by hilzoy
If we keep on repeating the phrase “the angry left, the angry left”, maybe we won’t notice things like this:
“On his radio show, Savage told listeners that “intelligent people, wealthy people … are very depressed by the weakness that America is showing to these psychotics in the Muslim world. They say, ‘Oh, there’s a billion of them.’ ” Savage continued: “I said, ‘So, kill 100 million of them, then there’d be 900 million of them.’ I mean … would you rather us die than them?” Savage added: “Would you rather we disappear or we die? Or would you rather they disappear and they die? Because you’re going to have to make that choice sooner rather than later.””
The point of this is not to pull one nutcase out of some dark corner and proclaim: “Lo! It’s conservatism!” Michael Savage is one of the most popular talk radio hosts in the US. His program is syndicated on 350 radio stations, reaching over eight million listeners. He’s not, in other words, the right’s answer to Ward Churchill: someone no one had ever heard of until liberals started inveighing against him. If ‘mainstream conservatism’ means ‘popular with enough conservatives that you can’t call him a member of a ‘fringe’ with a straight face’, then he, Ann Coulter, and Rush Limbaugh are mainstream conservatives.
Just remember, though: it’s liberals who have problems with anger these days.
Yup, Savage is definitely on the angry right.
“If ‘mainstream conservatism’ means ‘popular with enough conservatives that you can’t call him a member of a ‘fringe’ with a straight face’, then he, Ann Coulter, and Rush Limbaugh are mainstream conservatives.”
Funny, someone else from the kitten just today made that very argument. Who says we’re not an echo chanber?
You know, if these people want people destroyed, they should do the deed themselves, not just incite it done. I say give him a nuke and a B-52 and see what he can do.
I don’t think we should worry about people spreading an “angry left” phrase. I also don’t think that those of us in the middle or left should try to deny or minimize the phrase–to do so puts us on the defensive. Instead the response should be, “Yes, we’re angry, and if you aren’t, you must not be paying attention.”
People like Savage aren’t angry. I can’t quite come up with a one word definition for them. Something about being primitive, respresenting the worst in human intinctive behavior, regression to our territorial pack-hunter ancestry etc.
I can’t quite come up with a one word definition for them.
“Rabid” works for me.
“I say give him a nuke and a B-52 and see what he can do.”
Well, O.K., now Washington D.C. and the Federal Government are dust with a very long half-life. Then Savage would ask for another nuke to take out his second-place enemy: all Muslims.
Give ME a nuke and a B-52. Show me where Savage is. Maybe he’s having dinner with Limbaugh, Norquist, Coulter, Boortz, and Delay.
Have the waiter bring them each a pair of Depends.
Then … Kaboom.
The word?:
Demagogue.
Add “rabid” to it if you like.
And spittle-flecking.
One word?
Wealthy.
“Rabble-rouser” ?
hilzoy: “it’s liberals who have problems with anger these days.”
I know you are trying to point out that liberals aren’t the only ones with anger problems. But I really don’t think liberals have a problem with anger.
Many of them are angry, including myself, but that isn’t a problem. It is what we are angry about that is the problem.
As lily points out, there is no reason to be ashamed of being called “the angry left.”
Just like when Poppy Bush campaigned talking about the “l” word. I never understood why democrats didn’t come out and say that yes they were liberals and darn proud of it, and then explained why.
And yes, I am angry, although I don’t go around calling those on the right traitors and advocating killing whole groups of them. That is not anger, that is hatefulness.
John: true enough.
What are they?
Hutu.
What do they do?
Hutu trash talk. Very organized and coordinated. At the behest of a governing power. To galvanize anger into a malleable force. Against an enemy. An internal enemy.
Who would that be?
Liberals, the culture, the U.S. Federal Government outside the walls of the Pentagon, taxes. Did I say taxes? Muslims?
When it is convenient.
To what end?
We don’t know the punch line yet. Well, I don’t.
McManus might.
Actually, I was listening to Savage the other day (lots of conservative talk radio to listen to here in OK) and musing about how he has been attacking Bush based on the same hysteria that Bush has cultivated when it occured to me: This is the “Hysterical Right”.
The problem with hysterical people is that they can’t really be reasoned with. They see all issues through an intensely focused and very distorted lens. So when your actions seem funny when translated through their lens, they turn on you in a heartbeat. This is why one ought not cultivate hysteria. It is good leverage for a while, but ultimately it undermines any type of non-hysterical policy on anything and everything.
“Give ME a nuke and a B-52. Show me where Savage is. Maybe he’s having dinner with Limbaugh, Norquist, Coulter, Boortz, and Delay.”
The funny thing is that that is funny….
But when Mark Steyn proposes about the same thing as does Savage, we’re supposed to take him seriously (or else so-called libertarian law profs get all snivelly at you).
Anderson,
Given the same law professor vociferously argued there was no such thing as a Constitution-in-exile movement while simultaneously promoting his book entitled Restoring the Lost Constitution, I take his pronouncements as being of very little value.
It’s amusing how many conservatives will maintain that Rush is just an entertainer and no one takes him seriously, etc., when the Vice-President of the United States makes regular appearances on his program. Just the other day he had Rumsfeld on.
It’s amusing how many conservatives will maintain that Rush is just an entertainer and no one takes him seriously, etc…
Ha! I just totally misread that as “Bush”…
It’s amusing how many conservatives will maintain that Rush is just an entertainer and no one takes him seriously, etc..
if you’ve been marinated in Republicanism your whole life, Rush probably would seem like mere entertainment. he probably sounds like he’s just stating the obvious when he says ‘librilz hate A-Merica!”, if you already believe that.
Given the same law professor vociferously argued there was no such thing as a Constitution-in-exile movement while simultaneously promoting his book entitled Restoring the Lost Constitution, I take his pronouncements as being of very little value.
But he didn’t use those exact words. It only counts if you use the magic words!
Y’all realize that the angst about anger is really a dead giveaway for being a liberal. ‘I’m not angry, I’m being objective, damnit!!’ When I see demagogues on the Right get angry, they never really seem to be concerned about objectivity.
In an unfortunate way, it might be useful to have “Angry Lefties” or, if you are from Euston, the “indecent left”. The volubality of the lunatic fringe may have served to make what would previously seemed to be marginal ideas less extreme. Torture? Well hey, we aren’t killing em all and letting god sort em out…etc.
Or it might just lead us to Goldstein’s second civil war…
John, the Hutu v. Tutsi hatred ran considerably deeper, longer, than any of the hatreds the American Right is inflaming.
The American Right’s hatreds more closely resemble a drug jones: a habituation-tolerance cycle requiring higher doses to reach the desired state of euphoric rage. The higher doses take the form of escalating threats against a wider range of targets.
I don’t know how likely a Kristalnacht actually is. The thugs who chased election officials through the streets in Florida, who gathered outside the Vice President’s mansion in to howl at Al Gore, and who tried to precipitate a riot outside Terri Schiavo’s nursing home, certainly show a real potential for targeted mob violence.
However, in all but one case, SFAIK, no law enforcement presence dissuaded the rioters/attackers. The one case in which law enforcement did take a stand (outside the Schiavo nursing home) resulted in the would-be rioters backing down – granted, because Jeb Bush did; I don’t know what would have happened if he’d urged the mob onward.
For a Kristallnacht to be our future would require a completely co-opted police force and military – or such overwhelming numbers of thugs that law enforcement doesn’t go near the scene at all. I don’t, currently, see that as a possibility.
That’s “currently,” mind you. We have three more years of Bush’s incompetence, corruption, and criminal negligence still to endure.
A war with Iran that goes badly, an economic wobble caused by $100+/barrel oil, another few hurricane-devastated cities left to drown and rot, a flu epidemic that’s anything like the one in 1918 and, above all, another terrorist attack on US soil… any combination of those events, and the use that Bush and the Right will make of them, changes the scenario considerably.
All these rabid right talkers have figured out how to make a lot of bread by appealing to the worst instincts of fearful listeners. They don’t believe it themselves. They would switch over to the liberal arguments if that made more money. Their present audience is easier to jive.
Is the “angry left” meme even alive anymore? Seriously?
Is the “angry left” meme even alive anymore? Seriously?
In the same way that any other meme useful to the administration seems to rise from the grave to wander through a shopping mall in Ohio…
Hey, what is it about Ohio?
According to the news, of the last five PowerBall Lotto winners, four were in Ohio. Even if Ohioans are buying tickets at some insanely higher ratio than any other state’s residents, that shouldn’t make any difference in the odds of winning, should it?
Maybe Diebold runs the PowerBall drawings 🙂
Even if Ohioans are buying tickets at some insanely higher ratio than any other state’s residents, that shouldn’t make any difference in the odds of winning, should it?
every ticket bought by any group raises the odds for that group winning (assuming they pick different numbers, randomly) by a very small amount.
maybe i’m worng – i’ve always hated probability.
The left has many problems these days, if you want to add angry to that list… well OK.
/snark
If you want to tar conservatives with the slime of one wacko, you might want to chose someone that conservatives actually embrace. Nebulas statistics such as 8 million listeners doesnt cut it outside the echo chambers. After all, just because I listen to Air America doesnt mean I embrace their POV.
bains, what criteria do you suggest we use to determine popularity besides, uh, popularity?
Ok, I’ll bite…you’re kidding, right bains?
f you want to tar conservatives with the slime of one wacko, you might want to chose someone that conservatives actually embrace.
But there are so many… it’s hard to choose a favorite.
four were in Ohio.
For a lot of Ohioans, the Lotto is the only viable retirement plan left.
popularity, more accurately listenership, is one thing, but that’s not what Hilzoy was impling.
e.g. Conservatives are angry because Michael Savage is angry (I’d argue that he’s beyond angry), and he must be representitive of conservatives because he has 8 million listeners.
If you accept painting by such broad brushes, then you’ve no standing to complain when you are similarly painted into a corner – say painted as the angry left.
I guess the logical question is “Why do 8 million people listen to Savage if they don’t agree with what he says?”
bains: actually, I don’t think he’s representative of conservatives. I do think that if you’re looking for someone who is representative of the right or the left, Michael Savage is more representative of the right than Mary Scott O’Connor is of the left. But that’s just comparative: I would never say that Savage somehow represented, say, Sebastian.
You are totally blind, hilzoy. Michael Moore sat next to Pres Jimmy Carter at the 2004 Democratic Convention, for crimenintly.
And where were Savage and Coulter at the Republican Convention?
Sheesh.
I’m trying to remember which public figures Michael Moore advocated killing again. DaveC, could you help me out here?
And when did Michael Moore call for the killing of 100 million people? Or suggest the only way to reason with conservatives is with a baseball bat? Or wonder why the Washington Times wasn’t blown up along with the Pentagon on 9/11?
Sure, there are “angry” partisans on both sides. There may even be an “even number” of “angry partisans”. But it’s a false equivalency to say that the rhetoric from the partisan media figures is equally violent. Read Dave Neiwart’s Orcinus. Limbaugh, Coulter, Savage, and Malkin’s eliminationist rhetoric is absolutely worse in tone, effect and frequency than anything coming from Michael Moore, Al Franken or Randi Rhodes.
I think you are in the category of folks who wonder “how could a conservative / Republican get elected, nobody I know voted for them”
My wife and kids and in-laws all theoretically hate conservatives and Republicans even though I support Pres Bush.
But here I am.
I vote at least 35% Democrat, because I live in Illinois. But I have kids, am married, care about national security, is it so awful that I would choose to vote for the candidate that best addresses my concerns?
Gary often complains that I make these blanket statements, but that’s a pretty broad brush you’ve got going there.
Oh, and the audience for the “angry right” is far larger than the audience for the angry left. Not to suggest this means all conservatives are represented by Limbaugh/Coulter listeners. But the popularity (10s of millions voluntarily listening, also pushed on VOA radio), coupled with their obvious access to influential Republican figures (like Rumsfeld and Cheneye) shows that right-wing talk-radio is an influential force in the Republican party.
The best the right can come up with is commentators on Kos, or some obscure professor. On the left all we have to do is turn on Fox news or the radio. Hell, even people like Michael Medved come close to regularly calling for the death of liberals (or saying it wouldn’t be bad if they did die because they’re immoral).
There’s a difference.
Here is the MM Michael Moore link
Excerpt:
They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow — and they will win.
So that’s what liberals and Democrats stand for? They invited this guy to be a honored guest of an ex-President?
Is it because he’s an Academy Award winner? Do you think Oliver Stone correct about evrything too?
Hell, even people like Michael Medved come close to regularly calling for the death of liberals (or saying it wouldn’t be bad if they did die because they’re immoral).
I gave you the quote and the link from Michael Moore , be so kind to do the same for me from Michael Medved.
You are blind. When I get back from my Mamaw’s funeral, I will post a list of 2004 Sixty Minutes shows with links that were anti-Bush, and talk about that. Zinni is not a 2006 phenom. He was on the 60 minutes line-up with Moore, Richard Clarke, Paul O’Neill, yes Zinni, and on and on, probably half the weeks of that year had anti-Bush shows.
But you guys think that your views are “suppressed”? Give me a break – Note: Zinni, election year, big headlines, etc.
Draw your own conclusions
“They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow — and they will win.”
This is a predictive statement. In context, it was meant as a condemnation of certain aspects of the prosecution of the war effort. He was telling President George that he had misjudged his war task in many of the same ways King George had misjudged his war task.
On the other hand, “Savage added: ‘Would you rather we disappear or we die? Or would you rather they disappear and they die? Because you’re going to have to make that choice sooner rather than later.'”
While in some ways this has a foot in the realm of descriptive logic Moore uses, the emphasis on the choice between self- and other-destruction means a stance closer to the pulling of triggers.
Moore says “they”; Savage says “you” & “they”.
To me, there’s a difference.
But I have kids, am married, care about national security, is it so awful that I would choose to vote for the candidate that best addresses my concerns?
If you voted for Bush, you didn’t.
Gary challenged me to link to Michael Yon, Micheal Totton and ITM. (Yon and ITM are worried.) I don’t have a heckuva lot of time for analysis, but these seem like pretty important posts:
Michael Yon
Michael Totten
Iraq The Model
My sincere codolences to Mohammed and his family.
I’ll buy in to this
How about you?
But you guys think that your views are “suppressed”?
Uh – no. That’s not the topic here.
The topic is whether the characterization of the left as angry is accurate, in comparison to the right.
Until you start producing quotes of popular left figures calling for/celebrating in the death of members of the right, producing signs that 60 minutes has an “anti-bush” bias doesn’t actually seem relevant to the topic.
The quote you use from Michael Moore is a criticism of the language used by the Bush administration. He is arguing that describing iraqis resisting our occupation of their country as “terrorists” or “the enemy” is a deliberate twisting of the language. Whether you disagree with him or not, to compare the anger of Moore’s statement with the anger of someone proposing the nuclear annihilation of Muslims boggles the mind.
DaveC: I vote at least 35% Democrat, because I live in Illinois. But I have kids, am married, care about national security, is it so awful that I would choose to vote for the candidate that best addresses my concerns?
No, not at all. But since you vote for the candidate who doesn’t “best address your concerns”, why ask? You have kids, so you vote for the party that wants your kids uneducated and poor: you’re married, so you vote for the party that wants to pass a Constitutional amendment against marriage: you care about national security, so you vote for the party that puts profit ahead of national security. This isn’t awful, it’s just kinda weird. People do it all the time.
How about “opportunistic”? I’ve listened to Paul Savage, so I may in fact count among his 8 million listeners. Paul doesn’t have much to say that I agree with; he’s more the radio equivalent of Jerry Springer(12 million viewers, once upon a time). Or: his show holds the helpless fascination of an accident on the freeway. You don’t want to look, but you can’t help yourself. He’s the World Wrestling Federation of radio.
I don’t criticise him because there’s very litte he says that’s unworthy of criticism. Usually you’d like to sort of nudge people back on the path of correctness via criticism, but correctness isn’t even on the same map as Michael. I mean, this is a guy who (apparently earnestly) makes frequent references to “the gay mafia”.
I mean, this is a guy who (apparently earnestly) makes frequent references to “the gay mafia”.
Proving that he knows nothing about the gay mafia, because if he did, he’d know better than to talk.
Did anyone see my copy of the gay agenda? I dropped it somewhere.
I will post a list of 2004 Sixty Minutes shows with links that were anti-Bush, and talk about that. Zinni is not a 2006 phenom. He was on the 60 minutes line-up with Moore, Richard Clarke, Paul O’Neill, yes Zinni, and on and on, probably half the weeks of that year had anti-Bush shows.
could you post some links where Dan Rather or Morley Safer says “We need to execute people like McVeigh in order to physically intimidate conservatives, by making them realize that they can be killed, too” ? at least that would be relevant.
The first rule of the gay mafia is you don’t talk about the gay mafia.
One of the things I admire about some people on the right is their persistant belief that anybody who criticizes Bush or things this administration has done represents an “Anti-Bush” faction.
It does not matter if the statements by those people have the facts behind them. What matters is that they have dared to bring up something that is critical.
If DaveC wants to present an anti-Bush bias, then it is incumbent upon him to show that what was presented was not based in fact.
Oh, and Slarti, you may be able to realize that Savage rarely is in contact with reality, but my guess is that a large segment of his audience does not. There are people who believe everything they read in the tabloids like the National Enquirer.
In fact, the two sets of people may be identical.
Completely agree. Just as, for instance, there are people who believe that the people one sees starring in the WWF Smackdown du jour are just like that in real life. Or, worse, that what they’re seeing IS real life.
People whose lives are screwed up probably watch Jerry Springer for the misery-loves-company effect, though, or (probably more prevalently) the life-is-good-because-others-have-it-so-much-worse effect.
Another strong effect could be the outrage-addicts. Some watch him because they’re outraged that he could be so damned mean, while others watch him because they enjoy being inflamed by him. A liberal smearing of Preparation H could take the latter out of the picture, maybe.
BTW, completely OT, the occasionally brilliant Pearls Before Swine is occasionally brilliant today.
Slarti,
What is your opinion on how Get Fuzzy is coordinating with Pearls before Swine this week by copying PbS’s comic and then adding GF’s characters to it?
And where were Savage and Coulter at the Republican Convention?
Coulter has been an honored and popular guest at conservative gatherings. And Limbaugh, an equally vile figure, has a huge daily audience and is clearly a major spokesman for the Republican Party Are you suggesting hs audience doesn’t, by and large, agree with him?
The angry right
It’s not only the left that’s angry, as the usual accusation goes, according to Obsidian Wings….
Savage is to conservative thought what International ANSWER is to liberal thought: The Lunatic Fringe. Savage regularly bashes Republicans. He does not represent the mainstream of conservatism and is widely reject by the mainstream. Just as I would not expect you to justify the Stalinst ravings of International ANSWER, don’t ask mainstream conservatives to justify the ravings of that ape Michael Savage.
DaveC – You keep changing the subject to avoid discussing the issue at hand. As others have pointed out, I wasn’t discussing whether or not the left’s views are supressed. I also wasn’t disputing the existence of the angry left. I’m not even going to dispute that there are probably some on the far left who actually sympathize (not just understand, but sympathize) with terrorists.
But you have utterly failed to show that the rhetoric from public, prominent Democratic partisans is as heated, eliminationist and violent coming from the left. Try this post for an example of the unhinged right.
The popular media figures on the left are, at most, calling for Bush’s impeachment and Rumsfeld’s resignation. They’re not saying conservatives need to be shipped to Gitmo for re-education. Or that conservatives need to be physically intimidated so they “know they can be killed”. Or that Oklahoma should be bombed because it voted for Bush. And we don’t regularly go around calling conservatives traitors, treasonous, and calling for them to be tried for sedition.
You also seem oddly fixated on Conventions, as if Limbaugh not being there makes him a fringe figure, despite Cheney and Rumsfeld appearing on his show regularly. What about Coulter’s paid (and cheered) appearance at a recent RNC event?
Despite the fact that I think Bush & Cheney’s actions re: warrantless wiretapping and indefinite detention represent a completely extra-legal gutting of the constitution, I wouldn’t call either of them a traitor. Horribly misguided, yes. Deserving of impeachment, scorn and anger? Yes.
Even people like Coulter I don’t want murdered. I have no respect for her opinions, and little respect for her as a person given her sustained attacks on liberals. I might even “hate her”, but I don’t think she needs relatives to be blown up by an IED-wielding terrorist to be “taught a lesson”.
