MORE ON FREE SPEECH — OR THE LACK THEREOF — AT HARVARD. Alan Dershowitz notes that if you took “hate speech” and “offensiveness” seriously, you’d have to ban Tom Paulin and Amiri Baraka, two guys that Harvard seems to regard as neither offensive nor hateful despite their obviously being both.

Meanwhile Scott LeHigh reviews recent events at Harvard — including the cartoon-censorship affair at Harvard Business School, which he correctly calls “laughably trivial,” and remarks:

All that reveals a university community lamentably ready to sacrifice free speech on the altar of civility. Harvard is hardly alone there. . . .

Why no sustained outcry from the faculties? ”They don’t consider that to be a free speech issue because it is imposed by the academic left, and the academic left is an authoritarian movement, not one of genuine liberalism,” Silverglate, himself a liberal, observes.

Yes, complaints about McCarthyism ring rather hollow, these days, given that so much of academia has given up on academic freedom as a principle. And once the question isn’t whether speech should be suppressed, but rather who gets to do the suppression, the PC crowd shouldn’t be surprised to find itself targeted. But it will be, of course, if it ever comes to that. And if it doesn’t come to that, it’ll be because people like Silverglate, anathema to the PC crowd, have stood up for a principle that too many academics have been happy to abandon.

MICKEY KAUS IS BEGGING FOR HATEMAIL. I knew he’d miss MWO.

SAUDI SCHIZOPHRENIA: The IndePundit writes:

FEW YEARS AGO, I read a news report about some remarks made by a Saudi Prince to the Arab press that struck me as odd. The Prince was responding to a question about the presence of foreign military in the Kingdom, and he replied, rather brusquely, that there were no foreign troops in Saudi Arabia.

What was odd about this was that I was reading this report on board the USS Nimitz in the Persian Gulf, and a few hours earlier I had been tracking a flight of American F-15s from Prince Sultan Airbase to the Southern No-Fly Zone over Iraq.

The Saudis’ relationship with the truth is a complex one. Well, actually, “complex” is a euphemism for “they lie a lot, even when it’s obvious, and expect to be taken seriously.”

BOTH JOHN POINDEXTER AND THE HOMELAND SECURITY DEPARTMENT are coming in for a shellacking from bloggers. Here’s what the Acidman says:

We DO NOT NEED THAT SHIT, folks. Granting such power to Washington will not make us more secure; it will make us more likely to be terrorized– NOT by terrorists, but by own own government. If you trust the IRS, the ATF, the FBI, the CIA and the goddam Post Office, you’ll LOVE this fucked-up idea. Put everybody under a government microscope and see how many terrorists are targeted.

They won’t have time to fight terrorism, because they’ll be going after low-hanging fruit, which is YOU and ME, people. The super-spy agency will be no different than gun-control nutballs. They’ll take guns from law-abiding citizens because that’s easy to do.

The criminals get to keep theirs. They can’t find the fucking criminals; criminals HIDE. So, the crime-fighters go after you. They know where you live.

Given the choice between worrying about a POSSIBLE terrorist attack on my life and a DEFINITE government attack on my privacy, I’ll take my chances with the terrorists every time. Terrorists aren’t that smart, they don’t have that much money, and they aren’t the government. They aren’t frightening.

The government is.

Meanwhile, Shellshocking writes: “Stay the FUCK out of my shopping cart!” And she joins Kim du Toit, who has been righteously ranting about the Poindexterbase for some time, in encouraging people to write their Senators and Representatives.

Overplaying the domestic-spy hand could be a big mistake for the Administration. And what idiot decided that Poindexter would be a good public face for this program? Or was it some ingenious maneuverer trying to kill the program who put Poindexter in charge? That would explain the creepy logo, too.

Meanwhile, outside the blogosphere, Randy Barnett (who has been mentioned as a potential Supreme Court nominee. . . .) has some advice for the Administration: “When libertarians do not trust Republican legislators to respect the Bill of Rights, they will be more likely to vote Libertarian,” which as we’ve read has been costing the GOP elections.

UPDATE: Pejman Yousefzadeh, writing in TechCentralStation, isn’t very impressed either.

PARANOIA STRIKES DEEP. Into your soul it will creep. . . .

UPDATE: On the other hand, it’s interesting to see Gore jump on the anti-pomo bandwagon:

For now, Mr. Gore can only attempt to explain what motivates the ceaseless lampooning he continues to face from America’s columnists and commentators. “That’s postmodernism,” he offered. “It’s the combination of narcissism and nihilism that really defines postmodernism, and that’s another interview for another time, if you’re interested in it.

I’m not sure, though, that postmodernist critics are Gore’s biggest problem.

UPDATE: The latest research proves me right!

