Comments on: The Pieing of William Kristol

By: Alinsky Rules « Counterculture Con HQ

Alinsky Rules « Counterculture Con HQ — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 06:49:14 +0000

[...] But it’s tough. You’ve got to be quick on your feet and have the hide of a rhino. When they throw a pie at a conservative speaker on campus? Think Alinsky. The speaker dodging the pie looks like a fool, and if he gets angry, twice the [...]

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 18:34:26 +0000

So it's Jan, 2009 now, your money and jobs are gone and the country is in ruins -- still think a pie in the face was too much for this guy?

By: Hospitality for the Coming Age » Pointing fingers and pie in the face

Hospitality for the Coming Age » Pointing fingers and pie in the face — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 00:34:14 +0000

[...] Halfway through Bill Kristol’s speech, a student climbed onto the stage and threw a pie in his face, then ran out of the building. Bill (and Earlham president Doug Bennett) wiped the pie off his face and continued his speech, to a standing ovation. [...]

By: Billy

Billy — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 20:20:42 +0000

Kristol has the blood of innocents on his hands. He deserves more than just a pie to the face. More like a noose around his neck.

By: Chris Hardie's Weblog

Chris Hardie's Weblog — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 00:44:34 +0000

Kristol Pieing, Dialogue Redux

One of my blog entries that is most often commented upon is The Pieing of William Kristol, about the incident in March where Earlham Student Josh Medlin hit conservative commentator Kristol with some sort of pie. As the paper reported yesterday, Medl...

By: Liz Schwartz

Liz Schwartz — Sun, 23 Oct 2005 21:58:16 +0000

do you think this deserved a 60-day prison sentence for the student? that's what he got (tho he is doing community service instead).

http://www.pal-item.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051020/NEWS01/510200314/1008/NEWS17

By: matthew

matthew — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 16:05:42 +0000

kristol is a lying piece of crap like cheney and this monkey pres bush. i liked that students pied his stupid ass. its time for bush, cheney et al to be impeached over leaking valerie plames name and bullshitting the country about averyting leading up to the war in iraq.
what happened to the people who were left at the superdome after katrina was a disgrace. it shows how this war is not only bankrupting this country but how racism ends up costing many innocent people their lives.

keep throwing those pies people. maybe it wont change the a-holes minds being hit with pies but it make them think alot more how people are fed up with their crap. they will also have to start ducking more too

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 13:19:14 +0000

I share your frustration, Thomas. I'm starting to think I should have avoided blogging about it at all; my site apparently comes up #3 after Earlham's own pages about it when you search google for "kristol earlham". It's sad to watch the national press take hold of the story and contrast the action against the backdrop of a "peace studies college" as some are calling Earlham. I can almost hear some NPR in-between-news-readings quip about it now. There are so many more good things that Earlham should be known for and, as Ian noted, there are so many other injustices happening in the world that deserve "attention," to put it mildly.

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 19:45:48 +0000

Thanks for your comments.

You may not be able to have constructive debates with liars, but you can have constructive debates about them, or because of them. I suspect that Earlham might find an address by someone like Kristol useful in this regard: it allows students to see up close what the right wing intelligentsia look like and how they do frame the debate. So I guess it's one thing to read the works of Lakoff and others about re-framing the way these exchanges go, but it's another to have an opportunity to practice it with someone like Kristol. Ian, I suppose this is what you meant by determining counter-strategies. Given how things actually turned out, I can't help but agree that in this case, at least some at Earlham were apparently not ready, and thus the College as a whole was not well-served by inviting Kristol in the first place.

By: Ian Bicking

Ian Bicking — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I certainly wouldn't see any purpose to this kind of pie-throwing -- it's just too easy, and serves no point. Infiltrating their scripted events or internal discussions (e.g., G8, various charity dinners, etc) is both more interesting and serves some purpose, because it isn't a message to the wider world, it's just a message directly to the opposition. There's value in that. People can over-focus on the public sphere sometimes, forgetting that it often doesn't *matter* what the wider public thinks when compared to the opinions of the elite. OTOH, you may simply alienate the elite. Trying to drive a wedge between the unforgiveably evil elite and the possibly reformable elite is subtle, and total condemnation probably won't serve much purpose. Still, I don't think people like Kristol provide a useful or interesting perspective. They are liars and thieves. You can't have constructive debates with liars. If you let them phrase the terms of the debate you've already lost. When someone does not provide an honest or genuine perspective, you do a diservice to give them any time or attention at all (except perhaps the cynical attention when determining counter-strategies). The idea that all opinions are valid or true, or that some golden mean exists, is false. It lets the extremists shift the center too easily, it lets the liars redirect the discussion too often.