So Dave. How about it? Come back with prominent Democratic media figures calling “with glee” for the death and destruction of your favorite conservatives or conservative cities and we’ll talk.
Savage is to conservative thought what International ANSWER is to liberal thought
where can i find the multi-million-listener ANSWER radio show ? has ANSWER ever hosted a talk show on MSNBC ?
Here is another point of view. If it isn’t the angry left, it may be the looney left.
http://maxine-log.blogspot.com/2006/04/looney-left-rant-vs-one-long-sustained_17.html
Muslim fascistic fear and hatred has to be stopped and this is not a situation we find ourselves can not be nuanced. Reasonable people do not take passenger planes and fly them into skyscrapers.
According to International ANSWER’s web site it was formed on September 14, 2001. Had anyone heard of them until the protests just prior to the invasion of Iraq? I had not.
I marched in San Francisco and what struck me was the wide variety of attendees … families with babies in strollers, veterans in uniform, to me it seemed like mostly ordinary people. Sure, there were some with other agendas (I particularly remember anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian protesters) but they were way outnumbered.
My presence at the march in no way indicates support for International ANSWER as an organization or agreement with its stated positions on any other issues. So, I grant that Michael Savage or Ann Coulter do not speak for all conservatives, and certainly not for those we meet here.
However, I have to insist that there is a big difference. Even in the ’60s the strident voices on the left were more bark than bite, even more so today. The extreme left has never held real power in the United States. On the right it’s a different story.
Most of the millions who listen to Savage do so for the same reason that people slow down to look at a car wreck. To suggest that all his listeners endorse his ravings is just silly. A tiny fraction do, the rest just like a good insane tirade.
I love irony. Savage isn’t angry, at least not in this piece. Yet our intolerant host mislabels calm self-preservation as hatred and the usual suspects chime in with the usual lexicon of instinctive, self-reinforcing attacks. Much back-slapping ensues.
Like a collective personality disorder, the hard Left runs almost entirely on images and appearances. Like unruly children, the hard Left never holds itself accountable to unpleasant realities, prefering to attack their appearances, wishing them out of existence.
Blogs like this one prove that some people have too much time on their hands … and too much emotion to think rationally.
The difference between Michael Savage and a car wreck: do advertisers pay money to place signs at a car wreck?
6Gun, who is this “hard Left” ? got any names ?
Bill, meet 6Gun.
6Gun: I love irony. Savage isn’t angry, at least not in this piece. Yet our intolerant host mislabels calm self-preservation as hatred and the usual suspects chime in with the usual lexicon of instinctive, self-reinforcing attacks. Much back-slapping ensues.
Yes, hilzoy, shame on you for being so intolerant of eliminationist — er, I mean self-preservationist — rhetoric.
I think 6gun is a parody.
“I think 6gun is a parody.”
One can only hope.
Other than 6Gun, there seem to be many occasional [do those numbers distinguish first ever /regular/never again?] listeners to Savage who are not fans/choir members but curious, even critical assessors of a opposing view.
Notably absent are those darling “undecideds” who refuse to join “the angry left” or “the angry right”.
I’m not sure whether 6Bun’s “hard Left” is an improvement on “angry Left”, but I kinda think that “some people have too much time on their hands” is embarrassingly candid.
Ditto that disturbing remark that Savage is not angry but calm and self-preserving. We undecideds can rescue you 6Buns, we must.
One can only hope.
The sad thing is, it’s impossible to tell the difference between parody and reality where the Angry Right are concerned. It’s like the Onion becoming indistinguishable from the MSM.
“It’s like the Onion becoming indistinguishable from the MSM.”
Actually, I think The Onion is usually more accurate about some things.
He’s right about the too much time, at least in my case. We’re doing the state-mandated standardized testing which means I sit here for hours…. and hours… and hours while kids take tests, or (morely likely) sleep…
Hilzoy is a member of the hard left? Obsidian Wings is an example of a blog with too much emotion and too little rationality?
If 6Gun isn’t a parody, he’s posting from an alternate universe (possibly one that exists only in his head).
I think Savage is stating the fact that he believes that roughly 100 million of the 1 billion muslims out there are radical and willing to kill for Islam. That is our enemy and they will kill, so what to do? What to do?
I think 6gun is a visitor from Protein Wisdom, although I certainly could be wrong. If he ever comes back for the next volley, I urge him to read the posting rules, and keep in mind that “The Hard Left” and “those people who disagree with me” are not, in fact, interchangeable.
I’m not sure whether 6Bun’s “hard Left” is an improvement on “angry Left”
i know which i’d rather be.
I think 6gun is a visitor from Protein Wisdom
… or Mars.
one word description:
“stalk·ing-horse (stôkng-hôrs) KEY
NOUN:
Something used to cover one’s true purpose; a decoy.
A sham candidate put forward to conceal the candidacy of another or to divide the opposition.
A horse trained to conceal the hunter while stalking.
A canvas screen made in the figure of a horse, used for similar concealment.”
…
But this is just my cryptic paranoiac-as- performance-art speaking.
…
Of course, all discussions of right wing demogoguery must link to Dave Neiwert. He is the professional who has actually been paid to study the nexus of extremism, propaganda, and praxis.
But, with all groveling and obsequious worship I can sincerely offer, Neiwert may be slightly prone to the occupational hazard of fascism-watchers. A tendency to overconnect or overinterpret. There is certainly interesting parallels to protofascism in the Savage eliminationism and Malkin’s recent obvious directing the Sturmabteilung toward Santa Cruz, but sometimes I think hate-radio is just a variant of sports-culture. There seems to be a pretty large gap between the adoring crowd in the stands and the professional players on the field. The “homers” with the mikes alter the outcome of the game very little.
Course home-court advantage can be decisive in close contests. San Antonio over Dallas in 7, Detroit over San Antonio. I hope I am wrong.
…
15 hours without electricity yesterday. Luckily it wasn’t one of our freakish 100 degree days, but I was still so jonesing over a lack of electronics I had to do yard work to distract myself. Pity the poor trees.
“That is our enemy and they will kill, so what to do? What to do?”
Give them NBA franchises, of course. It is a fact that countries with professional basketball teams never go to war with each other, even if it isn’t. Thus speaketh the moustache of wisdom.
The points about all listeners to Savage not ascribing to his views is of course an appropriate one. After all, I listened to Limbaugh pretty regularly for a year (on AFRN, no less!), and I’m hardly the target demographic.
Still, there’s something about eliminationist rhetoric that shouldn’t be laughed off. Historically that sort of talk can go from ha-ha-only-joking to engrained and dangerous stereotype very quickly. And even without those consequences, the speech itself is hateful, even when it doesn’t rise to the level of hate speech.
Man, I love this blog. Inadequately educated one day, insufficiently rational the next…. what’s next? Incapable of abstract thinking? Excessively tidy? Just too darn mean?
Are you excessively tidy, Hilzoy?
Ward Churchill wasn’t exactly unknown. His works were par for the course in Native American history and culture courses, sociology courses, etc etc. Outside of academia he was little known, but within it he was a mini-star.
All is revealed. Pajamas Media has linked to this.
… what’s next?
How about “interested only in the superficial”?
And Jes: no. I was just trying to come up with some of the least likely criticisms ever. That one was prompted by the fact that my little sister and her family came to visit, and even after I vacuumed and everything she thought there was a lot of cat hair.
Outside of academia he was little known, but within it he was a mini-star.
Maybe within his subspecialty. Academia as a whole, though? Hardly.
AnonCon: I’m an academic — and an academic who reads some native American history for fun, though it’s not my field — and I had never heard of him.
In case anyone’s interested, my recent dearth of wit (or at least, of the usual number of characters per second in comments) is due to illness that’s sufficiently tenacious that I’m semi-regularly checking myself for buboes.
Slarti I hope you feel better asap. How’s your eye?
My eye’s the best part of me; seeing maybe 20/50 or so, and only a mild ache, discomfort-wise. J/K about the buboes, although I’ve had these glands in my neck that have been painfully swollen for days.
The other eye; the one that’s wearing the contact lens, that one’s not happy. I knew there was a reason I had given up on contacts, but it took my eye a while to remember.
Remember, Slarti: flu-like symptoms are also precursors for Lyme’s disease, cholera morbus, and syphillis!
“Still, there’s something about eliminationist rhetoric that shouldn’t be laughed off. Historically that sort of talk can go from ha-ha-only-joking to engrained and dangerous stereotype very quickly.”
Cue Ahmadinejad then pan over to Rafsanjani.
🙂
“Man, I love this blog. Inadequately educated one day, insufficiently rational the next…. what’s next? Incapable of abstract thinking? Excessively tidy? Just too darn mean?”
Some one once yelled at me “Can’t you just take something literally” and I almost laughed out loud. Nearly every other person in my life (starting with my mom and going from there) has noticed that I’m way too literal. It is the kind of thing that makes you want to look around to your left, and to your right, and behind you and say “Were you talking to me?”
On House a couple of nights ago, the patient of the week was suffering from, it turned out, the Black Plague.
Moral: don’t watch medical dramas when sick. Still, it’s a good show, and Hugh Laurie’s character is somehow likeable and highly obnoxious, both.
My dad actually got bubonic plague forty years ago in Seattle, probably fleas from rats at the zoo. Been trying your new eyeballs out at the zoo, Slarti?
Apparently some ridiculously huge percentage of the ground squirrel population in the Four Corners area are bubonic plague carriers. One of my sister’s colleagues, who was studying the phenomenon, was hauled onto campus after 9-11 to swear up and down and sign some pledge that she would not bring the plague onto campus, or she would lose her funding, get expelled, and be subject to proscecution.(!) Later, of course, she got some DHS bioterrorism-related grant, so it all worked out.
Wow, Lily. How far did symptoms get before the antibiotics kicked in?
The doctor in Seattle didn’t recognize the plague. He thought my dad had some kind of cancer and nearly did a biopsy (which would have killed my dad). However, instead, the doctor told my mom to take the family back to our home in Iowa and get my dad to the family doctor. A couple days later in Iowa the family doctor made the diagnosis. I was only eight or so, so actually forty years ago was a bit of an underestimation. I guess antibiotics must of worked since my daddy didn’t die.
i guess i never answered the question. He had buboes around his neck and under his arms. And a fever.
It was starting to rain last light, so the girl dog brought in her toys through the flap. First the squeaky, then the rawhide, last the headless, bellyless still wet squirrel. I had to handle the leftovers, so we may have the makings of a pandemic.
He got to the buboes stage!?! Wow, ack, and double-wow. Well done, family doctor.
Once a year or so, I have a fullblown antibiotic-resistant bubonic-plague nightmare.
Don’t touch or feed the squirrels, people!
Even in excessive numbers, and for primitive vengeful reasons, there’s an “anger” difference between someone who advocates killing the enemies who say they want to kill us, and those who speak so fondly of violence to their fellow-citizens. That shouldn’t be a difficult distinction for people on the left to make, should it?
As to all the supposed violent mobs the conservatives keep putting forward, just on the edge of violence if someone just gave them a push, you will note it hasn’t happened. “Chasing election officials?” You mean the ones who were stealing the ballots and putting them out of reach of the legitimate bipartisan authorities? They chased them, yelling at them. No threats, no assaults.
Compare: environmental, anti-globilization, racial, and union protestors — a pretty consistently Democratic set.
You are letting your imaginations of what you think conservatives are capable of blind you to what others actually do.
Ann Coulter, though, I’ll grant you. She does get threatening…
Heh. We used to use pneumonic plague for our little bioterror thought experiments, and occasional presentations. Lots of fun, as long as it’s entirely theoretical.
I hope you get well not just soon but instantaneously, Slarti.
(Bing! If you actually get better instantaneously right now, it will be proof of my Kozmic Powerz.)
As to all the supposed violent mobs the conservatives keep putting forward, just on the edge of violence if someone just gave them a push, you will note it hasn’t happened
the ghost of Tim McVeigh disagrees, as do the vile souls of his accomplices. Eric Rudolph and the people who harbored and aided him disagrees. James Kopp disagrees.
Thugs working for Tom Delay have twice attacked supporters of the Democrat running in what used to be DeLay’s district.
But the real problem with AVI’s post is this: he seems to think that the people advocating violence toward their fellow citizens aren’t conservatives. Hoo boy.
Savage laid it on thick. He has to for a population who believe the enemy is not in fact, Islam, but our own government.
Wake up! A billion or so Muslims want to destroy your culture, your constitution, your freedom of speech, your way of life.
If Islam prevails, gays will be executed, women will be removed from public life and non-Muslims killed or enslaved.
Can they win? Only through our weakness.
What is our weakness? Multi-culturalism.
What is multi-culturalism? The insane belief that anything (even Islam!) is superior to Western Civilization.
Get ready for dhimmitude and the jizya because we, by our failure to correctly identify the enemy, are begging for it.
wow… Jammypants Media apparently attracts people with some kind of logic-deficiency disorder. it’s clear they’re able to learn the Buzzwords Of The Day, but they’re unable to use them in any meaningful way.
Maybe that one is a parody, too. Oh well, I’d rather talk about the plague anyway.
Oh well, I’d rather talk about the plague anyway.
This will be my nominee for blog comment of the year.
Goodbye To The Way We Were
Savage is AC/DC. Historian and a moderate at heart. Sometimes I have to cut him off – like power but sometimes, I like his perspective on History. It is not incitement anymore than Howard Stern is incitement. As it was said, I did not like what he said, but it is something many people do wonder seeing the nature of whe we are up against. He says what many people think but are afraid to say.
Remember that most people are good and moderate. They will not follow that line even if he does say it. Just like al jazeera.
Thanks for the insight, CloseDanger!
And America is not France!
Down down, Rabid Dogs! Up up, children!
cleek, you really don’t want to go head-to-head with me on logic. You are whistling down the wind. Timothy McVeigh was much too mixed in his politics (and his thinking) to be regarded as a conservative or liberal.
Lily: “hoo boy.” Well there’s a devastating argument I can’t possibly counter, eh?
Either of you want to attempt to answer what I actually wrote? Only one more chance, thanks.
“What is our weakness? Multi-culturalism.”
(/giggles)
“What is our weakness? Multi-culturalism.”
(/giggles)
Oh…don’t laugh, Hilzoy. It’s what the “serious” think….
If Islam prevails, gays will be executed, women will be removed from public life and non-Muslims killed or enslaved.
Love it. Nothing better than a Michael Savage fan expressing concern about the fate of gays under an Islamofascist dystopia. Just delicious.
“When you hear ‘human rights,’ think gays. When you hear ‘human rights,’ think only one thing: someone who wants to rape your son.”
–Michael Savage
hilzoy,
Diversity is our strength. The suicidal belief that anything (including Islam) is superior to Western Civilization is our weakness. This suicidal belief is an aspect of multi-culturalism.
Whoopsie. Trust a silly queen to forget to turn off the bolding.
Myself, I prefer the suicidal belief that Drano is a sports drink. Multiculturalism as a suicidal belief is either ineffective or really, really slow.
Uncle Kvetch,
No matter who delivers the message it is still true that “If Islam prevails, gays will be executed, women will be removed from public life and non-Muslims killed or enslaved.”
Islam is the greatest practitioner of religious and gender apartheid in the world today. If we allow it, they will transmit these pathologies to our culture.
Islam is the greatest practitioner of religious and gender apartheid in the world today.
[*whistle*] Mixed predicate (illogical personification). Fifty yards penalty.
Also:
Diversity is our strength. The suicidal belief that anything (including Islam) is superior to Western Civilization is our weakness. This suicidal belief is an aspect of multi-culturalism.
Reduced, isn’t this “diversity does not equal multiculturalism”?
If so, welcome to the more abstract theoretical debates of academic cultural theory!
Reminds of something I wrote about Savage over a year ago. An excerpt:
I wish more conservatives agreed with me. Yes, there is an Angry Left, but there certainly is an Angry Right. The only positive thing I can say about Savage is that I’m glad he left the GOP.
John: might I ask what you take “multiculturalism” to be?
ignore the trolls. I tried posting over at protein wisdom for a bit but the tenor there is, well, silly. I suspect these guys are from there.
Even in excessive numbers, and for primitive vengeful reasons, there’s an “anger” difference between someone who advocates killing the enemies who say they want to kill us, and those who speak so fondly of violence to their fellow-citizens. That shouldn’t be a difficult distinction for people on the left to make, should it?
Given your comments, the examples of liberals speaking ‘so fondly’ of violence to their fellow citizens should be easy to cite, so I hope you could give some examples, which would be drawn from the set of “environmental, anti-globilization, racial, and union protestors” you mention.
I would think that there would be a big gulf between someone demanding the cessation of various activities in Iran that cause collateral damage and advocating a method to do so as being violence against Americans. However, someone presenting eliminationist rhetoric against Muslims and then arguing that those who do not support this call to arms deserve some special attention is not as much of a logical stretch, so the contrast you make doesn’t seem to be as strong as you think it is.
Assuming arguendo that McVeigh out of bounds, I would point out that “pro-life” is something that is more generally of the right than the left, and there has been actual violence associated with them, and probably more than anything from the groups you listed, unless you want to include groups like the Weathermen and the SLA, which is a bit of historical telescoping, and we should then include the deaths of the freedom marchers in Mississippi and the burning of black churches. More close to the present day would be the murders of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd. I have yet to hear about a conservative dragged behind a truck, but if you know of a case, please inform us. Malkin famously argued for internment of Muslim americans, so a lot depends on if you are advocating against the ‘them’ of muslims or the ‘us’ of fellow citizens. Unfortunately, your logic requires some definition of terms. Precisely who do you mean when you say “environmental, anti-globilization, racial, and union protestors”? What would be the left wing equivalent of the Turner Diaries or the Nuremberg Files, where contact information of doctors who perform abortions is posted? Can you cite me an instance where one of the groups of the types you listed above posted a list of people’s personal contact info and invited those sympathetic to their viewpoints to ‘teach them a lesson’ or something similar?
FWIW, Dave Neiwert: Multiculturalism under fire
Uncle Kvetch, No matter who delivers the message it is still true that “If Islam prevails, gays will be executed, women will be removed from public life and non-Muslims killed or enslaved.”
Yes, John. If the Taliban takes over the United States and institutes sharia law, people like me are in deep doodoo.
Similarly, if my cat develops the capacity for human speech overnight, she and I are going to have a hell of a conversation come tomorrow morning.
About equally likely, in my opinion. But hey, enjoy your existential terror; I imagine it’s quite exhilirating.
“Both progressives and centrists need to understand what the increasing attacks on multiculturalism from ostensibly mainstream conservatives are really all about: namely, the return of white nationalism.”
I’m so surprised that Neiwert has discovered that something done by ostensibly mainstream conservatives is really all about the return of white nationalism. I’m also shocked to find that he supports this by not quoting mainstream conservatives.
That’s funny. His piece is filled with citations.
cleek, you really don’t want to go head-to-head with me on logic. You are whistling down the wind
in the words of lily, “hoo boy”.
Timothy McVeigh was much too mixed in his politics (and his thinking) to be regarded as a conservative or liberal.
yeah. i’d try to disown him too, if he was a lefty of any kind. but he wasn’t. sorry.
gonna try to run away from Kopp and Rudolph, too ?
Sebastian, I acknowledge that someone else brought up Neiwert this go around, but doesn’t ‘obstensibly’ modify ‘conservatives’, implying that they are simply ‘conservative’ in name only? If you want to argue that my parser is set on too fine, you certainly could, but I haven’t seen many caveats such as ‘This guy, who obstensibly a liberal, is really proposing a X which is not very liberal at all’
Good advice: Do not come unarmed to a battle of wits.
And if Christianity prevails, gays will be executed, women will be removed from public life, and non-Christians killed or enslaved.
Of course, both statements require a certain definition of “Islam” or “Christianity”, but that sort of Christianity is about 1000 times more likely to take over the US than that sort of Islam is — while of course still being so unlikely as to mark anyone worried about such a takeover as possibly dangerously insane.
Charles Bird,
Multi-culturalism is the polar opposite of ethnocentrism and either of these extremes is to be avoided.
Moslems are ethnocentrists who demand that we, in the name of multi-culturalism, accept everything about them while they, in the name of Islam (ie. bigotry), reject everything about us.