INTERESTING REPORT FROM IRAQ:

The city of Qurnah in the south of iraq (way down in the map, exactly where the tigris and euphrates meet) was bombarded for two days. A friend who works there says that the planes are bombing an empty area very close to the city, the windows of the hotel where he lives are broken, first no one knew why the americans would bomb an empty area. later when they went to look at the craters they found out that there were telephone lines burried in that area. the governarates of Basrah and Maysan are cut off the rest of Iraq, telephonically speaking, that is.

Now why would anyone want to do that?

THEIR TEAM DOESN’T LOSE MANY PLAYERS, but Arthur Silber is thinking of converting to heterosexuality in protest to the latest from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

HERE’S ANOTHER CRICHTON-INSPIRED NANOTECH STORY, this one from Business Week.

AZIZ POONAWALLA HAS another post on non-Wahhabi Islam and terrorism.

BRINK LINDSEY has a post on the Bush Administration’s no-tariffs policy.

APPARENTLY, YASSER ARAFAT’S INFLUENCE REACHES FARTHER THAN I REALIZED:

CHILDREN as young as 11 are being encouraged by the Government to show an interest in bomb-making.

A briefing document, which tells science teachers how to engage pupils’ interest, includes the suggestion that they “use ball-bearings to make tilt switches for bombs”.

BB guns, though, are right out.

VIA TIM BLAIR I found this reply by Australian Prime Minister John Howard to a letter by the father of a Bali victim who said Australia is too close to the United States:

You asked me: “Why did [my] son die?” I don’t have a perfect answer to that but I will do my best.

He died at the hands of a murderous group of Islamic fanatics who despise the liberal democratic, open life of Western nations, such as Australia. He died because there are people in the world who believe that indiscriminate violent murder is a justifiable political instrument.

Well said.

BOTH SOFIA SIDESHOW and Merde in France note that the warm reception received by President Bush from Easter Europeans isn’t getting much attention elsewhere. (Here’s a CNN story, though you have to scroll down to find out about the cheers.)

Strangely, Eastern Europe seems to be more of a repository of Western values than most of Western Europe these days.

UPDATE: Emmanuelle Richard has an interview with Merde in France.

UPDATE: Innocents Abroad has more — and scroll down for an additional post.

JOHN SCALZI WRITES ABOUT CREATIONISM AND THE BIG BANG:

Asking whether one “believes” in the Big Bang doesn’t really answer any questions — it merely suggests that the Big Bang is itself part of a faith-based system, equivalent to a belief in Christ or Allah or Buddha or whomever. This is another piece of semantic ammunition that Creationists and others like to use: That science is just another system of “belief,” just another species of religion. Not only is science not just another species of faith, it’s not even in the same phylum. Faith is a conclusion. Science is a process. This is why, incidentally, the two are not ultimately inherently incompatible, just as driving somewhere is not inherently incompatible with having a fixed home address.

If I were putting together a poll on the Big Bang, I wouldn’t ask people if they believed in it. I would ask them, based on the evidence, what model of universal creation best described its current state. I’d make sure I left space for the “I have no idea” option. I believe — and this is just hypothesis, not a theory — that the data from that question would be informative.

Hmm. If you’re a Tiplerite, which category do you fall in?

HERE’S YET ANOTHER ARTICLE ON WEBLOGS. And here, courtesy of NYU’s journalism school, are a bunch more.

READER STEVE MILLER SENDS THIS LINK TO AN INDYMEDIA POST by apparent S.F. cop-killer Andrew McCrae. One thing’s for sure — this guy’s an economic idiot:

The truth is that the people of these Third World countries know exactly how to get themselves out of their economic ruts, but are forcefully kept from doing it because of a dominating U.S. influence. These people want to develop their own industrial and technological industries by putting tariffs on U.S. products. But they can’t do this because the World Trade Organization (WTO) which is both dominated by U.S. corporations, and has the authority to regulate third world use of tariffs, prevents them from doing so.

Tariffs on U.S. products sold within Third World countries would raise their prices and ease consumption of them. This would give third world industries space in the market to strengthen themselves. Using tariffs in this manner is a fundamental tool for any country to develop into a more powerful nation, but the WTO is perpetually keeping them from doing it, just so U.S. companies can sell their own products there.

This is the exact same situation the American colonists were protesting when they threw the Boston Tea Party.

Actually, they were protesting high tariffs on imports. Like tea. But hey, that’s just the icing on the cake, here.

THIS POST from a week ago about academic feminists’ statements about men got Barry Deutsch upset. I was posting from memory and I can’t give a cite, nor am I inclined to spend the library time it would take to make Deutsch happy. And I suppose I could be wrong, though my recollection of the statements in question seems quite clear. But if you’re interested, see the update.

