EXPLORING THE WORLD OF ALTERNATIVE WEEKLIES: I actually like our local rag pretty well, though it seems to have suffered a bit from staff cuts lately.
Archive for 2006
February 14, 2006
I CAN’T SAY I’M SURPRISED:
 |
Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics)
created with QuizFarm.com
So I guess it’s not just that we aren’t supposed to draw pictures of Mohammed as terrorist, or of Mohammed at all; we aren’t even supposed to draw pictures that are obviously not of Mohammed, and that are meant to mock the inability to draw pictures of Mohammed.
Well, I have to admit: The folks who are offended by this have a First Amendment right to be offended. They should feel entirely free to be offended.
The rest of us should feel entirely free, as a matter of civility as well as of law, to say: Your decision to be offended by this particular cartoon gives you no rights (again, as a matter of civility as well as of law) to tell us to stop printing it.
More on the underlying conceptual issue — the difficult but necessary distinction between (more or less) reasonable taking of offense and unreasonable taking of offense — later; I also hope then to talk in some measure about the distinction between this cartoon and others that I do think can reasonably be found to be offensive, and that probably shouldn’t (as a matter of civility) have been published in the first instance, though it is proper to publish them now in order to explain the controversy. For now, it seems to me that this incident does plenty to illustrate the danger of the “it’s wrong to publish any cartoons that offend people” attitude.
Particularly as those who espouse this attitude don’t really mean it.
AVIAN FLU IN NIGERIA?
And there’s this:
Bird flu has reached Western Europe, with Italy and Greece announcing yesterday they had detected the H5N1 strain of the virus in dead swans.
No immediate threat to humans, yet, of course. Meanwhile, the WSJ’s avian flu newstracker reports:
The European Commission expects to release in March details of an influenza pandemic simulation exercise carried across the 25 EU-member states in November. The final report is still being prepared, but among the early findings released were the fact that the organization’s computer network could become overloaded in a scenario of a quickly evolving pandemic.
Even if the feared avian flu pandemic never materializes, it’s becoming clear that we’re not ready for a pandemic of any sort, really.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: What Will Europe Really Do?
Here is what we can probably anticipate. First will come a radical departure from past immigration practices. Islam will be praised; the Middle East assured that Europe is tolerant—but very few newcomers from across the Mediterranean let in.
There will be continued public furor over the American efforts in Iraq, but far greater secret efforts to coordinate with the United States—in everything from isolating the Assad regime in Syria to rethinking missile defense. For the past three years the post-colonial Europeans have wished the Americans to learn their imperial lessons by failing in Iraq. Yet it may well be that many in private will now wish us to succeed, if only in the hopes that such Middle East democracies will be less likely in the future to turn loose their mobs to burn European embassies and threaten their citizens.
We won’t see much public condemnation of Hamas, but more likely quiet efforts to pull the plug slowly on subsidies for such terrorists.
Read the whole thing. I hope he’s right.
Fascinating. With Google, Yahoo! Microsoft and Cisco about to be called on the carpet in Congress on Wednesday, AOL releases a new Chinese-language portal. It focuses on culture and sports, with a major feature being downloadable Chinese movies. But the target audience is – at least officially – meant to be the Chinese-speaking community in the United States.
I can confirm: the search engine on this portal is uncensored. Searches for “Falun Gong” and “Tiananmen Square Massacre” turn up the full range of results from dissident and human rights websites. I can also report that according to my friends in China, so far the AOL Chinese portal is not blocked from within the People’s Republic. Yet. However one blogger in Southern China reports that some content is inaccessible. But the language he uses implies the blocking may be for geographical copyright reasons rather than political reasons. It will be interesting to see how accessible the site remains from the PRC over the coming weeks.
The timing of AOL’s release is pretty interesting – one wonders if they are launching the portal now to gain maximum praise for not censoring at a time when their competitors are in the censorship doghouse.
Let’s hear it for competition. And here’s more on Yahoo!’s latest action.
February 13, 2006
WELL, YES: The InstaWife is unbearably hot. Duh.