Multi-culturalism, taken to it’s extreme, says that we must tolerate the intolerance of the other. I say we must draw a line in the sand and say to the Moslems “No more. Enough. We will never accept shariah law, dhimmitude, jizyah, burkas, honor killings, beheadings, stonings, fatwas, female genital mutilation, executions of gays, apostates, adulterers, etc. etc. etc. Assimilate or get out.”
BTW, (and I know this is terribly insensitive of me but) our culture IS vastly superior to Islam.
Perhaps, but often the advocates of the two “different” kinds of killing seem to be the same people, with their liberal-hunting licenses, daydreams of blowing up the New York Times or poisoning a Supreme Court justice, and calls for hanging various “traitors” such as journalists who have the audacity to reveal illegal and un-American actions by the current administration. Not to mention that Muslims and US citizens are by no means mutually exclusive.
John, have you ever met a Muslim?
KCinDC,
“still being so unlikely as to mark anyone worried about such a takeover as possibly dangerously insane.”
Let’s see. We in the West have already rolled over like dogs and renounced our free speech rights at the slightest provocation from Moslems (the cartoon war).
Do you really think it’s going to end there?
And do you really think Iran is bluffing or will be the last or only Islamic Nutocracy to threaten us with nuclear attack?
Multiculturalism would have us believe that our culture and way of life is not worth fighting for and, so far, we have certainly been good little multiculturalists.
KCinDC wrote:
“John, have you ever met a Muslim?”
Yes. In fact, I had a Pakistani friend many years ago. As I recall he was quite Westernized, professed to be Muslim but drank wine. Also distrusted jews and considered blacks inferior. And I could not get him to understand the concept of separation of mosque and state. But he was all in all a pleasant enough fellow.
Individual Muslims can be fine. It’s the demographic critical mass I worry about. France is only 3% Muslim and look at what they are going through.
“Sebastian, I acknowledge that someone else brought up Neiwert this go around, but doesn’t ‘obstensibly’ modify ‘conservatives’, implying that they are simply ‘conservative’ in name only? If you want to argue that my parser is set on too fine, you certainly could, but I haven’t seen many caveats such as ‘This guy, who obstensibly a liberal, is really proposing a X which is not very liberal at all'”
I think your caveat meter is set too fine. It isn’t just “ostensibly conservatives”. It is “ostensibly mainstream conservatives”. Ostensibly in this case meaning something akin to ‘seemingly’ or ‘on the face’. Thus he continues his neverending quest of unmasking “mainstream conservatives” as REALLY Nazis.
The full sentence is “Both progressives and centrists need to understand what the increasing attacks on multiculturalism from ostensibly mainstream conservatives are really all about: namely, the return of white nationalism.”
So progressives and centrists are apparently confused about what people who APPEAR to be mainstream conservatives are really about. They aren’t really attacking multiculturism because multiculturalism as discussed in the general culture tends to undercut the abilty to make moral judgement. What they are REALLY doing is trying to empower WHITE Nationalism!!!!
“That’s funny. His piece is filled with citations.”
But citations to people who appear to be mainstream conservatives? Not so much.
“So progressives and centrists are apparently confused about what people who APPEAR to be mainstream conservatives are really about.”
But you are avoiding my point that Neiwert isn’t slamming conservatism, but pointing out that a number of people claim to be mainstream conservatives but actually have a more dangerous agenda. And I am confused and it is not ‘apparently’. Is William Lind a conservative? The subject of this post? Steve Sailer? Michelle Malkin? Rushbo? You suggested earlier that Ann Coulter’s ‘point’ about there being more Communists than was realized was true, so am I to take Coulter as a mainstream conservative?
If you could point to one conservative writer who makes a clear distinction between Ward Churchill or Noam Chomsky, and liberalism as a ‘mainstream’ political philosophy, I would love to see it.
“But you are avoiding my point that Neiwert isn’t slamming conservatism, but pointing out that a number of people claim to be mainstream conservatives but actually have a more dangerous agenda.”
That may be your point, but it is not Neiwert’s.
The ‘number of people’ he points out are selected just like Chomsky and Churchill, not for their representativeness but rather for their shock value. I’ve been a conservative for decades and I’ve never heard of Lind nor have I seen conservatives refer to him at all much less as a prominent thinker whose views ought to be respected. You can’t say the same for Chomsky who has his malign influence spread across campuses all over the nation.
And the idea that multiculturalism can undermine the framework for making moral judgments is not a conservative fantasy. In the “Dimensions of Culture” class, required for every undergraduate at what was then “Third College” but is now “Marshall College”–University of California, San Diego, my fellow students and I were taught by anthropologists including this one Steven Parish that morality was entirely a cultural phenomenon and could not be the basis for legitimate criticism of other cultures. This was a year-long course required of every single student at the college. During this course I was subjected to a most unpleasant public humiliation where I was accused of being a racist in front of hundreds of other students for a portion of a lecture after questioning whether or not that formulation of morality allowed for criticism of apartheid in South Africa. My point being not that you should feel sorry for me, but that the ridiculously strong version of multiculturalism is not a strawman invented by conservatives to bash liberals.
That may be your point, but it is not Neiwert’s.
I would rush right out and patent that mindreading cap.
The point that he picks the right wing equivalents of Churchill and Chomsky is noted, but he says they are ‘obstensibly’ mainstream conservatives, and obstensible means, as I understand it, “appearing as such but not necessarily so”. Would that you say ‘obstensible liberals’ when you are talking about Churchill and Chomsky.
You can’t say the same for Chomsky who has his malign influence spread across campuses all over the nation.
I agree that the notions of generative linguistics have been pernicious, but I don’t think that is what you were referring to. If you can help me out on this, I hope you could point to, say, a major in Chomskian political philosophy or even a course devoted solely to Chomsky’s view of politics.
Your citation of Parish is also interesting, and though the link is broken, the google cache has this
Steven M. Parish received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from UCSD, where he was trained in psychological anthropology. He has conducted fieldwork in the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal and in the United States.
Parish’s major interests are psychological anthropology, social theory, Hinduism and Buddhism. His research has addressed a number of topics in psychological anthropology, with a central focus on the study of self, emotion, and moral experience.
He has used person-centered ethnography to examine the role of culture in the development of moral consciousness and has also examined the experience of inequality as it shapes the formation of self and culture in caste society.
Parish is the author of Moral Knowing in a Hindu Sacred City: An Exploration of Mind, Emotion, and Self (Columbia, 1994) and Hierarchy and Its Discontents: Culture and the Politics of Consciousness in Caste Society (Pennsylvania, 1996).
Given that his field work is in a society structured in ways very different from that of college freshmen at UCSD, perhaps he was trying to get students to consider things from a different perspective. I’m sorry you feel he humiliated you, but that does not make those beliefs ‘liberal’. But if he is truely the danger you make him out to be, you may want to report to Horowitz and get him listed on an addendum to this list.
We in the West have already rolled over like dogs and renounced our free speech rights at the slightest provocation from Moslems (the cartoon war).
the editorial staff at Comedy Central isn’t the final, umm, decider about which rights we hold and which we don’t.
Do you really think it’s going to end there?
interesting philosophical question: can something which hasn’t started, end?
You can’t say the same for Chomsky who has his malign influence spread across campuses all over the nation.
Chomsky is another one of those people I wouldn’t know of, if the right wasn’t so terrified of him that they couldn’t stop talking about him. i don’t think i can name a single political position of his. so either i need to work a little harder to educate myself about what scares the right, or he’s not as influential and widespread as i’ve been told.
On behalf of Liberalism in all its forms, I’d like to apologize for Sebastian’s education, at both HS and UC levels. I’ve never doubted that there were morons in every tendency, but it’s always embarrassing to hear of particular morons carrying one’s flag.
I say we must draw a line in the sand and say to the Moslems “No more. Enough. We will never accept shariah law, dhimmitude, jizyah, burkas, honor killings, beheadings, stonings, fatwas, female genital mutilation, executions of gays, apostates, adulterers, etc. etc. etc. Assimilate or get out.”
Last time I checked, the US was invading Islamic countries – not the other way around.
It’s funny that people on the left are accused of hating America, when it is people such as this who are so uncertain of America’s capabilities that they seriously fear the imposition of Sharia law.
Oh, you were at Marshall. Yes, I’ve heard from a LOT of people that that class was horrible.
I know this is going back up stream a while, but when I hear the listenership of Savage belittled as mostly idle spectators who are fscinated by his outrage, I have to wonder who the idle listeners are that keep turning his books into best sellers. I listen to the man occassionally because he encapsulates a lot of the talking points I hear all the time here in OK (also because of a morbid sense of fascination). However, I can’t imagine actually giving him money for a book, because that would mean supporting him. There are enough people that do so to convince me he isn’t just a fringe spectacle.
what Shinobi said.
Sebastian: What CharleyCarp said. Moreover, while it would be bad (a) to impose one’s viewpoints on one’s unsuspecting students, and (b) to publicly humiliate them, it’s particularly galling to read about someone being publicly humiliated for making a standard, and good objection to relativism. Speaking as a college professor, the idea that there are professors who get up and talk about stuff when they haven’t bothered to master the basic pros and cons of the argument is galling in a whole new way.
(It’s one of the many reasons I disliked it when the various branches of literature went in for what I thought of as their ‘practicing philosophy without a license’ phase, otherwise known as “theory’. It’s not that I think that you can’t master this stuff without a philosophy Ph.D., of course — that would be silly — but that so many of the no doubt unrepresentative sample of lit people who were into theory didn’t seem to realize that there was actually a rather interesting body of thought about the very questions they were interested in, and that it might be good to look at it.)
oops: after “no doubt unrepresentative sample of lit people”, add: that I talked to.
“During this course I was subjected to a most unpleasant public humiliation….”
The underlying dynamics of S.H.’s political stance finally made clear.
Okay, John, for the sake of argument let’s say that to support free speech all of the media had an obligation to reprint cartoons from a racist Danish newspaper (presumably that means everyone was obligated to march beside the Nazis in Skokie and hold their signs), and that some of them failed to do so out of fear (or I suppose even desire to avoid pointless offense would be just as bad for your purposes).
Granted that, what do you imagine are the steps that lead from there to a United States in which “gays will be executed, women will be removed from public life and non-Muslims killed or enslaved”? Be specific. To me, there seems to be a huge gulf between allowing someone to dissuade you from reprinting a cartoon and allowing someone to kill or enslave you.
KCinDC: that’s just because you don’t understand the inexorably progressive nature of dhimmitude. One gesture of courtesy to Muslims and all is lost.
I’m angry and not ashamed to admit it. I want justice.
Michael Savage is hateful. He wants the elimination of his “enemies”.
Same goes for Coulter and Limbaugh. I doubt they personally believe much of what they’re saying; they’re performers of a particular kind. Just having fun and getting rich building the market for hate.
“Be specific. To me, there seems to be a huge gulf between allowing someone to dissuade you from reprinting a cartoon and allowing someone to kill or enslave you.”
This discussion has taken place recently at crookedtimber, and I’m totally sure about the argument. I suspect it goes something like…. one of the especially crazy regimes will get nuclear weapons and threaten to use them, cowing many. This regime will train and fund suicide terrorism similar to what we currently see against Israel which will spread across the Western world. If people are cowed enough now to give up on free speech as they seem to be now, they will give up on other rights (say allowing women to dress showing their ankles) when subjected to more duress.
I don’t actually buy it. My plausible-to-me nightmare scenario goes sort of like the above, but a couple of thousand people killed in France, or a nuclear bomb going off in New York, or something like that happens in Germany after years of being emboldened by hundreds of small gestures. Like Hitler, a few important Middle East political leaders take that as a sign that we are too weak to resist and fund a major atrocity. That touches off a genuine genocidal counter-reaction in which our technical means of destruction far outstrip our moral guideposts and one or another Western country decides to kill tens or hundreds of millions in the Middle East. That doesn’t lead to the imposition of Sharia law in my nightmare, but it leads to something very grotesque.
That should be “I’m not totally sure about the argument”
Thanks, Sebastian. I was actually intending to link to the Crooked Timber thread. I’m not clear on how “years of being emboldened by hundreds of small gestures” leads to more terrorism than “years of being inflamed by hundreds of small gestures and large actions” does. Has the Iraq war decreased the number of Muslims sympathetic to terrorists? Will an attack on Iran decrease the number further?
The Crooked Timber post
Germany was emboldened by small gestures after Hitler grew to power but that is not the historical lesson we need to focus on now since there is no equivalent of Hitler in power in the Middle East now.We need to be thinking about why Hitler grew to power. His power came from the frustrated nationalism, economic disaster, and sense of being over-punished which the Germans felt after WWI. If we continue to treat countries like Iran with unnecessary belligerance we embolden the Hitlerish sections of their society in the same way that the allied determination to keep on punishing the Germans encouraged their excessive nationalism. We are in a pre-Hitler stage of affairs, not a post Hitler. However Bush’s policy toward Iran could change that.
KCinDC wrote:
“Has the Iraq war decreased the number of Muslims sympathetic to terrorists? Will an attack on Iran decrease the number further?”
No and No. And if you don’t believe our half-assed Marshall Plan in Iraq can work anywhere in the Middle East then, apparently, the solution is total war against an aggressive totalitarian ideology.
Oh gee, wasn’t the original Marshall Plan also preceded by total war?
Sebastian: my nightmares:There’s the nightmare in which someone manages to bomb the Saudi refineries, or in some other way massively disrupt oil flows, and all hell breaks loose, for instance; also, the global warming nightmare, and the ‘good lord, he actually bombed Iran, and now the Middle East is exploding’ nightmare. As a result of these nightmares, not to mention all the other reasons, I have thought for ages that we need to do something serious about diminishing our reliance on oil (= our vulnerability to oil shocks, the pain of the inevitable transition away from oil, the leverage of feudal kingdoms whose good will I do not trust further than I can throw it, etc.) As a further result of this, I am really, really upset that we have spent the last six years with essentially no energy policy other than “hey, let’s drill in ANWAR!”, which does absolutely nothing about the crucial demand side of the equation.
Then there are the non-nightmarish but very bad dreams, in which our society is just eaten away from within by debt and a failure to invest in education and infrastructure.
For some reason, Danish cartoons don’t figure in them at all, and I’ve never been able to see why some bloggers (not you) are so fixated on any of the rather implausible scenarios in which they figure.
RE: the year-long UCSD indoctrination class.
My point with the anecdote isn’t that some professors are stupid–a point that surely doesn’t need making. Thousands of students have been herded through that stupid program by now at just one school. Unless I fell in to the only really sick mandatory college class in the US, it shouldn’t be shocking that some conservatives (including myself) see too-strong multiculturalism as a bad thing. We aren’t making up the bad interpretations. We have been slapped in the face with them as if they were not only correct, but so obviously correct that any disagreement is a sign of a deep moral sickness. (Leading to an interesting irony as advocates of strong multiculturalism have denied the existance of a moral high ground from which moral criticism can be made.)
John, which countries exactly are we supposed to be making total war against? I just don’t see the parallel to WW2 here. No one (except the US) is invading any other countries. You don’t make war against an ideology, but against countries.
I understand that you think the US needs to be killing a lot more people in the Middle East, but I’m still unclear on how you think all this killing is going to improve the situation — unless you’re advocating genocide, in which case I think it’s rather odd to be comparing the other side to Hitler.
hilzoy: Yes we can and should diminish our reliance on oil but that is not going to diminish the desire of Islamists to establish a worldwide caliphate by any means necessary.
Iran is an Islamist state. Pakistan is a hearbeat away from becoming an Islamist state.
What? No “good lord, he actually bombed Israel” nightmare scenario?
Must resist temptation to come to Chomsky’s defense. Must resist. Oh well, here goes–
As it happens, one can reach Chomskyan conclusions about the frequent wickedness of US foreign policy without ever taking his writings into account. One doesn’t even need to have much sympathy for anarcho-syndicalists (except those oppressed ones in the Holy Grail). For instance, a belief that all men are sinners and much better at plucking the motes out of the eyes of our enemies than noticing the beams in our own will take you a long way to full-fledged Chomskyite attitude towards American foreign policy, or the foreign policy of any powerful country. That, plus a little reading of how the US has actually behaved over the past century or so. The new Stephen Kinzer book (a mainstream NYT liberal reporter) I’ve been hearing about lately sounds like a Chomsky book without Noam’s name attached–I’ll have to read it.
Getting back to the genocidal rhetoric, I’ve been in the position of agreeing with Sebastian off and on lately. It happens. I’m having trouble telling how seriously to take the Iranian versions of Michael Savage, in part because I simply haven’t had the time to read up on the subject, but probably more importantly, in part because I doubt anyone knows for sure whether they really mean it. (I have this dark suspicion that people’s political leanings are determining their analysis. I know, hard to believe.) For that matter, I don’t even know if the genocidal rhetoric from Savage is something he means, or whether there are people in the Bush Administration who really are insane enough to use tactical nuclear weapons in a pre-emptive strike on Iran. But this genocidal rhetoric and nuclear saber-rattling in both countries could lead us to a really bad place even if no one started out meaning it.
Threatening to use or even daydreaming in public about the use of a nuclear weapon against an enemy in a first strike ought to be illegal, btw, for government officials. Automatic sanctions on the officials, bank accounts frozen, arrested if they travel, that sort of thing. It wouldn’t stop the real fanatics, but it might stop someone doing it just for demagogic domestic consumption. Whether we have a real fanatic or a mere demagogue in Iran I don’t know. Of course it might not even stop the demagogue if he can pose as a martyr for his local constituents. I’m about to talk myself out of this, but still, There Ought To Be A Law against casual gloating over prospective genocide when it’s done by someone in power.
I’m hoping no one thinks I think that merely passing a law would prevent mushroom clouds over Israel. I’m launching a pre-emptive strike against that misunderstanding.
“Yes we can and should diminish our reliance on oil but that is not going to diminish the desire of Islamists to establish a worldwide caliphate by any means necessary.”
True. It will however, vastly diminish their ability to turn such desires into actions, both by removing a major pool of money to support their desires and by reducing the factors we need to consider as their potential retaliations for any actions we take.
Sebastian’s nightmare of 10:40 is my nightmare. I think we are going to nuke ’em, beause the right wants to do the ME cheap and the left doesn’t want to do it all. If the ME could develop the economic and social opportunity without it, I wouldn’t care about the democratization.
…
hilzoy doesn’t have nightmares at 11:17, simply foresight.
KCinDC wrote:
“You don’t make war against an ideology, but against countries.”
The ideology is radical Islam or Islamism which seeks to establish a worldwide caliphate by any means necessary.
The country (so far) is Iran, an Islamist state which seeks to establish a worldwide caliphate by any means necessary.
In WWII the ideology was fascism and the countries were etc, etc.
Maybe conservatives are stuck in 1941 and liberals are stuck in 1968?
it shouldn’t be shocking that some conservatives (including myself) see too-strong multiculturalism
Could multiculturalism please be defined. To Canadian ears, the term has very particular connotations. The way it’s being bandied about certainly sounds like opposition is based in some sort of white nationalism to me. But that’s only because I have to guess.
Start a new thread, if you like. Or not. It might be covering old ground, I see.
Dantheman wrote:
“It will however, vastly diminish their ability to turn such desires into actions,”
True to a point. With the increasing oil appetites of China and India, I’m not sure “vastly” applies.
Spartikus:
I cannot see into the hearts of individual multi-culturalists who may or may not wish to replace American/Canadian culture. Conversely, I cannot see into the hearts of individual anti-multiculturalists who may or may not be white nationalists. I do know that I am no white nationalist. I, for instance, am not disturbed by Hispanic immigration because we share a common enough European background. But I am extremely disturbed about increasing Muslim demographics because Islam is diametrically opposed to our way of life. And, unlike, Hindus, Buddhists and every other religious or ethnic group on earth, they tell us everyday they plan to destroy us.
And just for the record, I had started the post on energy that I will put up sometime today before this thread turned that way 😉
“Could multiculturalism please be defined.”
You wish! 🙂
The problem is that (like post-modernism) ‘multiculturalism’ in this debate comes in at least two distinct flavors.
Flavor 1: Cultures have lots of different and interesting practices. As cultures intersect with one another they change each other in unpredictable ways and often adopt little bits of each other’s practices. We shouldn’t resist that out of an unconcious or reflexive preference to our own culture. Besides, watching things the evolution of cultural practices as they interact with each other is one of the great pleasures in life. There are however certain bedrock moral tenets that are not subject to a cultural relativism analysis.
