4.08.2012

Greenspan's Body Count in Academia

Look who's cited in the Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law: little ol' W.C. Varones!

Elizabeth L. MacDowell, Associate Professor of Law at UNLV, discusses the 2008 Karthik Rajaram murder-suicide in her paper When Reading Between the Lines is Not Enough: Lessons from Media Coverage of a Domestic Violence Homicide-Suicide:

In this context, the story was soon  swept up in what Associated Press writer Kelli Kennedy characterized as a trend of suicides and murder-suicides across the country attributable  to worsening financial conditions.  In the blogosphere, W.C. Varones even included the Rajaram family in his “Greenspan’s Body Count”—a list of suicide and murder victims whose deaths he attributes to former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s policies.
While we're honored to be cited in such a prestigious journal as the Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law, the author is a complete loon steeped in Grievance Studies nonsense. From her intro:
This was obviously a domestic violence homicide, by virtue of the fact that Karthik had killed his family. But in the aftermath of violence, significant questions remain about what occurred beforehand. Statistics tell us that a history of abuse most likely preceded this killing. Whether that was the case in this family, whether these killings were preventable, and what this tragedy would teach us about preventing domestic violence in the future, all remain to be seen.

However, media accounts of domestic violence homicide and homicide-suicide typically forego explora tion of these significant questions, presenting domestic violence crimes as isolated events that are unrelated to other similar cases. As a result, these accounts tend to cloud rather than clarify the problem of domestic violence. Coverage of the Rajaram case would take these familiar concerns to new levels, as the emerging narrative first inspired incredulity, and then anger.

This Article is a response to the secondary, routine acts of violence enacted in the media that utterly efface victims of domestic violence, even in death. In particular, it grew from a desire to do some small justice on behalf of Subasri Rajaram, whose position as the erstwhile safety net in her family is easy to imagine and empathize with. While it would be dishonest to pretend that we can discern the truth of her story from the scant details provided about her in media reports, or from mere demographics, it would also be irresponsible to ignore what is known about similarly situated women in considering the circumstances that led to her death.
Get that? If the media even discuss the contribution of economic stresses to a murder-suicide, the media themselves are committing violence against the victim!

Can you believe your tax dollars are going to fund dingbats writing drivel like this? Or that your children's five-figure annual college tuition is going to fund it?

The sooner the higher education bubble bursts and these professors take up new jobs as Walmart greeters, the better.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sorry to inform you, but Walmart greeters are gone.

Not sure I'd get too excited by the citation as the journal title implies some kind of feminist-commie stuff. Real geniuses, those.

Dean said...

I was waiting for the "talk radio" shoe to drop.

Anonymous said...

Loans to our children are the Fed's biggest asset!
http://advisorperspectives.com/dshort/charts/2012/Federal-Government-Total-Financial-Assets-Q4-2011.gif

Happy Super Tuesday!