UPDATE: Brian Carnell has a post in which he quotes Mary Daly (famous for excluding men from her classes at Boston College) as advocating a world nearly free of men. And he notes that Daly’s work has been endorsed by many prominent feminists. I suppose we’ll hear that it’s “satire,” though. Here’s an excerpt from an interview that Carnell quotes:

WIE: Which brings us to another question I wanted to ask you. Sally Miller Gearhart, in her article, “The Future—If There is One—Is Female,” writes: “At least three further requirements supplement the strategies of environmentalists if we were to create and preserve a less violent world. 1) Every culture must begin to affirm the female future. 2) Species responsibility must be returned to women in every culture. 3) The proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately ten percent of the human race.” What do you think about this statement?

MD: I think it’s not a bad idea at all. If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males. People are afraid to say that kind of stuff anymore.

Yeah, this is the kind of stuff I remember. Does this sound like satire to you?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s a link to the interview. The passage quoted above appears here. There’s lots of other fascinating stuff. And here — as a testament to her mainstream impact — is some rather fawning praise of Daly’s work, including a quotation of the passage above, by a Unitarian minister from a church in Arlington, Virginia.

HE’S NOT THE MESSIAH, HE’S A VERY NAUGHTY BOY: Porphyrogenitus is insulting Mohammed.

UPDATE: Aziz Poonawalla replies: “Muhammad SAW is insulted every day. Normal Muslims (ie, 99.999%) don’t really give a damn.”

A READER WONDERS WHY THIS STORY ISN’T GETTING MORE ATTENTION:

A 23-year-old man opposed to “police-state tactics” was captured in a hotel Tuesday as people in California flocked to a memorial service for a police officer he apparently admitted killing. . . .

Red Bluff, Calif., police officer David Mobilio, 31, was shot once in the head on Nov. 19 as he was refueling his cruiser. A man identifying himself as Andrew McCrae claimed responsibility in a posting Monday to a Web site for San Francisco news, www.sf.indymedia.org.

“Hello everyone, my name’s Andy,” he said in one of two letters. “I killed a police officer in Red Bluff, California, in a motion to bring attention to, and halt, the police-state tactics that have come to be used throughout our country.

The writer said the killing also was “an action against corporate irresponsibility,” which he blamed for “all of the major problems in America and throughout the world today.”

I blame Molly Ivins and Noam Chomsky and all the others who have stirred up such hatred. Does Tom Daschle know about this?

I HAVEN’T BEEN UP TO POSTING MUCH TODAY. End-of-semester blahs, I guess. I’m not actually sick, and yet I just feel kind of, well, crappy. But one of my posts led to this poetic response, so I guess it wasn’t wasted.

ADDRESSING “ROOT CAUSES:”

ASHINGTON, Nov. 25 — The White House outlined a detailed proposal today to set up a competition among the world’s poorest nations for portions of a new $5 billion foreign aid fund. To win, countries must demonstrate that they are curbing corruption, spending more on education and following free market economic principles.

Under the plan, a new federal corporation will be set up to administer the aid, and decisions will be made by a Cabinet-level panel that will dole out the money much the way colleges assign scholarships.

The proposal has yet to be submitted to Congress, but it has a good chance of passing.

“Think of it as a bonus pool,” one of Mr. Bush’s senior advisers said today, briefing reporters. The administration’s judgments about which nations will get the money and which will not, he said, would depend on scores on a range of performance tests. The countries would be rated on everything from their encouragement of civil liberties and their spending on education and health, to their control of inflation and their use of budget targets and tax policy.

As a reader writes, this is actually pretty radical.

THE STORY OF SAUDI COMPLICITY IN THE 9/11 ATTACKS seems to have legs, much to the discomfiture of the Bush Administration.

Or is it all part of some devious plan?

JAMES LILEKS HAS SOME THOUGHTS about antisemitism in Minnesota, and elsewhere.

EUGENE ROSTOW, one of my old law professors, is dead. He was one of my “old” law professors even when I had him, and had to take off part of a semester for a heart attack. But he was an excellent teacher, and encouraged me to publish the paper I wrote for his class, thus starting me on an academic career even though I don’t think he agreed with the paper’s conclusions. And his 1945 article, The Japanese-American Cases: A Disaster, is a classic.

GOOD NEWS / BAD NEWS: Okay, I have to go teach Administrative Law, but I just ran into my old secretary who left here for a job with the county public health department. She’s carrying a pager that’s just for smallpox (or other bioterrorism, but smallpox is what they’re worried about). She gets her shot next week. They’ve already identified the locations where they’ll give emergency vaccinations, and they’ve made all the plans on who goes where with what so that all it takes to start the vaccination process is one mass pager message. They even have pre-arrangements for buses to take people to the innoculation centers.

I’m glad to hear that there’s so much planning and efficiency involved. But it indicates to me that someone is taking the threat rather more seriously than the general run of the media tends to suggest. And while the efficiency is comforting, what this says about the threat isn’t comforting at all.