The Insurgent Controversy: A Primer
A number of people have emailed us recently asking what the controversy surrounding the Insurgent is all about. We’ve had a number of posts going into detail about the issue and its accompanying brouhaha, so here are the important ones:
- Most importantly, we posted a .pdf of the issue here. (Note: link contains picture of the Insurgent’s cover, which many find offensive.)
- After the Insurgent released its controversial issue, the University suddenly remembered that student groups were not eligible to use the University’s bulk mailing rate.
- UO Student Zachary White was the first to file a grievance against the Insurgent. Here‘s the first post of our coverage on that, and here‘s our coverage of when the ASUO ruled against him.
- Soon enough, Bill Donohue of the Catholic League learned of the Insurgent’s issue and began complaining.
- The Commentator’s own Tyler Graf (who appeared on the O’Reilly Factor tonight) wrote a guest commentary in the Daily Emerald, the UO’s campus daily.
- And just yesterday, the ASUO once against ruled in favor of the Insurgent, by turning down the “Students of Faith” group’s grievance.
- And here are the first five pages of the newest Insurgent issue. They’ve been scanned in by hand, but we included the parts relevant to the controversy surrounding their previous issue.
NOTE: For those of you just tuning in, the Insurgent and the Commentator are two different publications. We are conservative/libertarian. The Insurgent is anarcho-syndicalist/marxist/crazy. We find this situation funnier than they do.
The original deal would have had one or two people from the Insurgent and one or two people from the OC, with perhaps a Jethro Higgens thrown into the mix for good measure. Alas, the kids at the Insurgent aren’t big fans of, you know, explaining their thoughts or actions, so the offer was rebuffed. Thus, I came on to act as the Big O’s punching bag. I’ll post more of my thoughts later …
Maybe I missed something here. Stupid question time: any idea why O
Jake: Thanks! We also moved it off of our server to another one that Ian has, I think he’s got some ridiculously sized quota as well.
If you guys start to push your quota for the PDF again, I’ve mirrored it here:
http://utterlyboring.com/archives/Insurgent_17.4.pdf
I have a 1000GB quota on that server, and I’m only pushing 30GB for the month right now, so go ahead and link away to it.
Great coverage of this Bill O’Reilly mess. I miss being on campus, otherwise I would’ve known about this sooner.
-Jake Ortman
-Former ODE Online Editor, but always a big fan of the Commentator
-Blogger: utterlyboring.com
Hmm… Well. That just made my night.
I was watching our good friend Bill and was quite surprised to see this issue come up… Let me know if you guys are fishing for any stories that’ll put the Commentator on CNN.
Seriously, though.. Bill O’Reilly? How did that happen?
Thanks for scanning the new Insurgent in, Ian. A couple of quick thoughts:
This is exactly the wrong lesson to learn from the OC’s Motoon issue. There the cartoons were presented in context, the controversy was discussed in a sensitive and intelligent way, and there is no way that any literate person could describe the content of that issue as “anti-Muslim.” Result: no protests.
The Insurgent, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to acknowledge that the way you say things is important; all they’re concerned with is who you’re saying it about. This explains why they’re baffled at the outcry over their last issue: they don’t have particularly good critical reading skills. (It also explains why they’re now muttering things like “It is obvious who holds the power in this country.”)
As for “…the cartoons are clearly intended as humor,” you know, I read the Aroused Jesus issue, and it was po-faced and glum as every other godawful thing they publish. Maybe we missed something and the whole bit was a spoof of an Insurgent issue? If so, we owe their hive mind an apology.
Oh, and check out the list of collective members. Don Goldman picked a hell of a time to jump ship.