BATMAN VS. AL QAEDA: “Superman punched out Hitler. So did Captain America. That’s one of the things they’re there for.”
THANKS to all the folks who have moved the Glenn and Helen Show up to #5 on iTunes’ “talk radio” charts.
A FIELD REPORT from the Army of Davids. Very cool.
WHAT WAS DANA MILBANK THINKING? I assumed it was a photoshop until I saw the video. Good grief.
UPDATE: Jim Treacher emails: “Dana Milbank was thinking …that nobody would notice because it was Countdown with Keith Olbermann.” Maybe it was some kind of a test!
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Pat Graham senses a hidden hand:
Stunning! The clown costume deconstructs Milbank’s report and makes him appear absolutely ridiculous. (Reminiscent of Dukakis in the tank helmut or Kerry in the astronaut garb.) This is clearly the work of Karl Rove or the RNC.
Rove’s moles are everywhere.
Just when former Vice President Al Gore seemed to be re-carving a niche for himself as an outspoken, blunt political critic of the Bush administration he forgot a key rule of real estate:
“Location, location, location.”
In a political move that is at best baffling, Vice President Al Gore delivered a speech filled with hard-hitting language about U.S. treatment of Arabs in the post-911 world in Saudi Arabia.
Even a potato that was just taken out of the sack would know that the location — Saudi Arabia, a country not exactly role model for the observance of human rights, democracy and a country of origin for many of the 911 hijackers — was a bad one. By choosing to deliver his speech there he was virtually ensuring that a controversy about it being on foreign soil, and from Saudi Arabia, was BOUND to overshadow its actual content.
Why didn’t Gore just put a sign on his back that said “KICK ME” and then walk into a Republican rally?
Uh, oh. We better not give him any ideas…
Al Gore looked like the Joe Lieberman of 1988 back when I was working for him. Now, well, he doesn’t. I’m disappointed, because he seemed a lot more sensible than that, once.
UPDATE: Ouch.
SO I GET HOME AND FIND MY INBOX full of complaints from lefties that I’ve been “silent” about Ann Coulter’s remarks on Friday. I guess they’re scrollbar-challenged, as I did in fact note them and link to Sean Hackbarth’s denunciation. I figured that readers would know my feelings about Coulter — whose similar comments I was condemning back before Bill Quick named the blogosphere — but on the other hand, I guess I shouldn’t take stuff like that for granted. I got an email today from a reader who didn’t know that my wife had had a heart attack, and I got an email last week from a reader who, despite my best efforts, had somehow missed the fact that I had a book coming out. You can’t assume that everyone is keeping up with everything, and I tend mostly to ignore Coulter.
The lefties seem mostly upset about her use of the term “raghead,” which is racist and offensive, but more or less akin to the term “cracker,” which doesn’t seem to bother a lot of lefties. So pardon me if I’m largely unmoved by their mock outrage on this account.
But there are more serious reasons to be unhappy with Coulter, reasons that, as so often happens, are actually obscured by the theatrics of angry lefties. And though I’ve been a bit distracted this weekend, and I don’t generally like to give Coulter’s attention-getting efforts more attention, it’s probably worth mentioning them now.
I didn’t attend the event (I didn’t actually attend any events except the book stuff in the Exhibition hall; I was supposed to be on a panel about online media but had to cancel) but as I understand it, Coulter made the raghead remark, and then a Muslim attendee — perhaps the guy from “Muslims For America” that Helen interviewed for our podcast — got up to object to the “raghead” remark, and she put him down. And that’s what’s really bad. In fact, Ann Coulter is guilty of doing what Ann Althouse and Stephen Green note that the lefty bloggers tend to do: Someone stretched out a hand, and she spat on it. And her ongoing treatment of Muslims has followed this general pattern of fostering alienation. The result of this sort of behavior is aid and comfort to the enemy.
To win this war, we need to kill the people who want to kill us. But we need to win over the rest. The terrorists of Al Qaeda want to polarize things so that it appears to be a war of Christianity against Islam, of America and the West against all Arabs and Muslims. With remarks like those, she’s helping their cause, not ours. Call it “objectively pro-terrorist.”