Flavor 2: Since moral practices are culturally determined [never really proven but they soldier on] morality cannot provide an independent basis to criticize any practice of any culture.
Personally I call flavor 2 “strong multiculturalism” because it undercuts its own arguments the same way that “strong materialism” does when talking about the biological origins of individual thought.
In my experience very few people adopt strong multiculturalism as a consistent world view. (See my apartheid example above). That doesn’t stop it from being used as a club on other issues.
The problem with analyzing it as Neiwert does (for instance) is that those who oppose flavor 1 are probably racist but those who oppose flavor 2 aren’t. Neiwert pretty much treats those who oppose 1 or 2 as if they were all racist. In doing so he (almost amusingly) is making the mirror-image error of someone like Rush who sees the really bad flavor 2 multiculturalist arguments and decides that all multiculturalist arguments share a moral relativism which must be opposed.
If you actually believe that “Islam is diametrically opposed to our way of life”, then clearly there is no solution but genocide or perhaps some sort of forcible conversion of Muslims (or abandoning our way of life). What exactly are you proposing, John?
Fortunately there are millions of Muslims in the United States demonstrating that Islam can be compatible with our way of life.
Of course there are Muslims who believe differently, just as there are Christians (though a smaller number) who believe they can’t coexist with a secular world. That doesn’t mean that sweeping statements about Islam as a whole are accurate or helpful.
The countries which have actually done something significant to promote a militant global Islam are Saudi Arabia, with its ongoing funding of Wahhabist preaching and education, and Pakistan, in particularly with A.Q. Khan’s academy for wayward nuke seekers. Notice that both of these are allies of the US, that the president is personal friends with the governing family of one of them and refrains from pressuring the other to do anything at all in the way of giving up the guy who planned the 9/11/2001 attacks.
Iraq was a secular state until we created the conditions that allowed rival theocracies to emerge, and Iran has never had anything like the prestige or influence of our hate-mongering, death-dealing good friends in the Middle East.
I’d be much more impressed by people making some of these arguments if they’d start off with proposals for dealing with those who actually have advanced the cause of a militant Islam.
it shouldn’t be shocking that some conservatives (including myself) see too-strong multiculturalism…
I’d have more respect for this viewpoint — in general, I’m not trying to dispute your personal experience here — if conservatives were equally vociferous in trying to root out the (usually blatant) ideological stances of, say, economics departments, or business schools, or (less frequently) engineering schools.
Perhaps I’m just too steeped in the multiculturalism as practicality of my own locality, but it seems to me that opposing “Flavor 2” would indeed be like opposing post-modernism. Of relevance only in theoretical discussions. I’m not sure it’s seriously advanced as a basis for policy and laws, outside of perhaps a few limited and notorious examples on campus.
But thanks for the response. Appreciated.
Flavor 2: Since moral practices are culturally determined [never really proven but they soldier on] morality cannot provide an independent basis to criticize any practice of any culture.
I don’t know who makes this claim, but even if you take the premise as true, for the sake of argument, the conclusion hardly follows. To say that it does seems logically equivalent to saying that there are no such things as moral principles at all, even principles that may vary by culture. If there were, it would surely be possible for a society to behave in a way that violates its own principles.
“if conservatives were equally vociferous in trying to root out the (usually blatant) ideological stances of, say, economics departments, or business schools, or (less frequently) engineering schools.”
To my ears this sounds like a false equivalence. Not all ideological stances (even if false) are equally destructive. Strong multiculturalism and post-modern ‘analysis’ run amok attack the entire moral framework of society. Having an ideological stance on the minimum wage in an econ class isn’t the same.
KCinDC wrote:
“What exactly are you proposing, John?
I am proposing that everyone see the threat for what it is. I believe it was Sun Tzu who said that, in order to achieve victory, you must first know your enemy.
“Fortunately there are millions of Muslims in the United States demonstrating that Islam can be compatible with our way of life.
A sweeping statement about Islam that would be helpful is an answer to this question:
What happens in countries wherein the Muslim population is higher? Say, France, for instance, where the Muslim pop. is 3%?
KCinDC wrote:
“If you actually believe that “Islam is diametrically opposed to our way of life”, then clearly there is no solution but genocide or perhaps some sort of forcible conversion of Muslims (or abandoning our way of life). What exactly are you proposing, John?”
I think one peaceful solution would be for Moslems to become as ashamed of their heritage as we are of ours (ie. for them to become strong multiculturalists).
Are you holding your breath?
KCinDC wrote:
“If you actually believe that “Islam is diametrically opposed to our way of life”, then clearly there is no solution but genocide or perhaps some sort of forcible conversion of Muslims (or abandoning our way of life). What exactly are you proposing, John?”
I think one peaceful solution would be for Moslems to become as ashamed of their heritage as we are of ours (ie. for them to become strong multiculturalists).
Are you holding your breath?
I am proposing that everyone see the threat for what it is.
and then what?
What happens in countries wherein the Muslim population is higher? Say, France, for instance, where the Muslim pop. is 3%?
it’d be a more menaingful question if all countries were equal in every way except for their percentage of Muslilms.
I think that differences in the relationship between the general population and the Muslims, differences in general attitudes toward immigrants, and probably differences in the Muslim population involved are probably more important in explaining differences between France and the US than are differences in the proportion of Muslims (which isn’t really all that much greater, if it’s 3% in France).
And regardless, I don’t see any evidence of imposition of sharia law on France. Quite the contrary, I see a ban on head scarves that would probably be ruled an unconstitutional violation of freedom of religion in the US. How does that fit in with “dhimmitude”?
Perhaps you could say what you think happens when the Muslim population reaches this magical number? And please consider talking more specifically about the groups you fear rather than lumping all Muslims together into a monolithic mass of insidious, inhuman foreigners.
“Perhaps you could say what you think happens when the Muslim population reaches this magical number?”
We have seen what happens. Film directors are murdered in the street. Politicians are forced to live in hiding due to death threats. And now film actors are receiving threats, http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/011113.php . Please go to dhimmiwatch.com for daily examples.
‘And please consider talking more specifically about the groups you fear rather than lumping all Muslims together into a monolithic mass of insidious, inhuman foreigners.”
Oh I see. So the “millions of Muslims in the United States demonstrating that Islam can be compatible with our way of life” is not a monolithic mass? Or are “monolithic masses” only acceptable in statements with which you agree?
“Film directors are murdered in the street.”
— As so often happens in, say, Turkey…
I mean: it’s a wonder Islam has survived these many years, what with everyone killing each other and all. Even more amazing that there are actual countries that are full of Muslims. And more amazing still that they managed to take time out from their killing sprees to preserve philosophy and math during the dark ages.
Perhaps that was just because film hadn’t been invented yet, and so they didn’t have to spend all their time killing directors and threatening actors.
My point with the anecdote isn’t that some professors are stupid–a point that surely doesn’t need making. Thousands of students have been herded through that stupid program by now at just one school. Unless I fell in to the only really sick mandatory college class in the US, it shouldn’t be shocking that some conservatives (including myself) see too-strong multiculturalism as a bad thing.
OK. This has what to do with mainstream liberalism? I don’t recall a single prominent liberal politician advocating anything remotely like this in this country. Do you?
And you just might want to check how typical this class is/was before using it as a basis for sounding the alarm, because every anecdote about cultural relativism run amok I hear seems to come from the California public universities. I’m really dubious that this is a widespread problem. I also note that your idiot professor did not convert you to ultrarelativism — did he convince anyone?
One more thing: I had one professor in college who was convinced that telling students his opinion on a disputed subject covered in class disserved the students, so he refused on principle to let class discussions arrive at a final answer. I asked him once, and he assured me that he did have a personal position on the current subject, but wanted us all to develop our own views. Is it possible that you missed the point of what your prof was trying to do?
Of course not, and I didn’t make any statement referring to Muslims as a monolithic mass. Consider the difference between our two statements:
You: Islam is diametrically opposed to our way of life. That means every Muslim on the planet is our enemy, and essentially the only good Muslim is a dead Muslim. And it’s obviously false to anyone who knows that there are many, many Muslims living peacefully in Western countries.
Me: There are millions of Muslims in the United States demonstrating that Islam can be compatible with our way of life. That says nothing about all Muslims, or even all Muslims in the United States. And it’s obviously true, unless you can point to some evidence that these millions of seemingly peaceful US Muslims are actually biding their time over decades to kill us in our beds one day.
Osama bin Laden is grateful, I’m sure, for the help from you and Michael Savage and various others in spreading the idea that we’re at war with Islam. But one of the few good things about Bush is that he’s mostly avoided that idea. It’s good to avoid spreading that idea not just because it’s immoral, but because it’s a very bad strategy. The vast majority of Muslims in the world are opposed to killing film directors and flying airplanes into buildings. They aren’t our enemies. But if you tell them that you’re at war with Islam, they certainly will become your enemies.
“OK. This has what to do with mainstream liberalism? I don’t recall a single prominent liberal politician advocating anything remotely like this in this country. Do you?”
You don’t hear the “who’s to judge” query come up all the time? It comes up nearly every time there is a discussion on multi-cultural interactions. You don’t hear about the special attention we should be paying to Arab ideas of honor? I do. You don’t hear about the important sensitivity of Muslims when their Prophet is depicted in cartoons? I’ve heard that one a bit recently. You don’t hear explicit dismissal of professions to commit genocide as mere “playing to domestic audiences”? I’ve heard that on this very board. (And if some one could explain to me why I should feel better that politicians in Iran can get lots of hitherto unavailable support by boosting for genocide it would be greatly appreciated because I’m not feeling comforted.)
And the reason that it came up (I did not raise the issue) is because Neiwert (who seems admired by many liberals on this board) regularly mixes in fighting the “who’s to judge” garbage with his overbroad accusations of having ties to Nazism. And for the second time in three days, other people have linked to him and when I read the links I discovered the exact type of thing that liberals at obsidianwings hate when it is directed at them. See also hilzoy’s post on this thread.
“And you just might want to check how typical this class is/was before using it as a basis for sounding the alarm, because every anecdote about cultural relativism run amok I hear seems to come from the California public universities.”
You think so?
There is a university you might have heard of in New Haven with similar issues. It is a private school. Have you read anything on “Theory” (capital letter “T” very important)in literature? Very widespread analysis along those lines in Literature departments all over the nation throughout the past 15 years.
You can see even see the attempt to attack arguments on a cultural instead of logical basis in responses like this one on this very board:
It isn’t like I have to look really hard to find university programs with that tilt.
Personally I call flavor 2 “strong multiculturalism” because it undercuts its own arguments the same way that “strong materialism” does when talking about the biological origins of individual thought.
Ironically, that sort of strong “multiculturalism” sounds like a reaction to the problematic aspects of weak multiculturalism. Someone pointed out that the effect of multiculturalism is to be able to control the influx of ethnic/racial influences into White Anglo-American culture so that power is never relinquished. In that sense, the strong ‘multiculturalism’ (we could call it ‘obstensible’) is often expressed by groups trying to preserve their own cultural identity rather than be overwhelmed by the dominant culture. They argue that this is not a buffet lunch that you get to pick and choose, but that in order to preserve cultural identity, intellectual barriers must be erected.
Unfortunately, Sebastian’s freshman days example of criticizing South Africa is a rather weak attack, because South African apartheid was the result of the imposition of European cultural values, so one need not argue that ‘multiculturalism’ prevents criticism of apartheid. Unfortunately, it seems that this is just an example to attack multiculturalism rather than a question about how to deal with apartheid, and many of the minorities who have adopted this sort of ‘strong multiculturalism’ have been co-opted by the majority culture. This is probably why the teacher you mention takes the stand that he did, because something like the caste system, while very problematic in terms of human rights, is not something that can be overturned from the outside by fiat.
“OK. This has what to do with mainstream liberalism? I don’t recall a single prominent liberal politician advocating anything remotely like this in this country. Do you?”
You don’t hear the “who’s to judge” query come up all the time? It comes up nearly every time there is a discussion on multi-cultural interactions. You don’t hear about the special attention we should be paying to Arab ideas of honor? I do. You don’t hear about the important sensitivity of Muslims when their Prophet is depicted in cartoons? I’ve heard that one a bit recently. You don’t hear explicit dismissal of professions to commit genocide as mere “playing to domestic audiences”? I’ve heard that on this very board. (And if some one could explain to me why I should feel better that politicians in Iran can get lots of hitherto unavailable support by boosting for genocide it would be greatly appreciated because I’m not feeling comforted.)
You know, links to specific comments or points are possible and it would be nice to address the actual people who write things rather than try and tar everyone with everyone else’s opinions. Also, the questions that swirl around in the zeitgeist are quite different from what liberal politicians ask Furthermore the ability of the US to weigh in on these matters has been compromised, perhaps fatally.
Also, as far as Neiwert goes, I disagree. In fact, he writes:
These attacks are coming from all sectors of the conservative attack machine — from the religious right, from the extremist right, and from mainstream liberal-hating conservatives who gleefully join in without considering the broader ramifications of these attacks.
It is one thing to argue that this is human nature and we can see that when, for example, some on the left attacked Domenech for being home-schooled, another attack that has broader ramifications. But I guess since you know what Neiwert thinks, him sticking this comment in the second paragraph of the cited piece doesn’t really matter, does it.
You don’t hear about the important sensitivity of Muslims when their Prophet is depicted in cartoons?
Isn’t this more a case of good manners rather than “multiculturalism”. I really don’t think there were broad calls for actual laws banning depictions of (insert diety here), were there?
And don’t you think you’re doing precisely what you’re condemning Neiwert for? ie. the lack of citations from mainstream liberals, and so on.
Seb: the thing is, some of the examples you adduce — e.g., sensitivity about depicting the prophet — might have entirely different sources. In that particular case, I wish more people had that sensitivity, if only because I wish, in general, that we didn’t annoy so many people for no reason at all. (Preemptive note: I am not, not, not saying that anyone should be censored. In the case of the Danish cartoons, however, I saw no reason to publish them in the first place, at least not the ones I saw, since they weren’t funny, and I think it’s a good idea not to offend anyone without having some remotely worthwhile excuse for doing so. In this case, humor, or an incisive political point, would have been one. As it was, I thought they were just pointless.)
On the other hand, the ‘who are we to judge?’ thing is, imho, ubiquitous, much to my chagrin. I spend annoying amounts of time in class trying to get my students to admit the possibility of objective moral judgment. (Not trying to convince them that it actually exists; just that it’s not on its face absurd.)
Liberal indoctrination at work again…
“Unfortunately, Sebastian’s freshman days example of criticizing South Africa is a rather weak attack, because South African apartheid was the result of the imposition of European cultural values, so one need not argue that ‘multiculturalism’ prevents criticism of apartheid.”
Wrong. A strong multicultural view would be that you can’t judge the post-Dutch imperial culture which thought it was ok.
KCinDC:
In his book Islamic Imperialism – A History, Efraim Karsh dismisses the commonly held apologetic which casts Osama Bin Laden as a fringe, demonic aberration of the “true” Islamic precept of jihad, which even at its most aggressive, remains mere bloodless “striving” in missionary activity for the pacific propagation of the great faith of Islam.
Instead, argues Karsh, the Middle East’s thousand year legacy of jihad—what he terms its “millenarian imperial tradition”—has been, and remains the most potent historical force shaping the region. And Karsh, in referring to Bin Laden’s August, 1996 “Declaration of Jihad Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places”, has the perspicacity and sheer courage to note that the Saudi jihad terrorist represents the modern apotheosis of this Muslim institution:
“Bin Laden’s proclamation of jihad was no novelty in and of itself; declaring a holy war against the infidel has been a standard practice of countless imperial rulers and aspirants since the rise of Islam. Nor does bin Laden’s perception of jihad as a predominantly military effort to facilitate the creation of the worldwide Islamic umma differ in any way from traditional Islamic thinking…”
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=22141
” I really don’t think there were broad calls for actual laws banning depictions of (insert diety here), were there?”
In fact there were calls for increasing the breadth of anti-blasphemy laws in Europe.
“You know, links to specific comments or points are possible and it would be nice to address the actual people who write things rather than try and tar everyone with everyone else’s opinions.”
Who is trying to tar everyone with everyone else’s opinions here? Have I accused liberals in general of anything in these comments? I’m not the one constantly finding Nazis under every conservative label.
You know, Sebastian, pretty much the sole survivor of the original Yale deconstructivist group is Harold Bloom. Go ahead and insult him: he’s making millions, and his books have sucked for the last ten years.
A strong multicultural view would be that you can’t judge the post-Dutch imperial culture which thought it was ok.
Not any “strong multicultural view” I’m aware of. Quite the opposite in fact.
In fact there were calls for increasing the breadth of anti-blasphemy laws in Europe.
Hmm…true. But was that sourced in “multiculturalism” or something else? ie. It’s labelled “anti-blasphemy” for a reason.
LiberalJaponicus, I honestly cannot believe that I’m being asked to provide cites for the “who’s to judge” garbage. Have you truly not come in to contact with the argument? Do you live in some sheltered world where that argument never or almost never comes up?
And what precisely do you think the Neiwart quote you bring is supposed to prove that requires this: “But I guess since you know what Neiwert thinks, him sticking this comment in the second paragraph of the cited piece doesn’t really matter, does it.” The part you cite supports my argument that he isn’t doing a particularly good job of distinguishing between the attacks on Flavor 1 and Flavor 2 multiculturalism. And which conservatives do you think he is EXCLUDING from his description? It isn’t very clear at all is it?
Spartikus, “And don’t you think you’re doing precisely what you’re condemning Neiwert for? ie. the lack of citations from mainstream liberals, and so on.”
No. I’m not accusing ‘obstensibly’ mainstream liberals of secretly holding repellant views.
Bin Laden’s proclamation of jihad was no novelty in and of itself; declaring a holy war against the infidel has been a standard practice of countless imperial rulers and aspirants since the rise of Islam.
you don’t have to look hard to find plenty of examples of holy wars started by western countries. declaring a “holy war” is a basic human activity.
While perhaps not based on “white” nationalism (even though the culture he advocates is the culture of white Americans), when, say, a Bob Ehrlich says he “rejects the idea of multiculturalism“, is that not a call for one culture to dominate, and is that not an implicit judgement on the worth of other cultures?
Not all ideological stances (even if false) are equally destructive. Strong multiculturalism and post-modern ‘analysis’ run amok attack the entire moral framework of society. Having an ideological stance on the minimum wage in an econ class isn’t the same.
You think that an ideological stance on the minimum wage isn’t potentially an attack on the moral framework of society? That… surprises me, quite frankly. Though it does explain a lot about society at large, I suppose.
Anyway, let me point out other concomitant attacks on society in the vein of which I spoke: Enron. WorldCom. Since you brought them up elsewhere, S&L and the Keating Five. For that matter, Halliburton’s no-bid contracts, and that egregious fiasco with the hospital contractor whose name I’m forgetting. And myriad others too numerous to mention. Obviously corruption’s been around for a long time, but there’s a specifically corrosive variant of executive/corporate malfeasance that erupted into the mainstream in the 1980s that has both contaminated universities (specifically business schools, at least IME) and has done orders of magnitude more damage to society — and I mean that quite literally, under any number of metrics — than “strong multiculturalism” and “post-modernism” (except insofar as the latter is being employed by the Bush Administration and its reality-challenged defenders).
And no offense, but while I’ll certainly grant you that your experience with this brand of multiculturalism was horrific, I’ve had an inordinate amount of university experience myself, I’ve talked with people of similar (or greater) levels of experience, and no one — no-one — has ever experienced anything like that. [Which isn’t to say that no-one’s tried to make me uncomfortable in a classroom setting for being a straight white male, and those who set out to do so deserve to be castigated, but nothing like the horrors you’ve described.] This suggests to me rather strongly that your experiences are precisely the kind of local ones that you said weren’t news (at least at the national level) and therefore don’t really merit attention in this kind of debate.
IOW, I’d be totally fine with you campaigning to oust that professor, or remove that course, from the university. I don’t believe for a moment that that particular kind of lunacy is a) commonplace, b) endemic or c) dangerous across a non-negligible sampling of universities, and certainly not to the level of “run[ning] amok [and] attack[ing] the entire moral framework of society”.
