Until the next unreasonable demand.
Is it just me? Is Blaska the outlier? Is your irascible bloggeur the only one in high dudgeon today? (Wouldn’t be the first time.) Anyone else think the removal of a glacial erratic boulder from the campus of the University of Wisconsin is the most stupid, egregious display of Woke virtue signaling ever? (Need more adjectives and adverbs, STAT!) Please tell me I’m not going crazy.
Neither the Babylon Bee nor the Onion can make this stuff up. It is its own parody. A 42-ton boulder — not fashioned into a likeness of Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest or Donald Trump — tumbled up on the Madison isthmus by the same impersonal glacier that formed Madison’s chain of lakes 12,000 years ago. Somehow, THIS is your symbol of white oppression?
Why? Because someone 100 years ago used a racial pejorative to refer, generically, to big rocks like the Chamberlin Rock. A term that, guaranteed, not one of the campus’ 40,000 cosseted students has ever heard in their young lives. That was only discovered in a mouldering issue of a 1925 newspaper. “University historians have not found any other time that the slur was used,” that newspaper helpfully informs today.
Through some bizarre progressive alchemy, the rock, named after a long-ago university president, has become a “painful symbol of the university’s racist past.” Notice the absence of the qualifying adverb “allegedly.” For it is given that the University of Wisconsin-Madison was racist and today, with its removal, likely is only a little bit less so. Because a noisy claque of social justice warriors is on the prowl. On a campus where young men once mustered out of Camp Randall on these very grounds to fight slavery and secession in the South. Now THAT is skin in the game, unlike the grievance studies majors playing little Miss Snowflake.
No baseball bat and bullhorn needed when playing the race card in Madison WI. Over-educated college deans, salaries well into six figures, will bow and scrape like reverse Stepin Fetchits. No history, either.
Loud and stupid is no way to go through life, kids.
‘Further harm’?
Campus chancellor Rebecca Blank couldn’t muster the spine to say, “Hey Kids, we’ll get back to you on that. If you want to stomp and shout over a big blank stone instead of making a difference in the world, I’ll sell the popcorn.” No, instead, we get this mealy mouthed subservience to stupidity:
“Removing the rock as a monument in a prominent location prevents further harm to our community while preserving the rock’s educational research value for our current and future students.”
That is the WI State Journal quoting the university’s director of campus planning and landscape architecture, who appears to be as white as a loaf of Wonder Bread. And as clueless.
Blaska’s Bottom Line: The Werkes hopes that some future generation will look at the rock in its new, undisclosed location and ask “What were they thinking back in 2021?” Now THERE would be some educational research value.
Education
Blaska Policy Werkes 
There are examples of true oppression worldwide: the Tower of London and the Auschwitz museum complex located in what was German-occupied Poland come to mind.
In having the Chamberlin Rock removed, the BLM crowd missed their chance for real guilt-tripping. They could’ve had a bronze plaque engraved with the offending slur and appropriate virtuous thoughts engraved and affixed to the rock on public display for all time.
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“German-occupied Poland ”
Thank you for correctly stating this. So many people get this wrong. Auschwitz was indeed located in then GERMAN-occupied Poland, but it was a product of the German Nazis. Fact: Millions of Christian Poles were victims too.
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Thanks for the tip, Lib.
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The rock is a bane, it’s all about the Deodand.
https://infogalactic.com/info/Deodand
By the way, this means liberals and progressives are actually superstitious animists. They need a witch doctor to help them.
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Famous Madison artifact I was glad to see the last of: the Nails ‘n’ Tales sculpture near Camp Randall.
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Oh hell yes. I wish it hadn’t been done so quietly; could have been a unifying moment for the entire city.
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HA ! I had to look that one up, looks like a giant head of sorghum.
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The rock’s lawyer, Garner Moss, points out the rock has been educating geology students for almost a century and therefore has tenure. Mr. Moss says he intends to file an illegal dismissal suit. “We will be asking for punitive damages and full restoration. My client has done nothing wrong and is eager to return for the fall semester.”
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BRING BACK THE ROCK….BRING BACK THE ROCK. THERE IS NOTHING MORE IMPORTANT TO TALK ABOUT THAN THE ROCK>
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A boulder administration would have demanded a recount. The rock only asks to start with a clean slate. Never meant to aggregate anyone.