UPDATE: So I post this, and I’m still getting emails like this:
Why are you so silent about your CPAC co-speaker’s hateful and violence-advocating rants?
Why do you tell Democrats they should “muzzle and marginalize their idiots” while you ignore Ann, even though she’s one of the most influential pundits in your Party and received a boisterous ovation from your fellow conservatives when she urged violence against “ragheads” and the assassination of Supreme Court justices? Why would you participate in an event that sponsors a speech urging violence against Muslims and the domestic political opponents of Republicans?
Speak up, I can’t hear you.
David Miller
Or read me, apparently. Hit “refresh” people. But this is starting to seem a bit, er, contrived. Have the people sending these emails even been to my blog?
ANOTHER UPDATE: Ah, apparently it’s some sort of campaign. It seems to me that the lefties are once again falling for Karl Rove’s notorious “blogpaper” strategy.
MORE: And here’s a nice roundup from Gateway Pundit about moderate Muslims coming to the fore in Denmark that illustrates what I mean. Read this report from Brussels Journal, too:
Moderates such as Kamran Tahmasebi say they have had enough of fanatic Islamism and its intimidation of the Muslim immigrants in Denmark. “It is an irony that I am today living in a European democratic state and have to fight the same religious fanatics that I fled from in Iran many years ago,” Mr Tahmasebi says. He came to Denmark as a refugee in 1989. Today he works as a social consultant and is very grateful for the life Denmark has made it possible for him to have. He says he no longer wants to keep a low profile to avoid attracting the attention of the imams. The cartoon affair was an incentive for him to stand up and warn against the Islamist imams in Denmark, whom he says are damaging the integration process with their misleading criticism of Danish values and norms.
Mr Tahmasebi is one of the people involved in the newly established network of moderate Muslims in Denmark led by Naser Khader, a member of the Danish Parliament. He says he is well aware of the risk he is taking by siding with Mr Khader, who has for a long time been living under police protection. But Mr Tahmasebi feels it is his duty to take part in this debate. “Naser Khader has carried this responsibility for too long. I share his beliefs and now I want to stand up and say so. Apart from that, as a parent I feel a responsibility to fight, so that my children will not have to live under Islamist dogmas. They shall be able to live free in this country.” Mr Tahmasebi adds that he believes the imams are one of the biggest problems Denmark is facing today.
You encourage these people by standing up to the radicals, and you also encourage them by not assuming that the radicals speak for everybody.
STILL MORE: Ah, so the emails calling me a “facist” and the like, by people who had obviously not read my posts or my blog, were coming from this post by Glenn Greenwald, where he included my email address. I’m tempted to return the favor, but I suspect that he’s just trying to repair his credibility with his followers after I committed the unpardonable sin of linking to him favorably.
But the downside of these astroturf campaigns is that they only ensure that I’ll view critical email from lefties with a more jaundiced eye next time, wondering who’s really behind them. Plus, the obvious ignorance (and frequent illiteracy) of the emailers hardly serves to improve my opinion of their side of the debate. Thanks for doing your small part to degrade the blogosphere, Greenwald.
More thoughts on Greenwald’s crusade here.
LATER: Okay, so I posted this last night. We’re now well into Tuesday afternoon, and I get this email from Crooks & Liars reader Ben Compson:
I too am wondering why you haven’t condemned Ann Coulter’s recent remarks at CPAC. One thing that good about your blog is that you’re somewhat moderate and often speak out when either liberals or conservatives need spoken out against. You silence here is deafening.
You lay into liberals when they say outrageous things like Coulter did, and you ought to be speaking up this time as well. Even if it costs you a few books sales.
I don’t think my silence is deafening here since, well, I haven’t been silent — I think that Greenwald’s readers, the ones who are still emailing me anyway, are ignorant sheep who apparently haven’t bothered to look at my blog, but who just do whatever Greenwald suggests.
Anyway, Compson, since I actually addressed your concerns last night, and since you raised the connection here, how about buying my book? It’s the least you can do!
Er, that, and try not to be such a tool next time. Because, you see, I make a point of trying to read serious emails that disagree with me first, and floods of emails from people who obviously haven’t read my blog, but are just acting at the behest of someone else, make that approach untenable.