“And no offense, but while I’ll certainly grant you that your experience with this brand of multiculturalism was horrific, I’ve had an inordinate amount of university experience myself, I’ve talked with people of similar (or greater) levels of experience, and no one — no-one — has ever experienced anything like that.”
But you are rather liberal. Are you asking conservatives? Because among conservatives that I know the experience is at somewhere less than ubiquitous but way more than the unheard of you suggest. Also what disciplines are you talking about. Math? Economics? Try talking people in one of the Literature departments or in Anthropology. Try various social sciences disciplines.
Sebastian, you need to make allowances for some of us old people. A lot of the kind of stuff you’ve experienced, and can point to, became more prevalent in the last 2 decades.
[Wrong. A strong multicultural view would be that you can’t judge the post-Dutch imperial culture which thought it was ok.]
But Boers were attempting to impose their culture on everyone else. Can’t the strong multiculturalist maintain that Boers are welcome to all the apartheid they want, and that they ought not to impose apartheid on anyone else (who’s unwilling to join in)?
“Can’t the strong multiculturalist maintain that Boers are welcome to all the apartheid they want, and that they ought not to impose apartheid on anyone else (who’s unwilling to join in)?”
On what basis would they say that Boers ought not impose apartheid? “Ought not” in this case implies a moral value of left-aloneness which transcends cultures.
I wonder if that stuff Sebastian talks about has also, thankfully, become a bit less prevalent recently. Because I DON’T hear a lot of “who are we to judge”. And I am sort of immersed in hotbeds of liberalism and all the places where supposedly you hear those things.
(Well, not California, I haven’t been there since I was about 8. I’d be willing to entertain the idea that liberals from New York, New Haven, Cambridge and Chicago are simply smarter than our Californian brethren, but that’s because I’m a complete northeast-plus-Chicago chauvinist).
Now, I am also increasingly immersed in fields like human rights and asylum law, which are all about the univeralistic moral judgments. So I may not be a fair person to ask; someone in anthropology or lit might have a very different experience.
Speaking of asylum law, this ought to be blatantly obvious but what the hell: John, a lot of the Muslim immigrants in the United States fled here to escape honor killings, murders of gays and heretics, being forced to wear a burqa, FGM, forced marriage and spousal abuse, and the rest of that litany of horrors you attribute to all Muslims above. So for you to use those things to justify whatever it is you are proposing that we do to Muslim immigrants, makes me kind of ill. And, of course, our laws forbid those things; they are grounds for long jail sentences and for deportation, and I am aware of almost zero reports of those crimes being committed in the U.S.
I would hope that people in human rights law wouldn’t say “Who’s to judge?” That would sort of defeat the purpose.
And that reinforces my point. Fighting against that foolish kind of multiculturalism is not a fight with everyone on the liberal side of the spectrum. And disliking it doesn’t make me a NAZI.
Sebastian: “But you are rather liberal. Are you asking conservatives? Because among conservatives that I know the experience is at somewhere less than ubiquitous but way more than the unheard of you suggest.”
Speaking from what I’m sure is the wildly unrepresentative sample of people I’ve talked to, including students (but note here that I went through a phase of being the campus conservatives’ favorite liberal for a few years, when one of them became my advisee): I’m sure this is right, but while I’m also sure, in whatever way one can be sure in the absence of empirical evidence, that a lot of the fault lies with the professors, I also know that back in the days when the PC stuff was at its worst, there was also, at least in the circles I ran in, a perfectly understandable, yet nonetheless unproductive, reaction among the students: sticking up for their right to say wildly politically incorrect things by saying things that were wildly politically incorrect as a sort of challenge. And while some things are wildly politically incorrect for no good reason, some — like my all time favorite, “I support our policy towards American Indians in the late 19th century!”, are politically incorrect for very good reasons.
As I said, I found the business of having students who didn’t know me come up to me, somewhat belligerently, and ask why suppressing unruly colonized peoples was supposed to be a bad thing, or whether there wasn’t something to be said for slavery, perfectly understandable. Adolescence is about saying silly things, partly (at any rate, that’s the only explanation I can give for mine), and I have never noticed that saying, essentially, “shut up”, in horrified tones, is a particularly constructive way of dealing with it. (Especially not when there are the wicked pleasures of the Socratic approach on offer.) But I also suspect that it gave rise to its own equally counterproductive reaction on the part of some professors.
They’re older, though, and should know better.
Marshall’s “Dimensions of Culture” class seems to have been pretty poorly designed; more than a few UCSD undergrads, of various ethnicities, complained about incidents like the one SH describes.
It seems to me that a lot of the complaints people have about freshman and intro-level classes demonstrate inexperience on the part of the teachers. Which makes sense when you remember how many of these required core curriculum classes are taught by grad students.
LiberalJaponicus, I honestly cannot believe that I’m being asked to provide cites for the “who’s to judge” garbage. Have you truly not come in to contact with the argument? Do you live in some sheltered world where that argument never or almost never comes up?
No, I’m asking you to stop saying ‘here’s what happens on this board’ and then not actually address what people are saying here. Hilzoy and Jackmormon suggests that there’s more at work here than simply the idea of multiculturalism, and until you can separate the issues from the ‘humiliation’ you received, I don’t think we can meaningfully discuss it.
The type of strong multiculturalism that you seem intent on tarring everyone on this board with is, I would suggest, itself a reaction to multiculturalism rather than a representative. This is because multiculturalism is not an unalloyed good. Multiculturalism is a form of assimilation, and for a family or group that is powerless, the idea that one’s children get to pick and choose what aspects of their own culture are worthwhile and which are to be discarded is frightening. It is not so much an issue for majority culture parents because some people would pick it up and it wouldn’t really be lost. But for a group that speaks an endangered language, some things, once discarded are lost forever.
Of course, you may point out that your humilator was white, but honestly, there are a constellation of reasons why he may have picked on you that have nothing to do with debating the idea. Until you accept that possibility, everything will seem as if ‘liberal multiculturalism’ is this malign influence on society that has to be stopped. You are right to dislike it, but you are wrong to ascribe it to other people based on a single college course and wrong to suggest that it is somehow more representative of multiculturalism than the first flavor.
It’s 30 years since I took PoliSci and history courses in college, so I can’t speak from personal experience about whether professors now are more or less likely to harrass students who challenge their orthodoxy.
From my own experience, my take is that some professors have personality traits that make them ill-suited to teaching, particularly at university level. They don’t like being questioned by “mere” undergrads; they certainly don’t like their basic assumptions questioned by people they’ve already decided are their intellectual inferiors. I have no statistics to back me up on this, but my anecdotal evidence indicates those tend to be professors who think their purpose is to do research and write papers; teaching is a regrettable, necessary evil they have to endure in order to get what they really want.
That attitude comes irrespective of ideology or ideological affinity. I had lefty profs and righty profs. The ones I got along with best were the ones who enjoyed teaching, enjoyed the give and take of (informed) opinion, and knew how to keep even the most heated discussions from getting personally nasty. The ones I got along with least were the ones who didn’t like students, didn’t like teaching and had no aptitude for it, and let heated discussions devolve into personal attacks.
Um. Yes.
This takes me back many, many years when I had the experience of white progressives trying to explain what we Third World types meant and were thinking.
Charming when we were abset, quite irritating when we were right there in front of them.
“The type of strong multiculturalism that you seem intent on tarring everyone on this board with is, I would suggest, itself a reaction to multiculturalism rather than a representative.”
I’m not intent on tarring anyone here with strong multiculturalism. I think very few people are real moral relativists. I do point out that sometimes people use or allude to strong multiculturalist arguments even here on this board. That isn’t tarring, that is pointing out that the ideas are common enough that they float in to otherwise good disagreements from time to time. Nearly everyone makes a bad argument from time to time so that isn’t shocking. But it does tend to show that the arguments are a lot more around than people like you or Anarch seem to want to admit. You want to make it a single isolated instance that only happened to me in just one class a decade ago. That just isn’t the case. People I have never met, who never went to school at UCSD have similar complaints. Moral relativist arguments get thrown around by people who on serious evaluation aren’t relativist because “Who’s to judge” is a popular way to shut up someone who has a different (and often more conservative) idea of morality than you. These things actually happen on a semi-regular basis.
“You are right to dislike it, but you are wrong to ascribe it to other people based on a single college course and wrong to suggest that it is.”
It wasn’t just a single college course. I am talking about the most gross example I have personally experienced but certainly not the only one. Of all the literature classes I took (that being my major) at least a quarter of them tended to that type of garbage–often in a confusingly self-righteous way. The “Critical Theory” movement was (and is) full of that type of thing.
“and until you can separate the issues from the ‘humiliation’ you received, I don’t think we can meaningfully discuss it.”
I think you are in such deep denial about the prevalance of such strong multiculturalist arguments that you are unconciously forced to blame the victim. “No I’m not” you say? There you go again, sadly still in denial.
I probably don’t really believe that….
But wow it is kinda of an obnoxious showstopper to play that game isn’t it?
You were a lit major at UCSD and entered college in 1993? Wow, we must have ended up in the same classes at some point.
Look, when I entered UCSD, I was culturally Mormon: conservative and skeptical, but interested in education.
I distinctly remember challenging an American-lit professor there with “If this writer weren’t a Mexican Catholic female, would we even been talking about her?” The professor hemmed and hawed, and I went home feeling important.
Now, looking back on it, I realize that the the American-lit professor was just presenting a single example of non-canonical writing within a syllabus of mostly accepted historical work. I was the smart skeptical kid in the class behaving brattily, and for all I know, the professor may have revised her syllabus the next year.
As for literary theory (I’ve never known anyone to insist on the capitalization), it’s been mightily restricted in the past few years. Literary scholars issue titles like “What’s Left After Theory” or “Consequences of Theory”–and those are the few who are bothering to address the theory wars directly.
UCSD’s literature department is unusual in that a) it was originally headed by Marcuse and b) “literature” is a single department. Its practices are not representative of the discipline or of leftists.
I think you are in such deep denial about the prevalance of such strong multiculturalist arguments that you are unconciously forced to blame the victim. “No I’m not” you say? There you go again, sadly still in denial.
I probably don’t really believe that….
But wow it is kinda of an obnoxious showstopper to play that game isn’t it?
Yes, it is, but just as obnoxious and a lot more covert is invoking personal experiences in order to get everyone to apologize for the way you were treated so as to give you some moral standing. Like the person who gets knocked down accidentally and staggers around, but when asked if they were hurt, they say ‘no, no, I’m fine’. You are on record as feeling that this board is basically overrun with the left side of the spectrum, so this may be a compensating mechanism, but I probably don’t believe that.
Ironically, if you would have said ‘the problem I see is that there are two flavors and I think the second one is extremely problematic’, you probably would have gotten a lot of people to agree with you and perhaps solidify the notion that extreme relativism is a bad thing, thus helping people like Anarch and I have the scales fall from our eyes. However, you want to claim that you are the one victimized by it and that we, by virtue of our political persuasion, are untouched. This allows you to question our observatory powers and our viewpoints. Nice work if one can get it.
If you would like to separate your personal experiences from the questions being discussed, I think there would be something to discuss. But by invoking your personal experiences, no one can say ‘no, that’s not true’. It’s a nice little rhetorical gambit, but it is less than helpful in illuminating any aspect of the actual debate. For the record, I’ve had bad experiences too, from both sides, but I tend to ascribe them to the weaknesses of the individual rather than the argument, because no one can be a perfect representative of a particular view. Several people have pointed to other factors that may have contributed to your experience (teacher a jerk, poorly designed syllabus, the zeitgeist of the campus and the time), yet you refuse to acknowledge any of them. So if invoking denial is an obnoxious showstopper, it’s only because there is no place else to take the discussion.
I’m heading out for the weekend to indoctrinate my students at a freshman camp, so by your metric, I will be convincing them that there are no rules of grammar and that anything they say is fine because they are not native speakers. I leave the field to you.
Okay, confused again. How is any of this multiculturalism?
Man alive (an expression of my French teacher…who was Italian!!!) it really seems multiculturalism is being used, and I’m looking at you Sebastian, as a euphemism for something else entirely.
I’m tempted to say white guilt. I’m not sure though.
SH and LJ, did you just recently adopt the habit of calling ObWi a board, rather than a site or a blog? It’s freaking me out.
But you are rather liberal. Are you asking conservatives? Because among conservatives that I know the experience is at somewhere less than ubiquitous but way more than the unheard of you suggest. Also what disciplines are you talking about. Math? Economics? Try talking people in one of the Literature departments or in Anthropology. Try various social sciences disciplines.
In brief: yes, I’m liberal. Yes, I’ve asked conservatives. I’m talking about the usual disciplines: history, anthro, sociology, economics, and a smattering of English/English lit types, though most of the latter weren’t conservative so it probably doesn’t count. And none of them have recounted anything like what you’ve said.
Insert the usual disclaimers here, the ones I put in every time we rehash this, since I’m too tired to do so now.
But it does tend to show that the arguments are a lot more around than people like you or Anarch seem to want to admit.
I can’t “admit” to something I don’t believe in and that I haven’t seen any evidence for, at least on the scale of which you’re speaking. I suspect that during the height of the PC craze it might well have been rampant… but when we were in college (I think I’m a year younger than you? frosh in ’94) I never saw it — where I definitely did see, and experienced first-hand, various conservative tropes that I’d argue are far more destructive than any gooshy multiculturalism — and furthermore I’ve asked most of my conservative friends whether they had experienced such things and their answers all came back negative.
Mind you, at this point I’m no longer sure what it is I’m supposed to not be admitting, so it’s entirely possible that you’re talking about something I’d regard as completely different and there’s no real disagreement between us… but it’s late, and I have a racquetball tournament tomorrow and a concert the day after, so hopefully the topic will have cleared by the time I can make it back here. Sayang.
“Ironically, if you would have said ‘the problem I see is that there are two flavors and I think the second one is extremely problematic’, you probably would have gotten a lot of people to agree with you and perhaps solidify the notion that extreme relativism is a bad thing”
Isn’t that what I said? Or do you think I was arguing that flavor 1 was a bad thing?
Did you take “The problem with analyzing it as Neiwert does (for instance) is that those who oppose flavor 1 are probably racist but those who oppose flavor 2 aren’t.” as me advocating opposition to flavor 1? I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear. For the record, when I say that those who oppose flavor 1 are probably racist I’m not paying them a compliment. I thought that would be obvious to people who don’t think that conservatives are automatically closet racists. I’ll try to be clearer for you in the future.
“Yes, it is, but just as obnoxious and a lot more covert is invoking personal experiences in order to get everyone to apologize for the way you were treated so as to give you some moral standing. ”
Who asked for an apology about that? Neiwert’s piece pretty much accuses everyone who doesn’t like multiculturalism of being a closet Nazi. I suggested that he might be conflating opposition to two different types of multiculturalism. I provided a quickie sketch of the two types. It was suggested that the second type of multi-culturalism was a myth or fabricated strawman. I suggested that I had experienced it first hand and gave an example of the many I have available. At no point did I ask you to feel sorry for me, the point was brought up only to show that the second type of multiculturalism is something that at least in some circumstances one could oppose without being a racist. I specifically used an example in which I was inappropriately called a racist. And that only came up in response to Neiwert’s over-wrought accusation that those who oppose multi-culturalism are ‘really’ closet Nazis interested in white power. If I am not permitted by you to introduce instances where fighting multi-culturalism might not be the province of closet Nazis than I can’t ever defend against the charge.
liberal japonicus, your comment rises well above mere insult and deserves a better response.
For a quick glimpse of my reasoning, my post “Always and Never” at my own site should be a good introduction. http://assistantvillageidiot.blogspot.com/2006/04/always-and-never.html. In brief summary, any statements such as “Democrats always…” or “Republicans never…” usually fall apart pretty quickly.
Cleek, I have a whole series on Faux Logic that should be helpful.
Back to lj…
I am no longer surprised when liberals are unaware of the violence of their allies. The template conservative mobs are dangerous, liberal protesters are basically peaceful is so ingrained that no amount of contrary information seems to dent it. The evidence cited for this is usually of the nature described here. Lone nutcases. To reverse the case for purpose of illustration, I don’t count the Unabomber and Mumia as examples of liberal violence, however similar their rhetoric might be to more legitimate allies. Wolves don’t hide in wolves’ clothing, they hide in sheep’s clothing.
Also, I work at a psychiatric hospital and have encountered many dangerous individuals with a bewildering array of political, religious, and social ideas fused into worldviews that bear no relation to usual political discourse. The idea that such folk are representative of larger movements is usually a politically convenient one, rather than a clear understanding of their motives. The very fact that they are acting alone or with only one other is significant. They know at some level that they couldn’t persuade others who agree with them to join them in violence.
The inclusion of the killers of James Byrd and Matthew Shepard, or of Rudolph and Kopp are a more emotive connection than a logical one to politically-motivated violence. Well, everyone knows that conservatives don’t like black people/gays/whatever, so when one gets killed, it must be by a conservative. Huh? So if a cop gets killed it must be by a liberal? If a black guy kills a white guy it must be political because 90% of blacks vote Democrat? People quickly make the political connections you made, but I don’t think they can be sustained logically.
For coordinated group violence, there is no consistent counterpart on the right for the long list on the left.
Environmentalist violence:
http://www.zianet.com/wblase/endtimes/terror.htm
http://www.globalterrorism101.com/UTEnvironmentalTerrorism.html
http://prfamerica.org/EarthLiberationFrontNo1onFBIList.html
Antiglobalization violence
http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/9948/features-anderson3.php
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/US/11/30/starbucks.vandals/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-globalization_movement
Union Violence
http://www.nilrr.org/9903a.htm
http://www.nationalreview.com/murdock/murdock060903.asp
http://www.npri.org/issues/issues04/i_b092004.htm
I would add to that my own anecdote of having been threatened outside my place of employment by a union metalworker protester brought up from NY just before the 2004 election. He didn’t think it appropriate that someone publicly disagreed with him.
Election Violence
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Vote2004/story?id=201736
http://www.jmac.net/politics/RIP2004Election.htm
The last category is particularly ironic, as the Democrats have been making accusations of intimidating voters for the last decade. Rumors abound, speeches are made, but when the investigations are over, the physical intimidation is far more often from the Dem side. If you don’t believe that, you should try and make your own collection of accusations that have held up after being looked into. You will find it difficult. Nationwide, I know of one, and I’m not going to help you with that.
I left out coordinated racial violence as too easy to find examples of.
The immediate counter is usually that this violence from the left is mostly vandalism, not so dangerous. The easy answers to that are A) Not always, see above, and B) Vandalism turns into violence against humans far more rapidly than statements do. Violence against objects is in fact a usual step along the way of a threatening person becoming an assaultive person.
The violence against abortion doctors and clinics and the clandestine networks that encourage it are criminal, and those people should be prosecuted fully. I think your information on those networks is well over a decade old at this point. I don’t think you can find much of that that’s recent. Personal information on corporate executives, particularly in the chemical, pharmaceutical, and gentech industries, however, are widely circulated among environmental and animal-rights groups, with clear encouragement to teach them a lesson.
Sebastian wrote–
” You don’t hear explicit dismissal of professions to commit genocide as mere “playing to domestic audiences”? I’ve heard that on this very board. (And if some one could explain to me why I should feel better that politicians in Iran can get lots of hitherto unavailable support by boosting for genocide it would be greatly appreciated because I’m not feeling comforted.)”
I think you might be referring to me. Which is sort of funny, for a number of reasons. First, I was explicitly comparing the Iranian nuclear saber-rattlers to Michael Savage and wondering whether they were genuinely serious or just engaging in very ugly rhetoric. I also wondered whether the Bush Administration was seriously considering the use of nukes. You might just as easily have picked out my multicultural postmodern relativist attitude toward Michael Savage (is he a real genocide supporter or mere windbag who likes to appeal to the pro-genocide supporters in the Bush constituency?), but you focused on the Iranian part of the question. That was very morally relativistic of you.
Second, I suggested that anyone in power who advocates nuclear genocide be declared an outlaw, whether or not they really mean it–presumably yet another example of how postmodern relativism is corrupting the thought of people in this very thread.