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Why do we, the sane people, allow these people to have any at all, credibility?
They belong in Mendota!
They are NUTS!
We have truly given the inmates the run of a crazy train of their own making. The problem is that they have been allowed to make we, the not crazy people, a part of their crazy train and now their crazy train has replaced what was normal with their new normal.
Lunatics Anonymous, that is where they belong, in a NUT HOUSE.
Why do we, the sane people, insist on joining them?
BTW- The way I heard it, the statue of Abe Lincoln was supposed to stand up out of his seat every time a virgin girl walked past him. Since his statue has never stood up, there must not of ever been a virgin on campus here in Madison since his statue was installed.
Should the statue of Abe Lincoln be removed because rumor has it that he will stand whenever a virgin girl walks by and the statue never has? This could quite conceivably be thought of as a slam on every virgin girl on campus.
I demand that we do something about this right away. I am offended at the thought that virgin girls on the campus here in Madison have been so traumatized by this obvious insult.
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More importantly.
I thought the U.W. Madison was a place of HIGHER LEARNING! With the removal of this rock, the university has just announced that it is NO LONGER a place of higher learning as it will accept rumors and tales from yesteryear whether true or not, to be the guide posts on how to run the university.
I demand that our Republicans in state office remove all funding from the university of Wisconsin, Madison as they no longer use FACTS in order to decide how the university is run!
FACTS are an important thing. We are living in a time that ignores FACTS in order to accommodate feelings.
Therefore, since the university of Wisconsin, Madison, no longer bases its decisions on facts, why then should we the citizens of Wisconsin pay our hard earned taxpayer money to support such an institution?
All I can say about the supposed leadership of this once great institution of higher learning is:
Stupid is as Stupid does!
Only you people are not just stupid, you are IDIOTS!
That means YOU, Chancellor Rebecca Blank. You and the rest of the idiots who made this decision. You need to hang your heads in shame. Shame, shame on you.
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Opposition to the Chamberlin Rock is absurd, preposterous, ridiculous, ludicrous, idiotic, lunacy, madness, deranged, unhinged, nucking futs, and most of all it’s stupid. This proves the old adage that human stupidity is infinite.
The real problem as I see it is that the City of Madison, the University of Wisconsin Madison and the Madison area media didn’t have the intellectual fortitude to tell the irrational people complaining about the rock that the adults in the room weren’t going to engage in with ignorant fools presenting petty irrational arguments. Tell the dang fools to shut up and grow up.
This action by the University of Wisconsin Madison literally enables stupidity and teaches students attending the University that their “feelings”, no matter how baseless and ignorant they are, can overrule the intellect and logic at a institution of higher learning that is supposed to teach, encourage, and promote intellect and logic. Absurdity abounds!
Nothing good will come from this kind of ignorant greasing of the squeaky wheels reaction from the University, the administrators are projecting that the power base is shifting and the lunatics are in charge of the asylum!
The university is feeding trolls.
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All true but Rebecca Blank gets a certain amount of virtual signalling points. She’ll regret it when she realizes they won’t stop with a rock.
I’d like to see a big donor express their opinion by turning off the spigot.
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so this rock had to go because it was competing with all those rocks between the ears of the woke???
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Where is the outrage against the Wisconsin State Journal for publishing an article with such a racist term? Since when does the messenger get a free pass?
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There is a shocking lack of creativity on display here, from the city to the university to the random BLM / Antifa vandal on the street. Moving the rock is so passe’! So 20th century!
Surely everyone would have been better served if the rock had been left in place, and also sculpted into a likeness of George Floyd. Win – Win!
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The reason for its removal is because it was easier to remove the rock than it was to remove the statue of abraham lincoln, which was also suggested for removal. Blank said no to Lincoln but yes to the rock.
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What Blank says or doesn’t say is irrelevant. The tiny faction of fanatical ideologues who persist in making these farcical ‘demands’ will get their way eventually. If she doesn’t approve, they’ll tear down Lincoln’s statue anyway without fear of consequences. It’s worked for them many times before.
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It’s perpetual outraging, the simply move from one outrage to the next.
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