as being that smartest man at the college. He shows no humor and lacks common sense too. Below is an exchange on the discussion boards of the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper at Harvard University. It appeared under a story about the campaign for US Senator in Massachusetts. Republican Scott Brown is the incumbent, quite an accomplishment in a heavily Democratic state. Elizabeth Warren a Harvard Law Professor is the Democratic challenger. The article is about the use of welfare rolls to send out voter registration forms with return postage. Warren's daughter is chairman of the board of a non profit which sued the state of Massachusetts to force them to comply with this voter registration law. Brown says that Warren, having raised $13 million for her campaign, should pay for the mailing.

Mr. Jonathan Pulliam dislikes Mitt Romney is all I've been able to discover. It may explain his moral superiority, his obtuse use of precise technical words pulled from text books, his omniscience, arrogance, personal attacks and his lack of a sense of humor. Poor JP, it is a burden being the smartest man in the room. "Willfully ignorant?" Huh?

[JP]
"Brown demanded that Warren reimburse taxpayers the costs of the mailings, which he called an “unprecedented voter registration drive.”
Massachusetts wasn't complying with the 1993 federal law, and Demos already had a well-established track record of litigating non-compliant states, so the Brown camp oughtn't hold its collective breath waiting for a refund.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but tertiary partisan jockeying amounts to, in the current context of ongoing global liquidity crises coupled with persistent, pronounced economic recession, just the sort of "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" partisanship decried across our Commonwealth and which figures so prominently in all of Scott Brown's recent campaign ads.
Rather than becoming distracted by the inconsequential minutiae of our post-Gerrymandered Commonwealth's arcane election laws, it is our critically urgent obligation rather to first address the more pressing policy proposals facing us.
* * *
[M]
Why do voters need to register before voting? That only embarrasses non citizens, and tourists who want to vote. I mean, like, you know, if a person has enough enthusiasm to actually go into those polling places, which are usually very dull with no music, no internet connections, no adult beverages available, to vote, why not encourage them? And why not allow people to vote from adult beverage emporiums, using their mobile devices? Why the burden of having to go to those polling places at all? Yecch. BTW does anyone know what "tertiary partisan jockeying" means? Horse racing? Underwear? "Global liquidity crisis?" Anyone? Does it have to do with adult liquid beverages not being allowed in polling places? How old do you have be to vote? Is there an upper age limit? Are waivers granted to very intelligent and highly motivated people? Can you vote more than once?
* * *
[JP] reply;
Tertiary partisan jockeying, as with tertiary syphilis, is the final stage which precedes the fatal dementia-fogged conclusion, invariably the demise of the host. In this instance it is the organism politic here in Massachusetts which is both diseased and dying. Our democratic institutions have been so swamped by a tsunami of mostly out-of-state originating contributions, that the will of our own Commonwealth's electorate has been thwarted again and again.

The "jockeying" refers to advantage-seeking via "positioning" on "issues of questionable priority" artfully introduced by one candidate's team in an attempt to derail the other's bid. People will often "see through" this ploy, though it must be noted that apparently, some don't -- you, to give one counter-example, fail completely in this regard, it must be stated.

It is not my duty to have to educate willfully ignorant persons such as yourself in the meaning of terminology used to describe economic concepts. That said, "illiquidity" is when one can't afford to pay, typically until they themselves are paid debt obligations owed. That is what has typically occurred when one hears of cascading loan, or bond-payment defaults. The classic, textbook example of a "Global liquidity crisis" would, of course, have been the so-called "Banker's Panic of 1907" a financial liquidity shortfall partially remediated by the intervention of J.P. Morgan ( the man not the craptacularly corporatized modern-day incarnation ), and the reason I mention our current global liquidity shortfall, manifest recently in Sapin, Greece, and other Eurozone nations, is that undefended, our financial system will wither and die, and if we're too busy arguing and self-righteously positioning ourselves vis-a-vis stupid-ass campaign-generated distractions of tertiary (third-rate) priority, such as the "Motor Voter" law of 1993, then we are essentially abdicating our responsibility to address problems in an order which might reasonably permit their timely and efficacious solution.
* * *
[M] reply:
Gasp! I am not worthy.
* * *
[JP]
From his lofty tower in Maecenas,
As the embers of burnt Rome glowed,
Emperor Nero chose to dither,
Harping off-key on his Zither.
* * *
and[JP]
Not worthy? Truer words were never spoken.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/8/12/brown-voter-registration-warren/

Brown Says Court Decision Was Meant To Help Warren
By NICHOLAS P. FANDOS,
Harvard CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
August 12, 2012