Third, the irony of all this is that I agree with you about moral relativism and the idiocy of those leftwing multiculturalists who might actually support it. In my case because I’m a Christian lefty. Incidentally, Chomsky the corrupter of campus youth is in your corner too. He’s always expressed either bewilderment or contempt (actually, contempt thinly disguised as bewilderment) with postmodern rhetoric and moral relativism. There’s a story in a biography of Michael Foucault (“The Passion of Michael Foucault”, I think) about a televised debate Foucault had with Chomsky on exactly this point, with Foucault expressing some really repulsive views in favor of violent revolution and Chomsky looking rather shocked and later saying that he thought Foucault sounded like someone from another planet.
In my own personal experience (I have no objection to SH bringing in his personal experiences with idiot professors), the biggest moral relativists are conservatives, often conservative Christians, and they don’t even know it. I could bore people with several anecdotes of this type–people who rail away against “terrorism” and talk about good vs. evil and when I mention some atrocities the US has supported or committed, they either defend them, deny them, or start talking about mitigating circumstances.
If anyone wants to learn more about undergrad education and its failings, I just learned, to my surprise, that Dadzoy is about to be on CSPAN 2, talking about that very subject…
Actually the the statement I was thinking of when I wrote was dutchmarbel’s
“Ahmadinejad is playing his own domestic political game with lots of chestbeating rhetoric. Do people really believe that he would start firing nucleair weapons (magically appearing a decade before they could make them themselves) at Israel?”
and
“Well I guess if you’re convinced that the official doctrine of the Iranian government is to Nuke Israel At Any Cost Whatsoever then there’s not much to argue about. At least not any more than there’s anything to argue about with Iranians who are convinced that the official doctrine of the US is to Wipe Out Islam At Any Cost Whatsoever.”
by radish.
The second I wasn’t sure of until I try to point out that the evidence for “Nuke Israel” consists of statements from Iranian presidents of Iran while the evidence of “Wipe out Islam” consists of no comparable people (and to further clarify no one in government at all so far as I know). That didn’t go over so well to say the least.
I’m not sure where I might have been thinking of you Donald (my recollection of the last discussion is that your points were mostly confined to thinking that a counter-genocidal MAD wasn’t a fun idea).
Donald Johnson
What you are calling moral relativism is a simple understanding that not all shades of gray are the same. Are you seriously comparing our actions to those of our enemies?
hilzoy, drat — just missed it. Rebroadcast due tomorrow at 8:00p EDT. Thanks for the tip.
ral — I was just thinking of having lunch, and thought: I wonder what’s on CSPAN; maybe some interesting wonky thing about some hitherto unknown subject to watch while I eat my sandwich. Imagine my surprise.
Cleek, I have a whole series on Faux Logic that should be helpful.
fantastic. what ?
Sebastian, since you’ve offered my comment as an example of ‘explicit dismissal of professions to commit genocide as mere “playing to domestic audiences”‘ I’d like to clarify the point that I was trying to make.
We agree — I think — that the risk which Iran poses to Israel is significant, that it has increased substantially in recent years, and that it is potentially but not currently existential in nature. Your position seems to be that Ahemdinejad’s rhetoric is a major, rather than minor, indicator for assessing that risk. My position is that it is no such thing.
In fact, with all due respect, I submit that you are being deliberately presented with a red herring which is strategically calculated to make it seem as though the risk is much higher than what it really is. I submit that the rhetoric in question is in fact a very poor and inaccurate indicator of the actual risk, and that by accepting the emphasis that others (including but not limited to Ahmedinejad himself) are placing on it you have been misled into assessing that risk incorrectly.
This strikes me as an error roughly similar to the one made by Iranians who conclude that the official doctrine of the US is to Wipe Out Islam At Any Cost Whatsoever.
“Ahmadinejad is playing his own domestic political game with lots of chestbeating rhetoric. Do people really believe that he would start firing nucleair weapons (magically appearing a decade before they could make them themselves) at Israel?”
It has nothing to do with multiculteralism to be honest, and it most definately does not mean that I think his statements are ok. At that thread we were talking about how real the threat of Iran was. I do not like your implying that I condone these thoughts or these kind of actions, just because I think they are no indication of an imminent threat.
Elsewhere you asked if someone could explain why calling for genocide would benefit him. It is more about being a strong man when outside threats are developping (imho of course).
Back to multiculturism: I like flavor 1, I do not like flavor 2. Honor killings for example should be radically fought – but in all forms (there are a lot of women in both our countries that do not dare to leave abusive husbands for fear of being murdered).
In the Netherlands however public opinion these days dictates that not shaking hands with someone of the opposite gender for religious reasons should be condemned or even punished. That for me is ridiculous and farfetched.
Female circusmcision is horrible and the practise should be forbidden en punishable, but for me mutilating your childs genitals should be forbidden and punishable no matter what gender the child is. In my moral universe that is much worse than greeting the opposite sex with a respectfull nod or bow instead of with a handshake. The majority of people here disagree though and feel that male circumcision should be seen as a cultural acceptable habit.
AVI wrote–
“Donald Johnson
What you are calling moral relativism is a simple understanding that not all shades of gray are the same. Are you seriously comparing our actions to those of our enemies?”
Yes.
This doesn’t mean that living in a democracy isn’t far superior to living under a dictatorship or sharia law. We aren’t as consistently bad as (some) of our enemies. But it’s just a fact that democracies can be and often are every bit as brutal to non-citizens as dictatorships are. You don’t get a pass to murder someone on the other side of town because you’re a nice guy to your family and friends.
Democracies, meaning the Anglosphere, Japan, and Continental Europe?
I don’t see that any of those nations are comparable to the brutality of the governments of Asian, African, and South American governments. Even at their worst, such as France’s recent brutality in Africa, the quantitative difference is so great as to be a qualitative difference. If you are merely saying that even “kindly” nations sometimes do barbaric things, I will reluctantly agree, wondering what conclusion you wish to draw from that.
I have two children from Romania, and many friends there. More than my own pride of country, it was their scoffing at any suggestion that “oppression” in the West comes remotely close to what they lived, sealed the deal for me. American liberals who sound off there are regarded as persons with sprained ankles lecturing paraplegiacs about disability. The sprained ankle may be real, and it may hurt, but so what?
You don’t get a pass to murder someone on the other side of town because you’re a nice guy to your family and friends.
apparently, you can. i guess it just depends on who you ask.
wasn’t it Jesus who said “The greater wrong palliates the lesser” ?
America: Better Than Ceaucescu.
Well, I suppose that’s an improvement.
Well, back from a weekend of indoctrination fun, made more interesting through the language barrier.
Sebastian,
“Ironically, if you would have said ‘the problem I see is that there are two flavors and I think the second one is extremely problematic’, you probably would have gotten a lot of people to agree with you and perhaps solidify the notion that extreme relativism is a bad thing”
Isn’t that what I said? Or do you think I was arguing that flavor 1 was a bad thing?
When you make statements like this
In my experience very few people adopt strong multiculturalism as a consistent world view. (See my apartheid example above). That doesn’t stop it from being used as a club on other issues
Am I to assume that you are not talking about it being used on the left?
Neiwert’s piece pretty much accuses everyone who doesn’t like multiculturalism of being a closet Nazi. I suggested that he might be conflating opposition to two different types of multiculturalism. I provided a quickie sketch of the two types. It was suggested that the second type of multi-culturalism was a myth or fabricated strawman. I suggested that I had experienced it first hand and gave an example of the many I have available.
And I suggested that you were misreading Niewert and you said that was my point, but not his. If you have such mindreading skills, why do you even bother putting up your opinion, since you seem to know all? Just because you don’t know the word ‘obstensible’ is no reason to take it out on me.
Then you brought up your experience at university. A number of people noted that rather than a true statement about what multiculturalism is, there might have been a number of other reasons behind that. You don’t need to concede anything, but if you simply said ‘I hadn’t considered that as a possiblity, but that’s a fair point’, we might have moved on to something interesting.
If I am not permitted by you to introduce instances where fighting multi-culturalism might not be the province of closet Nazis than I can’t ever defend against the charge.
You know, no one here has claimed that multi-culturalism opposition is solely the province of closet Nazis, except within your tortured reading of Neiwert. But if it is a ‘charge’, it was leveled by someone else at a different blog, so lashing out at us again suggests a level of personal animosity that is unhelpful. In fact, I pointed out that
The type of strong multiculturalism that you seem intent on tarring everyone on this board with is, I would suggest, itself a reaction to multiculturalism rather than a representative. This is because multiculturalism is not an unalloyed good.
When viewed in this way, flavor 2 multiculturalism can be seen in the strong insistence that black children be adopted by black families, the desire to see children marry within their culture (often by arranged marriages) and a wide range of other reactions. If it isn’t apparent to you, I don’t think the people above are ‘closet Nazis’, so what is this ‘defending against a charge’ about?
AVI wrote
your comment rises well above mere insult and deserves a better response.
which I hope is a good thing and not a bad thing. I haven’t had a chance to look at your series, but I will give it some attention when I get home this pm. I take your point that lone nutcases should not be taken as exemplars. However, the topic of this post is someone who I think is should be a lone nutcase, commands an audience of 8 million. How many of those are liberals who are simply listening to get angry at the right, I cannot say, but the fact that we have publishing houses like Regnery and RW talk radio is indicative of something deeper.
There was a similar pattern of incidents as you describe in the last paroxysm of left wing energy, which was the anarchist movement. When viewed historically, people and groups who want to change society have always attracted those more enamored of the aspect of tearing down rather than of building up. The state’s reaction to this is to try and demonize those asking for change, which is why anarchist is now a term of disapprobation. However, the ‘conservative’ movement has also made a mission of ‘changing’ society, which is why there has been a strain of libertarianism to much conservative action. And to that call of changing society (be it by changing it or trying to forcibly make it remain in the status quo) there are people who are answering that call. The question is who has more power, the people fighting against the system or the people who are subtly supported by the system?
AVI, maybe you misunderstand me. I’m not claiming that Western democracies are as brutal as dictatorships to their own citizens and I thought I was clear about that, but maybe not. But democracies do target civilians in war and sometimes peace, they launch wars preemptively, they support terrorism of both the state and nonstate variety, up to and including genocide, and they support torturers and sometimes practice it. I don’t think your Romanian friends would be quite so sure of themselves if they faced someone who had been in one of America’s torture centers. and Romania itself, horrific as it was under communism, was no worse than some of the governments that were enthusiastically supported by the US. The external behavior of the US in the Cold War was often (not always) as brutal as that of the Soviet Union and unfortunately this didn’t stop with the end of the Cold War.
Regarding your Romanian friends, I get the impression that victims of any type of severe oppression sometimes regard their story as much worse than anyone else’s. That is understandable, but it is still a very dangerous attitude. Many years ago I was in an Amnesty International group which had a Palestinian woman as a guest speaker. She spent her time describing the brutal oppression and atrocities of the Israelis. One member of our group asked in a very agitated voice at the end “What about Palestinian atrocities towards Israelis? You didn’t say anything about that.” She replied
“Oh, nobody wants to listen to those old stories.” In the words of your friends, I suppose she’d regard a terrorist attack on Israelis as a sprained ankle compared to what her people had suffered.
“And I suggested that you were misreading Niewert and you said that was my point, but not his. If you have such mindreading skills, why do you even bother putting up your opinion, since you seem to know all? Just because you don’t know the word ‘obstensible’ is no reason to take it out on me.”
Neiwert has a line for you though.
“These remarks do not come to argue, but to silence. Their intent is not to advance the debate by considering points on their merits, but by smearing those who raise them….”
But in the interest of argument please reread his post.
You claim his use of obstensible is meant to limit it. I claim it is part of his project of ‘revealing’ that most conservatives are actually Nazis. Which fits the evidence? He chooses as his example someone who has suggested that the South should have won the civil war. He goes on and on about Lind and his beliefs (spending special time on peculiar historical inaccuracies about the early history of the word though he ignores the recent history of the word) waves his hands and reveals that other conservatives don’t like multiculturalism either. (He doesn’t show that they agree with Lind. He doesn’t show they have the same problems with it as Lind. He doesn’t examine whether or not they have other problems with it.”
His rhetorical game in that post is exactly what hilzoy complained about in her “What is this Left” post–taking extreme examples like Churchill and Chomsky and pretending that they are representative of the argument.
That is post would be just like me going on and on with some of Chomsky’s garbage on how markets require conquest and then saying that liberals have problems with markets too. I could then chart the ‘transmission’ of extremist views via Chomsky into the ‘better hidden’ or ‘dressed up’ versions that are used by obstensible liberals to hide their extremist views (note here that just as with Neiwert, ‘obstensible’ means “appearing to be” but with an accusation bundled along.)
“These remarks do not come to argue, but to silence. Their intent is not to advance the debate by considering points on their merits, but by smearing those who raise them….”
Whose argument? Brian O’Connell’s? William Lind’s? Or are you suggesting that I am trying to silence you? If you feel the latter is the case, I am remarkably unsuccessful.
I acknowledge that it is unfair to demand a definition of multiculturalism from you and then pick at it without offering my own, and my apologies for not stepping back at that point and presenting it. However, I have done so over at HoCB. I promise that the first comment there is not mine.
Neiwert closes with the following (emphasis mine)
No one minds a serious critique of the errors of multiculturalism. But O’Connell’s polemic was anything but — rife with mischaracterizations of the actual tenets, as well as the history of, multiculturalism, and built around a thesis that is clear in its intent: to prove that the very nature of multiculturalism is anti-American. He wasn’t pointing out an error; he was painting liberals as unpatriotic sympathizers with the enemy. Especially when delivered in the context of a critique of the antiwar movement, the effect is clearly part of a worrisome trend in the national debate.
That you are not worried about the trend is your own choice. But that is a third person singular, so do not twist Neiwert to create some sort of cult of victimization for poor conservatives like yourself.
And if you would like to discuss how the ideas of Chomsky are ‘transmitted’ to the left (I would particularly be interested in how Chomsky’s distaste for deconstructionism and moral relativism has infected the left and ‘the entire moral framework of society’, as you put it) I would be interested to read it, but I hope you could refer to actual points made by Chomsky. That Chomsky doesn’t think much of free markets is no surprise, but if you want to claim that he is the philosophical father for resistance to free markets and the liberals have unknowingly been taken in by this, I hope you will humor me and make it much more clear about the transmission path.
I also note with profound embarassment that I continue to spell ‘ostensible’ as ‘obstensible’, for which there is no excuse. Would that I be as successful in transmitting a more appropriate understanding of multiculturalism to you.
I don’t think one has to call everyone a Nazi to note that the center of gravity on the Republican side has drifted towards the South and towards intolerance of various kinds, in the past several years. It’s not a constant movement; one can compare, for example, Pat Buchanan’s speech at the ’92 convention with Bob Dole’s ‘there’s the door’ moment in ’96. But the trend from 1964 to the present is fairly clear. That this is a source of considerable angst among many Republicans is not in question, what is open to debate is whether the drift is too much for people to stay in the party. Obviously everyone has their own exit point, and plenty of us have been wrong for a decade and more about where the exit point would end up being for a whole lot of Republicans we thought we knew.
Is there a corresponding trend towards anger in the Dem side? I’m not seeing it. One can go on at length about Moore being a guest in ’04, but the fact is that Dems deliberately chose a nominee who didn’t make anger the centerpiece over the one who seemingly would have. (A source of some anger amongst some Dems and amongst a great many to the left of Dems).
There’s plenty of alarm on the Dem side, but that’s pretty different from anger.
I’d say that Democrats have become more angry, but they’ve had more to be angry about. I don’t see evidence that it’s become a habit of mind that’s broken free of whatever provocation that inspired it. For the Republican figures I can’t stand, I can tell you specific actions of theirs that led to my not being able to stand him. On the other side, there seems to be a hatred of liberals because we’re liberals, nothing more.
These are overgeneralizations, obviously–you could certainly find counter-examples.
I’m more alarmed than angry these days. (Not that I can’t still summon a giant chip on my shoulder at times, but I used to be worse–I think I don’t feel quite as powerless to do anything as I used to).
The recent “throw Dana Priest in jail” meme, combined with the espionage act prosecutions, is freaking me out. (I don’t think the administration would actually risk prosecuting Priest, I think it would blow up in their face if they tried–but the question is always: if this is what they’re like now, what will they do if there’s another attack?)
“I’m more alarmed than angry.”
It’s not the anger of the far Right that bothers me, it is the inexorably organized and demagogic transmission of it into the bloodstream of the body politic that makes me …..
…..alarmingly angry…. says my wife.
It is true that much of the world has it worse than we do. As Mel Brooks pointed out:
A stranger walking down the street minding his own business falls down a manhole .. that’s hilarious. I get home and discover I have a hangnail .. that’s a tragedy.
Donald Johnson
…one of America’s torture centers…
I think you gave away the game right there. I am guessing you mean, what, Guantanamo? If you are making that as a serious comparison, I fear we cannot have a discussion. That’s simple madness. If you are referencing Abu Ghraib, I will describe it as a one-off event, with 50% of the incidents confined to a single 24 hour period, duly investigated and punished by the military (I admit, not entirely satisfactorily). There is simply no sense of proportion in your comments. What governments were you thinking of that were equivalent to the Soviet circle, that we “supported?” Somoza? The Shah? Brutal, but not remotely comparable. You are setting up a standard under which any evil invalidates the entire enterprise. You protest that you are doing no such thing, then draw equivalences that say precisely that. Your passing references to preemptive war, terrorism against civilians, etc. suggest the same. Evil acts are evil acts, and deserve punishment. But to suggest that there is an equivalence can only come from focussing on our own ills and downplaying that of our enemies. It is a brutal world, and always has been. Even in the West we are barely escaping from it.
It is an imperfect world, and will always be so. In most countries, our alliances with one faction or another will be temporary, for the good reason that there are no excellent choices. But to make no choices, to refrain from dirtying our hands by association with Bad People, is often to invite worse evils.
There is always a moral danger in this, for when we ally with the Russians against the Nazis, or Chiang against Mao, we participate in some way in their evil. But those are the choices of reality. It would be nice if battles were always against Sauron or the Empire, but we are seldom so fortunate.
I was a 60’s and 70’s socialist, and understand the desire for a kind of purity from one’s own people. We should certainly press for this, and clean our own house. But if the WOT is one balance a good thing, it remains a good thing even if we do it badly.
lj – thank you for your reply.
I think we come in for sliding definitions of hate and anger. Perhaps that is inevitable in humankind. I haven’t listened to Savage, but taking the statement above as representative, I would submit that it is angry, and warlike, and unwise, but still draw a large distinction between anger against enemies and anger against each other. The bumper sticker of one of my co-workers state “Support Bush” with a noose beside it. Is that not hate speech of a frightening order? Clinton expressly accused talk radio of creating a climate of hatred that lead to Oklahoma City. Isn’t this deeply irresponsible? (I know several people here will say “No, because it’s TRUE!” but I’m trying to address the rational people here.) The murder fantasies of the left keep rising to the fore. Democrats in FL declare Rumsfeld should be shot. Baldwin (?) suggests we should kill Henry Hyde and his family with bats. Moveon expressly compares Bush to Hitler, Gore calls the Republicans brownshirts. Bill Moyers thinks the GOP would stage a coup if Kerry had won. His guest believes we should move preemptively against that.
Alexander Cockburn thinks we should drop a tactical nuke on the Cuban section of Miami. Craig Kilborn puts a clip of Bush on CBS with the caption “snipers wanted.” Totenberg wants Jesse Helms or his grandchildren to get AIDS. I can multiply examples almost endlessly. I really don’t get how these things can go by daily without liberals perking up and thinking, “y’know, this has gotten out of hand.”
An interesting set of anecdotes. I work in a psychiatric hospital, and the clinical staff tend to be very liberal. When Hinckley shot Reagan, jokes abounded, and people openly said it would be a good idea. When we had a patient in the 90’s who had made threatening statements about Clinton (for personal and delusional, not political reasons), everyone was very serious and spoke in hushed tones, and wondered if the Radical Right had brought us to such a pass. But when a woman mistakenly ran her car onto the runway at Bush’s plane a few years ago, it was all laughs and smiles again, with people chuckling that it was too bad she hadn’t succeeded.
There is no equivalent of that on Limbaugh. There is no equal to that at National Review, or the New Criterion, or the Washington Times. Sean Hannity is an angry guy, and I can’t listen to him for more than 30 seconds, but he never says anything remotely like this. The accusations of domestic hate speech by the Right most frequently turn out to be accusations that the Left is Unamerican or hates America. People hated Clinton, but no one laughed about killing him. No one is writing how funny it would be if Barbara Boxer got raped, or Michael Moore got beat up.