SPENT THE MORNING at the pediatric cardiologist; cancelled my first class this afternoon when — after doing an EKG, etc. — they decided that some findings indicated that my daughter warranted an echocardiogram. That actually turned out OK, and shockingly they were fast enough that I made it back (barely) in time to have taught that class after all. Probably just as well I’m not trying to, though. I’ve spent all the time I want at cardiologists, though the pediatric kind represent a new thing, and one I’d happily have foregone.
The point is to rule out any kind of congenital problem in my daughter, on the suspicion that some undiagnosed abnormality may have led to my wife’s heart attack. So far, so good, but there are more tests to be completed.
Back later.
IS EUROPE DOOMED? Anne Applebaum has thoughts at Cato Unbound. “If the rise of China continues apace, I’m afraid Dr. Dalyrymple’s final phrase—that Europe is ‘sleep-walking to further relative decline’—might even be too mild. At some point, it’s also possible that Europe’s decline, for all the reasons he listed, might even cease to be relative.”
UPDATE: Fareed Zakaria writes on the decline and fall of Europe. I agree with Applebaum that it’s not inevitable. But it’s inevitable if Europeans don’t start doing something about it.
SO WHEN I GOT HOME, I found The Dance of Time, the new David Drake / Eric Flint novel, waiting for me. I was always a big fan of the historical Belisarius, though — in a sort of Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen meets The Terminator — this Belisarius has to contend with an evil time-travelling computer from the future. Anyway, I’ve enjoyed these books since the first one, An Oblique Approach, and based on the small amount I managed to read before I collapsed from exhaustion last night, the new one seems just as good.
JOHN HINDERAKER looks at Midwest Heroes.
INCENTIVES FOR NEW VACCINE PRODUCTION: This seems like a good idea:
Under an advance market commitment plan, the G-8 nations would promise to subsidize the purchase of new vaccines — for between $800 million and $6 billion — if pharmaceuticals companies develop ones that meet standards of efficacy and safety. Once the G-8 spends the pledged amount, the drug companies would sell the vaccine at a set discount in the developing world.
The idea is to ensure that companies get a substantial, upfront, government-backed financial incentive to develop the drugs, even if they ultimately have to sell them at a low price. “By restoring appropriate incentives,” advance market commitments “can stimulate private research and investment, accelerate the discovery of new vaccines, save lives and contribute to economic development in a cost-effective way,” Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti wrote in a report to his G-8 colleagues in December.
We certainly need to do something to make new vaccines more available.
THE CARNIVAL OF CORDITE IS UP! So is the Carnival of Cats, the Carnival of Cars, and the Blawg Review. Also check out the new Haveil Havalim.
RIGHTSIDEREDUX endorses Tom Delay’s opponent.
MICKEY KAUS writes on Brokeback Mountain and the Heartland Breakout Meme. “The Heartland Breakout Meme seems like B.S. of the sort that consistently hurts Democrats (and others who believe it).”
To the unclear extent that Brokeback has been a success, though, I identify a different explanation. My 14-year-old niece liked the film and explained it this way: “It’s a chick-flick with nothing but hot guys.”
UPDATE: Sploid offers “A Brokeback Mtn. for the Rest of Us.” Daniel Drezner will be pleased!
ALPHECCA is unhappy with Dick Cheney over his unfortunate firearms accident. But Six Meat Buffet is mocking him cruelly. That last picture is just mean.
UPDATE: SoccerDad reports that other politicians have had similar problems.
KATHY SHAIDLE wants readers to help buy an Egyptian blogger a digital camera.
THE MULLAHS CELEBRATE AN ANNIVERSARY, but no one else does.
Meanwhile, Al looks like he could have used a party.
Tigerhawk has further comments on Gore’s remarks. “Substantively, the idea that cracking down on Saudi visa applications is ‘playing into al Qaeda’s hands’ is laughable.”
Only Al Gore could come up with the idea of criticizing Bush for not sucking up to the Saudis enough. Sigh.
UPDATE: More here.