Tad Rall issued the challenge for the Right to prove there was more hate speech from the Left. He concluded there was, er, probably more from the Right, but, maybe not.
Most of the sense of dangerousness that the left picks up from conservatives comes from dark interpretations that they just know are true. Maybe they’re projections.
AVI:
If you are saying that there’s no torture in Guantanamo, I have to ask: how do you know?
I don’t think anyone (other than the cartoon left) is saying that we shouldn’t have a military response, of some kind, to AQ, or that our own flaws prevent us from having the moral standing to defend ourselves. What I hear over and over from folks on the right is that our flaws are excused because the other guys are worse. Sure they’re worse. What of it? Are we meeting our own standards the best we can? I don’t think so, and I don’t think that makes me a raving lunatic.
Tim McVeigh may have been a lunatic, but you shouldn’t ignore the effect that the social climate on the right had on him and the people he was hanging with. He deliberately misconstrued what happened at Waco — on whose anniversary he attacked — and he was far from alone in that.
I think your Moveon/Hitler thing might be a mischaracterization — if you’re referring to the ad that was entered in a contest, and not created by anyone at Moveon.
I’d like to see the context for your claim about Gore.
I don’t care at all about Cockburn or Baldwin. They are not representative of anything, and in the latter case, no one is paying any attention to the guy because of his politics. His ‘talent’ lies in a completely different field.
Lastly, about Abu Ghraib: you say that 50% of the incidents were confined to a single day. I’ll agree (though I don’t know, actually) that 50% of the acts charged happened on a single day. There’s a huge space between conduct that happens, and what gets prosecuted. I very rarely see speeders pulled over on the interstate nearest my house, although the flow of traffic is always well above the speed limit. Sometimes, though, people do get tickets. It would be ridiculous to claim that if only 1% of people driving on I-270 on any given day get tickets that 99% of drivers must be complying with the law.
CharleyCarp, I think Assistant Village Idiot is referring to one line in this speech by Al Gore, delivered June 24, 2004 at Georgetown University Law Center.
(I’m trusting truthout.org on the transcript.)
AVI,
thanks for your reply and your time. You give a lot of examples, but I could give a lot of examples from the period that I mentioned. We have a president assassinated (by a man with the finger busting name of Leon Czolgosz), accusations of bombs being planted, events such as the Haymarket ‘riot’. The Economist give a list that similarly assumes that an organized movement was responsible for all of the violence, which I don’t think was necessarily the case. But my point is not that these acts do not exist, but that they tend to arise when passions flair. Yet, in regards to the current situation, the party in power is arguably appealing to a sense of outrage within its own base. That is, from my perspective, new and frightening. I don’t see how you can view the attack on illegal immigrants in any other way. Some have argued that it is protection of our borders, which conflates illegal immigrants who come to work in the US with terrorists who come to try and disrupt the US. Similarly with abortion or the Schiavo mess. The war in Iraq seems to meld a ‘liberal’ (in the sense of attacking the status quo) rationale to this, but does so not in a way that now argues that we have to somehow suppress Islam because it is an inevitable enemy to our way of life, which may come as news to countries like Turkey.
I don’t want to dismiss your personal anecdotes, but do you seriously think a lunatic asylum is a fair mirror of current society? If you seriously say yes, then you can’t tell me that somehow, one wing of the electorate is somehow more responsible for this than the other. And I would argue that given the asymmetry of power and position, it is the party in power that holds the responsibility for keeping things off the boil. That is, I think, good governance. However, you have a very dangerous situation where the party in power is, if polls are to be believed, in the minority in terms of approval rating, so I think you see this urge to view themselves as an embattled minority. This is why you see DeLay being referred to as some sort of Christ like figure, doing his best work after being crucified and how liberal ideas (a word which used to me the ne plus ultra of Western values and norms) now claimed to be destroying ‘the entire moral framework of society’.
Hilzoy once pointed out something to the effect that the ‘liberals’ she knows tend to be more ‘conservative’ in that they often engage in activities that are past looking. I would argue that you are going to meet more liberals at a whole range of activities designed to preserve ideas and cultural traditions. People working on public libraries, symphonies, taking part in various ‘heritage’ activities, are, in my experience, more likely to have liberal tendencies rather than conservative ones. That is, at least in my opinion, because the true heart of a conservative agenda should be to preserve what is best and convince others that it should be preserved rather than try and impose a rigidity on what should be preserved.
I certainly admit that these are all opinions and I understand if you don’t share them, but providing a grocery list of incidents ‘from the left’, especially after noting earlier that
The idea that such folk are representative of larger movements is usually a politically convenient one, rather than a clear understanding of their motives. The very fact that they are acting alone or with only one other is significant. They know at some level that they couldn’t persuade others who agree with them to join them in violence.
seems to be contradictory. Also, if we accept that when people are placed in a mob/mass demonstration situation, restraints also disappear, then the whole level of ‘street’ incidents doesn’t really illuminate what is going on here, so you are right to object to Shepard and Byrd. However, it makes it more imperative to analyse the rhetoric being used and identify what is happening on that level. I would suggest that much effort is being placed in arguing that the left is ‘angry’, so that when acts do take place, they can be highlighted as the natural progression when it is, as you suggest, misleading to do so.
Apologies for the length and thank you again for taking the time to participate.
I would submit that it is angry, and warlike, and unwise, but still draw a large distinction between anger against enemies and anger against each other.
Are you suggesting that the anger of people like Limbaugh and Coulter is not directed against Americans who disagree with them politically? That is absurd.
Oh, and not to speak for anyone else, but it seems to me that ‘torture centers’ most likely is meant to refer to whatever hellhole KSM is currently in. And to the “Salt Pit,” near the Kabul airport.
If this is it
you have some reading comprehension issues, AVI. He’s not calling “the Republicans” brownshirts, but using the term to describe a particular group of people based on specific conduct. As to which I’m happy to say ‘if the shoe fits . . .”
OT to site admins:
Lily has for the past few days been getting a error message when attempting to post, worries she may have been banned, and has emailed the kitty for clarification or help to no response. Could the kitty help her out?
Jackmormon: thanks.
Lily: can you post now? (If this happens again, you can email me directly; my email is real.)
AVI, there are others here who know much more about the details of what our government has done lately on the torture front, so I’ll let them take you on if any of them wants to bother. I in turn can’t take you seriously if you don’t see the moral equivalence of some American allies with those in the Soviet bloc. El Salvador–75,000 dead, the vast majority murdered in sadistic fashion by the security forces. Guatemala–genocide committed by the army against the Mayans, with Reagan defending the very man (Rios Montt) most responsible for the killing. Somoza killed tens of thousands of his own people trying to stay in power in the final years. Indonesia–genocide in East Timor and an earlier, larger mass scale killing in Indonesia proper, both with American support. Angola–the US supported Savimbi and UNITA. Unita killed untold hundreds of thousands and according to the NYT, Savimbi personally beat children to death on one occasion. Mozambique–here the Reagan Administration showed uncharacteristic good sense in not supporting Renamo, but a great many mainstream Republicans wanted him to do so. When you hear “Renamo”, you should think “African Khmer Rouge” and you won’t be far off. Mobutu–one of the most corrupt worthless tyrants of the 20th century and yes, our ally.
I didn’t even mention Vietnam or some of what the US and its ally did in Korea in what I agree was a just war. (Just wars can be fought unjustly.) It’s sheer nonsense statistically and morally to claim that there weren’t massive atrocities committed on both sides during the Cold War and it’s also wrong to say that our atrocities were necessary to win the Cold War. If anything, they probably dragged it out longer, as communist ideology seems more plausible to people when they are being murdered or oppressed in the name of anticommunism.
I’ve ranted in some earlier comment section about the use of our alliance with Stalin against Hitler as a standard analogy justifying the support of some bad guy because he’s the lesser of two evils and we live in a dangerous world and so forth. There really wasn’t a choice in WWII. We couldn’t have defeated Hitler without the help of the USSR. That doesn’t mean we should have gven diplomatic support and supplied weapons to any monster when it seems convenient. The burden of proof should fall entirely on the shoulders of the those who say we should ally ourselves with some given mass murderer and you can’t meet that burden by trotting out the Hitler vs. Stalin analogy. Every case has to be argued separately. Who knows? If Reagan hadn’t warmly embraced Rios Montt after his army had burned 400 Mayan villages and crucified Indian babies on stakes, the Soviet Empire might not have collapsed. But I’d like proof. I have to say it seems sort of implausible to me that the murder of tens of thousands of Mayans in 1982 is what made the difference, but I guess I’m just too caught up in my simple-minded notions of moral equivalence to understand the deeper needs of statecraft.
On the hate speech issue, I think there’s a difference between calling your political opponents bad names and wishing for a group of foreigners to be slaughtered. Both lefties and righties have been calling each other scum for several years now and whatever one might think about this , it’s not likely to lead to violence unless someone is mentally unstable. I assume most of us have friends and family or at least acquaintances with very different political views–when I’m frothing at the mouth over some issue I often have a friend in mind who said something on that issue that I thought was really stupid. This keeps me from wanting to send all my opponents to the gulag forthwith. It’s a little different when people talk about killing the foreign devils, because I think it’s psychologically a lot easier to go from talk to supporting action in that case, foreign devils, being, well, foreign and devilish and therefore more deserving of anything we might care to drop on them.
One obvious parallel to the “multiculturalism” debate here ought to be raised, even though I’m not sure where (or how far) it leads.
There are certainly respectable intellectual (philosophical, historical) arguments for the doctrine of “states’ rights” in the USA. As I recall the 1950s and 1960s, however, one could reasonably conclude that anyone who was publicly arguing for states’ rights was either a segregationist or carrying water for segregationists. That was the political point of the whole discourse; to pretend otherwise at the time was to be faux naif.
Multiculturalism, ill-defined as it is, might equally well, in some of its forms, be a target for principled, apolitical opposition. Why is therefore, that I have the suspicion that the majority of people who publicly denounce multiculturalism do so because they oppose minorities – or don’t mind helping out those who do oppose minorities? When public officials lash out at “multiculturalism,” is it because they fear that it is philosophically equivalent to moral relativism, as suggested upstream? Or is it because they think everyone ought to speak English – not quite the same philosophical position?
I don’t know whether this is Dave Neiwert’s point of comparison, so take it as mine. When I hear people trashing “multiculturalism,” I thank my stars that I am a US-born white male heterosexual. And I pity everyone who is not: they’re in for a bumpy ride.
Fair enough. So because you aren’t actually acquainted with anyone who was tortured, or who had family members tortured or murdered by Savak or the contras or any other US clients, whereas you are acquainted with people who suffered (in what way, one wonders) under Ceauşescu, it stands to reason that the former atrocities must have been trivial compared to the latter? Duly noted.
This reminds me a little bit of your hilariously clueless comment about “continental europe” a little earlier. If you stop and think very very hard you’ll realize that you yourself occasionally use one particular Continental European democratic government as a symbolic reference standard for 20th century atrocity. I’m assuming here that you deliberately excluded Eastern Europe and therefore overlooked only one example.
Perfectly reasonable. So when left wing culture was authoritarian you favored that, and now that right wing culture is authoritarian you support it in turn? Duly noted. BTW how do your Romanian friends feel about your history as a commie symp?
Got it. So not only do the ends justify the means, but the ends which were originally sought don’t even have to be acheived in order to justify the means? Duly noted.
Now wait a minute. You’re claiming that a coworker of yours has a bumper sticker on their car which threatens the President? Absent some supporting evidence beside your say-so I am forced to conclude that you’re just flat out
embellishingfabricatinglying, because the chances of that being the case without an almost-immediate visit from the Secret Service strike me as near zero.Post a picture or provide some additional detail or at absolute minimum a link to a place where one can purchase such bumper stickers. In fact, since your colleague is driving around in public with this thing anyway I’m sure they won’t mind if you explain where people can go to get a look at it and verify it for themselves.
Indeed, and no doubt you can call on spirits from the vasty deep as well. But can you provide them with the citations they demand when they do come? Having raised the devil can you shame him?
If I thought it would do any good to come up with examples (with citations, in case any spirits from the vasty deep show up) I would spend the time necessary to do so, but being familiar with the work of Leon Festinger I know better than to bother. You should read him, AVI. “Projection” is so yesterday. “Cognitive dissonance” is the Next Big Thing.
Maybe so, AVI, maybe so. Hey, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean everybody isn’t out to get you 😉
folks,
with all due respect, I think you are jumping on AVI a bit much, especially since he’s new round here. Not simply for the conservative voice, but the life history (working in a psychiatric hospital is something that it would be nice to know about from a distance) involved has me suggest that y’all chill just a bit.
radish: Now wait a minute. You’re claiming that a coworker of yours has a bumper sticker on their car which threatens the President? Absent some supporting evidence beside your say-so I am forced to conclude that you’re just flat out
embellishing fabricatinglying, because the chances of that being the case without an almost-immediate visit from the Secret Service strike me as near zero.I think it’s a bit early to be leveling accusations of lying. That said, the only other mention I’ve found of this bumper sticker so far (in an admittedly quick search) is AVI telling the same story in a comment on Jane Galt’s blog.
I can multiply examples almost endlessly.
Indeed, and no doubt you can call on spirits from the vasty deep as well. But can you provide them with the citations they demand when they do come?
Well done, radish.
AVI is providing lots of examples of individuals in his vicinity doing hateful things. This is not compelling evidence that the left or liberals are fanning hatefulness into our civic discourse. After all, in a different neighborhood or job setting, a liberal could just as easily come up with as many examples of conservatives saying awful things. The original post was about the use of the mass media by some conservative pundits or spokespeople, with the appearent support of many conservatives in their huge audiences, to say things which promoted violence. That point stands unrefuted; there is no liberal equivalent of Coutler, Malkin, or Limbaugh either in audience size, consistant pattern of threatening talk, or support from party leadership as evidenced by invitations to seak at party events.
I think the case has been made on this thread that , while Savage has lots of listeners, no direct connection exists between him and Republican party as does between Coulter and the party.
Lastly, AVI is mistaken about the Hitler ad. Moveon solicited ads for a contest. The Hitler ad was submitted and posted along with every other entry, prior to any kind of evaluation or endorsement by Moveon. When the ad was brought to the managers’ attention, it was removed. It was never part of the actual contest.
People hated Clinton, but no one laughed about killing him.
“Mr. Clinton better watch out if he comes down here. He’d better have a bodyguard.”
–Jesse Helms, 11/23/94
” Chelsea is a Clinton. She bears the taint; and though not prosecutable in law, in custom and nature the taint cannot be ignored. All the great despotisms of the past — I’m not arguing for despotism as a principle, but they sure knew how to deal with potential trouble — recognized that the families of objectionable citizens were a continuing threat. In Stalin’s penal code it was a crime to be the wife or child of an “enemy of the people”. The Nazis used the same principle, which they called Sippenhaft, “clan liability”.”
–John Derbyshire, National Review Online, 2/15/01
Glenn Greenwald’s current post is on this subject and quite good.
Wow and double wow. Where to start?
The social worker with the bumper sticker in question lives in Bedford NH and works in Concord, NH, NHH-APS grounds. I’m not allowed to bring cameras on grounds because of confidentiality, but I may sneak one. So someone seriously thinks I’mn lying about that?
The information about the “lunatic asylum” was about what the staff – the people with the advanced degrees – found humorous. Read louder, okay? And find a better term than lunatic asylum.
Charley, you wonder why I claim there is no torture at Guantanamo, but offer that there is torture at two locales you know nothing about. I would submit the independent observers and the opposition party that visited Guantanamo as my witnesses. Who are yours, who know that torture is happening wherever KSM is?
I notice that my links to actual violence — such as shooting up a Republican headquarters, remain unaddressed. There is also a sliding scale for “anger.” I am not criticising anger, which can have many causes and expressions, I am criticising violence and incitement to violence. Limbaugh keeps coming up. Because he is angry at liberals, you make the leap that he encourages violence. Yet examples of actual violence I reference are not taken as incitements to further violence. Lily uses the word “threatening.” Give examples of Rush being threatening. My examples of being not only threatening, but destructive, remain above.
The Central American nations mentioned – a collection of arguments.
1. Precisely why George Bush has said we will no longer promote stability at the expense of freedom. Supporting the lesser of two evils has partly worked, but brings long term difficulties.
2. The actions of the opposition against the people – the Mosquito Indians, for a particularly brutal example – is left out in the tally. The death figures sometimes includes death from all sides. I agree that the choice between supporting Somoza and Sandinistas is a miserable choice. The argument given then was that we had to, because the Soviets were arming one side. After the fall of the USSR, it looks like that proved true, didn’t it? We are little involved there now that there is not another superpower destabilizing the area.
3. In numbers, there is no comparison in Cold War misery. Communist nations killed 100 – 200,000,000 in the 20th C, half of which were their own, and 90% of the rest lived in poverty. If you want to make some comparison on a more theoretical basis, then make a more sophisticated argument. With numbers, more than two orders of magnitude should be sufficient to cease discussion.
4. Where the US has been involved, those countries go on to make their own decisions, including electing governments we don’t like, if they choose. Despite claims of American imperialism, those nations vote against us at the UN, make trade agreements we don’t like, and have foreign policies that are sometimes at odds with ours. Funny.
The Hitler and moveon video. It was on the site. Someone had to load it on there. It was when the blogosphere complained (including, thank you, the left blogosphere) that it was removed.
As to Gore and the brownshirts comments — Yeah, that’s a huge difference. He didn’t call the Republicans that, he called their supporters that.
Uncle Kvetch — perfect. You left out the very next sentence of Derbyshire’s quote. I recommend the entire article to the readers, to see if it suggests violence. And Helm’s quote was not a threat of violence, but an admonition that there were people who might do it. How does that differ from the comments of Sens. Kennedy and Boxer about Bush?
I point out an irony here. Irony is seldom proof of anything, but it is always interesting. The accusation has been repeatedly made here that conservatives do not acknowledge any evils done by America, but rather make excuses or dismiss them. Tangentially, I think that is a myth – I think conservatives make the acknowledgement often, but keep a sense of proportion.
But if people here are so offended by that supposed lack of acknowledgement, why are you finding it so difficult to acknowledge my examples here of you doing the same thing? Rigid black-and-white thinking is usually the mark of the person scoring low on the Aware-o-meter.
I would submit the independent observers and the opposition party that visited Guantanamo as my witnesses.
To whom are you referring? The ICRC which has an explicit agreement with the government not to reveal publicly anything it sees at Guantanamo (and a longstanding policy of confidentiality to governments)? Or someone else who went (eg Sen Kennedy)and was not allowed to speak to the prisoners?
The best way to find that no crimes are committed is to make sure the victims can’t be heard. You can send prisoners to solitary for trying to communicate with Kennedy. You can classify everything that goes on and prosecute anyone who leaks it. You can control access so that no journalist ever sees a prisoner (like, say, closing off all movement in the prison camp for 3 hours while journalists are shown the ‘show cell’ at Camp Echo, even if this means that lawyers with an appointment to visit a client have to wait that long — see, they have to make very sure that no journalist catches a glimpse of a prisoner, so any time a camera is in the area, no prisoners can be moved from one cell/camp to another).
If you don’t know about the Salt Pit it’s because you don’t want to know. When you say that I’m talking about something I don’t know about — well, I guess you wouldn’t have any basis for that claim either. As for KSM, I don’t know what you think has happened to him: I think the various reports are pretty reliable on this point.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the US is uniquely evil, that rightwingers are slime, that AQ deserves to win, or anything remotely like any of that. I am saying that some very serious mistakes have been made with respect to prisoner treatment, that they are continuing to be made (in some senses getting worse), and that the long term harm from these mistakes vastly outweighs whatever short-term gain, if any, the treatment might have provided.
All the facts about this stuff are going to come out. It’s going to turn out to have been a lot worse than you think. I kind of feel sorry for all the people that have put their trust in the government with respect to this policy — many just can’t believe that the bad stuff could be true. You’ll find out.
I thought you’d trot out the 100 million figure, AVI. I accept it, give or take a factor of two. A very large number of those deaths were deaths from horrific communist economic policies (most notably, the Great Leap Forward). And if you count those, then one could make a strong case that economic policies pushed by the US have also caused countless millions or tens of millions of deaths. There’s a double standard here. How many people died in Zaire under Mobutu from malnutrition? God knows, but Jonathan Kwitney provided an estimate in “Endless Enemies”–over one third of the population. Peter Berger made this point in his book “Pyramids of Sacrifice” many years ago–economic policies which hurt the poorest people kill in numbers that dwarf the ones taken by violence. BTW, I don’t give all the blame for these deaths on the US, of course. Just some of them. But then, it’s sort of silly to look at the entire history of communism and use its total death toll as an excuse for US policies, as though deaths under Stalin and Mao (the overwhelming majority of those 100 million) are somehow supposed to balance off against the millions of people killed directly by US foreign policy.
If one restricts the death toll to those killed by violence, the numbers on both sides go down and again, but again they are comparable. The US killed 2-4 million in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, and at least hundreds of thousands and perhaps as many as 2 million civilians in Korea and if I went around totalling violent deaths in various countries from the Cold War that occurred with our blessing, you are safely in Black Book of Communism territory. Your two orders of magnitude difference is a fantasy, though having read Commentary in my misspent youth, I’m aware of that sort of argument.
Incidentally, the Sandinistas were brutal to the Miskito Indians in Nicaragua, but nowhere near as brutal in terms of numbers killed as America’s allies in that region. But anyway, I’m not disputing the overall brutality of communism.
As for what we do now in the post Cold War era, as it happens we continue to intervene in Colombia in ways that probably aren’t helpful and it’s probably the Mideast problems that keep us from being more intrusive in Venezuela, apart from the possible support for the failed coup a few years ago. Stephen Kinzer has just come out with a book on the history of US overthrows of various governments over the past century. It’s a pattern that predates and postdates the Soviet era. We always seem to come up with some reason for doing it. Clinton continued to supply weapons to Turkey in the mid 90’s, knowing they would be used to kill Kurds, so there was apparently a felt need to continue that particular pattern of behavior even after the collapse of the USSR.
BTW, I for one have no problem accepting that both sides of the domestic political debate use hate-filled rhetoric from time to time. I could give examples I’ve heard from friends and acquaintances on both sides. I think on the national level Limbaugh and company far outweigh whoever their leftwing equivalents might be. I couldn’t care less about most of this, except for advocacy of genocide (which I’ve heard personally, from the right of course). That’s worrisome because it suggests the sort of support Bush might get if he does decide to use nukes. But it doesn’t matter to me that lefties are called traitors or nitwits by people like Coulter and Limbaugh. What annoys me is that we hear so much about the “angry left”, with no acknowledgement of the perfectly legitimate reasons for the outrage. It’s a way of dismissing the issues.
AVI: I would pay attention to this statement by CharleyCarp: “When you say that I’m talking about something I don’t know about — well, I guess you wouldn’t have any basis for that claim either.”
Personally, I don’t doubt that there are idiots on all sides of any political spectrum. For that reason, I don’t doubt your claim about the bumper sticker, or about your conversations. That’s one reason I stick to people who have some sort of following: because I assume that for any reasonably large group of people (“liberals”, “conservatives”) there will be some number of bozos among them.
I also have no real desire to get into comparative badness. I take it for granted that we are better than lots of people; I’m interested not in showing that we are e.g. better than Saddam, Or Osama bin Laden, or Pol Pot or Mao, which I have never doubted, but that we live up to the ideals of our nation. Here’s the best explanation I can give of why.
Let me first express gratitude that some are acknowledging that this is a discussion of degree and net good, rather than a black/white discussion. That is not always the case.
Charley, I know you expect to be believed on the basis of your experience, but that is precisely why I don’t. I have spent years listening to patient advocate attorneys making things sound like something they are not, and accepting the testimony of personality disordered people with considerable agenda over the explanations of staff.
That is not to say that there are never abuses – of course there are – but I also know how things can be made to look when an attorney can choose carefully what he wants to reveal, having been in conference or on the stand numerous times for exactly that. Your assessment may indeed prove out to be true. But an advocate attorney is simply the least unbiased person in the picture.
Some of them are friends of mine, and you may be a fine fellow, with whom I would agree on many things. But what to you is pulling rank is in my mind a serious undermining of your case. Not because you (singular) would be dishonest, but because every paranoid interpretation would appeal to you (plural) as plausible. If I seem heated on this point, it is because I find that advocate attorneys investigating the hospital create policies that kill people, but congratulate themselves on the results. This is not to say that they have done no good or do not mean well. But their idea of the holiness of their cause is just flippin’ dangerous. I don’t see a compelling reason why Gitmo counselors would be cut from different cloth. I wish there were some way I could make that non-personal, but as I don’t know you I can’t move it either way.
At a minimum, are the conditions at Gitmo worse than in an average American prison? I would doubt that. If that is so, then why the attention on the one if not for political reasons, rather than social justice?
All that said, yes, it may well be that we are doing terrible things. But I have had a wait-and-see attitude on a number of things about the Bush administration, from Joe Wilson to WMD, and the track record when the information trickles out has been exceptionally good. I’ll risk it.
Donald Johnson
I think equating forced starvation, as in the Ukraine, with economic policies is a stretch. The lot of nearly all mankind until 1700 was starvation at some part of the year. What you are seeing as the cause, I am contending is the only known escape. Economic policy is complicated, with mixed results and unexpected results, and it is usually impossible to trace back even horrible results to a policy, independent of the corrupt administrators, underminings, and information dispersal. Forced starvation is pretty straightforward, and the attribution is usually clear. Bringing in the example of Zaire, I wish anyone knew what to do with sub-saharan Africa. God, I wish I knew what would work. Allowing GM foods and eliminating tariffs to the EU and the US is said to have potential for a huge difference, and I suspect it’s true. It is a tragedy that we will not do it.
Interesting fact. Famine does not occur in places with a free press. Some pretty severe hardship has occurred when naturaol disaster strikes an already impovershed area. But not famine. Those have to be directed by governments.
I am criticising violence and incitement to violence.
Funny you don’t mention Ann (“My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building”) Coulter, who seems to enjoy a status just short of a rock star at conservative gatherings.
Strange omission for an opponent of violence.
I know you expect to be believed on the basis of your experience, but that is precisely why I don’t.
This is ridiculous. The statements of a person with direct knowledge must be false because of that knowledge.
Yeah. You’re a whiz at logic.
It is not simply the question of what prison conditions are at Gitmo. It is a question of whether those imprisoned are guilty of any crime. In the case of the Chinese Uighurs, they have been found innocent, but because of fears that accepting that because the US utilized a procedure (bounty hunting) that could call into question all of the other cases, it continues to hold them. Perhaps you feel that a few broken Uighurs are the cost of making the omelette of a terrorist free world, or at least a terror safe US. However, in order to accept such a formulation, one would have to show that it is neccessary to imprison innocents in order to achieve this goal.
Bernard’s point about your logic also should be noted, because it would conveniently rule out any direct observations made by people here because of their personal political persuasions. If that is the case, there’s not really much point in discussing any of this and we are wasting each other’s time.
AVI, it’s all a matter of what ‘worse’ means. My last trip to GTMO was with a federal public defender, who was visiting his clients. He spends a lot of time in various federal prisons, and it was interesting to hear his comparisons: some aspects are better, some worse. (And of course no matter where one is in life, it depends a whole lot on the people around. No one I work with, of whatever political persuasion, laughs about political assassination, or has bumper stickers directly or indirectly advocating death of the President.)
One huge difference between GTMO and a federal prison is having had a trial. Another is knowing what the sentence is. Having a system that would allow one to complain about mistreatment. (I worked for a federal judge when I was in law school, and was quite impressed with how many federal prisoners have pro se lawsuits. Sure most of them are crap, but the few that have a kernel of truth make a difference, and I think one shouldn’t discount the deterent effect the right to sue has).
Of course I have also met lawyers who seemed to be willing to stretch the truth whenever they could get away with it. It’s not how I like to think of myself, you’ll not be surprised to learn. I work at a place where that kind of thing gets you fired, and either I’m reasonably honest, or a master deceiver.
To get back to the actual point, I don’t think it’s a mystery that KSM was tortured, and that this is one of the main reasons why Padilla (and the federal defender tells me it’s pronounced puh-DILL-uh) was moved from military to civilian custody, and only charged with crimes far removed from anything KSM and his cohorts told the interrogators. I don’t have any inside knowledge on this, btw.
I didn’t mean to ‘pull rank.’ I would never presume to lecture you on conditions in psychiatric institutions, and am not, in my view, in any position whatever to doubt your statements about co-workers’ remarks or bumper stickers. I think it’s laughable to get into an argument with you about what you had for breakfast yesterday. Unless you tell it was dinosaur eggs, over easy, there’s no way I’m going to come out ahead on that. I would only distinguish between statement (a) ‘you don’t know anything about the Salt Pit’; and statement (b) ‘I don’t believe what I’ve heard about the Salt Pit.’ Obviously, your foundation for (b) is way different from your foundation for statement (a).
Bernard, see my first comment. I mentioned Coulter right up front. She got fired from National Review for outrageous, inciting comments.
lj – I do not rule out any direct evidence, nor do I consider Charleycarp’s evidence by definiton false because he has first-hand experience. I may be bold, but not suicidal. In this instance, it is because of the specific type of first-hand evidence that I hold it in reserve. I would also hold in reserve as suspect the testimony of a Gitmo guard for the same reason.
CC – I am gratified to know that such violent humor as I experience would be unacceptable in your circle. Unfortunately, it is encountered in public fora (I think that should be forums, actually, having come into English in singular form) as well, as I note above. The Kos kids are the most egregious, of course, and as they are seldom disowned by other Dems, I have trouble discerning how central they are to the discussion. The new Euston Manifesto suggests to me that liberals are now taking more pains to dissociate themselves from leftists. But maybe not.
http://powerlineblog.com/archives/010150.php
http://michellemalkin.com/archives/002059.htm
The more I see people write things along the lines of Guantamano or Abu Ghraib are no worse than our domestic prisons, the more outraged I get about our complacency about conditions in our domestic prisons.
That said, the extralegal nature of GTMO should provide an added worry.
Charley, you might be able to answer a question that’s been niggling at me for a couple of years and that I’ve been unable to google effectively. I remember hearing on the radio that the “terror cell” from Lackawanna, NY had been persuaded to plead guilty to “material support for terrorism” in large part because they’d been threatened with being shipped to GTMO, effectively outside any jurisdiction. My understanding from reporting at the time was that the guilty pleas provided an important legal precedent for the “material support” charge. The case has really disappeared from view (the Wikipedia article, for example, is very sparse), and I’d be interested to hear how it’s aged.
Well, AVI, you are being Shakespearean in rejecting anything that lawyers have to say, but beyond that, I think it is a bit much to reject Charley, given that you are a newbie around here. It’s not wishing that someone drove a truck bomb made with ammonium nitrate fertilizer into the NYTimes office, but it’s a rather black and white sort of metric.
I would really hesitate citing Malkin for anything at all, given that her book about the internment of Japanese-Americans is a tour-de-farce and she has recently had her own problems with dealing with norms of blog communication.
As for Powerline, one of the conservatives occasionally posting here doesn’t think much of the cited Powerline pundit. That doesn’t necessarily make them wrong (just because an absolute fool says the sun will come up tomorrow doesn’t mean that it won’t), but in cases where objective reasoning might be called for, they aren’t your first string.
Yep. Nothing personal, mind, more of a guilt by association thing which I wouldn’t have engaged in just a few short years ago. That said, the fact that you’re talking about New England (San Francisco and parts of New Mexico would also work for me) makes it slightly less implausible. I don’t know anyone offhand that I can ask to verify it in person, and I’m not sure I care enough to actually put any real effort into it, but I’m willing to leave it in the “unlikely but possible” category for now. Please for pete’s sake don’t post her name or plates or anything like that though.
Well if Iraq doesn’t persuade people that our new policy is to prefer freedom over stability I can’t imagine what would. Haiti too — that must have been a very difficult decision to make. Oh and Afghanistan. Of course there are those who argue that this new policy is in place simply because freedom is easy to talk about and impossible to measure whereas stability is easy to measure and hard to fake. And there are others who say that it’s all well and good to sacrifice other peoples’ stability but that once that policy arrives on our doorstep we won’t be quite so enthusiastic about it. Buncha naysayers I guess.
Quite a bit less than the eighties, certainly, though I reckon some Colombians (to say nothing of Hugo Chavez) might quibble with you over what qualifies as “little.” In fact I suspect that a lot of people think that the commies weren’t destabilizing the area all by themselves, but those people are just blame-america-firsters. OTOH I’m sure Evo Morales would concede that US influence isn’t all bad…
Aside from the especially dubious value of this particular relative-badness defense, are you asking us to regard this as a falsifiable proposition? I mean you doubt it, sure, and lord knows there are some hella bad prisons in this country, but who is it exactly who can verify the comparison? Or is it not important that it be verified? Are we to accept your doubt, and the ICRC’s silence, as definitive, because we are at war and this is no time to make trouble?
Alternatively, given that you reject the legitimacy of strictly political opposition to gitmo, can we assume that you accept as fully legitimate opposition by people who also work for social justice in the context of the (increasingly ugly as it becomes increasingly privatized) US prison industry? I don’t suppose you know anybody like that, but they’re out there. Some people work, day in, day out, on one thing or another, because they can’t work on all of them. Some people see the economic and educational and thousand other interlocked elements that make a polity, and pick one, while others don’t. I wonder, AVI, if years from now when yet more chickens come home to roost you will even remember this conversation?
All in all, I doubt that we have any substantive disagreements about how to describe The Way Things Really Ought To Be. And I don’t doubt your (singular) intentions. I just think that your idea of the holiness of your (plural) cause (let’s call that cause freedom, for lack of a better word) is just, well, flippin’ dangerous.
I think Paul Weyrich very easily qualifies as a mainstream conservative, and that post was built around his commentary.
Or are you unfamiliar with Weyrich’s role in the “Reagan revolution” and the founding of the Heritage Foundation?
I think japnoicus apprehends my argument very well, thank you.
That’s rather misleading.
First, your quotes all appear to be from Lind, not Weyrich.
Second, you confuse a strict Boas multi-culturalism with how multi-culturalism actually plays out in less rigorous settings.
Third, you employ bad logic in suggesting that since the more limited multi-culturalism of Boas was a reaction to racism that resistance to a much broader definition of multiculturalism must come from racsim. That wouldn’t even follow if modern pop-multiculturalism was exactly the same as that of Boas. It is perfectly normal for a theory to be a reaction to one set of ideas while being open to critique from another.
Fifth, you compound these errors by utilizing totalizing language which you find abhorrent in those you study–you are adopting the tactics of those you dislike. You set the stage with: “Both progressives and centrists need to understand what the increasing attacks on multiculturalism from ostensibly mainstream conservatives are really all about: namely, the return of white nationalism.”
Attacks on the multi-culturalism are not inevitabely, and rarely in practice, about the return of white nationalism. Attacks on market failures are not “really all about” Communism. Attacks on religious excess are not “really all about” atheism. Questioning the moral implications of technologies is not “really all about” being a Luddite. You try to sweep up all of your enemies in a broad brush–erasing individuality in the condemnation of the other.
Heh, and sixth I don’t know how to count to four!
I mentioned Coulter right up front. She got fired from National Review for outrageous, inciting comments.
No. She didn’t get fired for her comments. Read what Jonah Goldberg had to say:
So let me be clear: We did not “fire” Ann for what she wrote, even though it was poorly written and sloppy. We ended the relationship because she behaved with a total lack of professionalism, friendship, and loyalty.
The bolding is mine.
In other words, NR was happy to give Coulter’sa forum for her “ourageous, inciting” ideas. It’s just that she was disrespectful to Goldberg and Lowry. (Not that they deserve any respect, but never mind that).
And of course, she is no fringe character on the right. She is enormously popular – a mainstream consevative. So there are many who have no problem with her ideas at all.
Meanwhile, I suggest you read Glenn Greenwald’s post on this topic. Perhaps you think calling for political opponents to be jailed, hanged, or charged with treason is acceptable, doesn’t meet your definition of calling for violence. What’s the punishment for treason? Follow the Malkin links. You may find them interesting.
I have to disagree with you, Bernard. Greenwald’s conflating (in my opinion, justified) outrage at the lack of (in my opinion, justified) legal consequences for Berger and (anticipated) same for McCarthy with other, less savory things. Appropriate consequences and a treason conviction are not the same thing at all.
I’ve also cried out loudly for Berger’s consignment to an appropriate federal penitentiary; I suppose that makes me enraged, in addition to being a puppet to racist overlords.
Shorter: like Hitler, only more angry.
Aside from the especially dubious value of this particular relative-badness defense…
… and the giggly irony of the fact that the ‘conservative’ here is the one playing the relativism game with questions of morality…
Slarti,
I think you skipped a lot of what Greenwald cited:
Here is Powerline on the reporters who broke the NSA story: “Throw ’em in the slammer.” Townhall columnist Ben Shapiro: Howard Dean, John Kerry and Al Gore all belong in prison for “sedition.” Powerline: Jimmy Carter is “on the other side.” Karl Rove says Dick Durbin is on the side of terrorists. Michael Reagan thinks Howard Dean should be hanged. Charles Johnson of LGF said this weekend: the media is helping Iran get the bomb by weakening our country (by reporting on what is going on in Iraq), and are therefore “becoming a major liability in the clash of civilizations,” a post which led his readers, needless to say, to spew sentiments about McCarthy and the media such as this:
This is a lot more than calls for criminal penalties for Berger and (possibly) McCarthy.
And if you’re so hot on imprisoning people, what about some other folks? From an earlier Grennwald post
Recently, close Bush ally, Republican Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, was found by investigators to have leaked highly sensitive, classified information to Fox News’ Carl Cameron and CNN’s Dana Bash while Shelby served on the Senate Intelligence Committee — an unauthorized and serious leak which, for some odd reason, the Bush Justice Department refused to prosecute. No Bush followers, at least that I know of, objected to the decision to allow Sen. Shelby to leak with impunity.
Equally close Bush ally, Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, leaked some of the most classified information our government had in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks
…
For some weird reason, the Justice Department did not prosecute Hatch’s leak either, and Bush followers did not express any objections to that decision.
there is a slew of leaks of classified information from the Bush White House — not decisions by the President to declassify information and then release it to the public, but anonymous pro-Bush disclosures by executive branch officials of information which is still classified, and which is released selectively and for plainly political ends. Leaking classified information is one of the principal tactics of the Bush White House and — as demonstrated — its closets political allies.
So let’s send Shelby and Hatch to join Berger in the penitentiary, shall we, and let’s send a few White House officials as well. Or is it only anti-Bush leaks that should be prosecuted?
Lind and Weyrich work largely hand in glove these days, and I’ve written on several other occasions about Weyrich’s hostility to multiculturalism.
Having studied Boas fairly extensively, your characterization of his view as promoting a “limited” multiculturalism is pure bosh. Agreed, the way it plays out in pop culture often approaches travesty — but that should be grounds to critique the individual actors, not the undergirding philosophy.
And I’m not making a logical error — I’m reaching a logical conclusion based on the words of the writers. I think Weyrich’s predilection for white nationalism is fairly clear when he says things like this:
“Surely [Cohen] must recognize that Political Correctness is an ideology … that … demands we all accede to many lies: that men and women are interchangeable, that there are no differences among races or ethnic groups within races (when those groups are taken as wholes, as PC demands), that homosexuality is normal,” he wrote. “This is, in fact, the unholy trinity that Political Correctness requires we all bow down and worship: ‘racism, sexism, and homophobia.’
Likewise with Lind:
Cultural conservatism is the belief that there is a necessary, unbreakable, and causal relationship between traditional Western, Judeo-Christian values, definitions of right and wrong, ways of thinking and ways of living — the parameters of Western culture — and the secular success of Western societies: their prosperity, their liberties, and the opportunities they offer their citizens to lead fulfilling, rewarding lives.
Whenever I encounter a critique of multiculturalism, I try to drill down into the argument to see what they’re proposing as an alternative. Most of them don’t; like Mickey Kaus, they’re content to simply bash away without offering anything in the way of a constructive counter-approach. But for those who do — and Lind and Weyrich are prominent among them — it’s fairly clear that what they are promoting is not an alternative but rather a return to the old system of hierarchical racial supremacism. Because that is precisely what those “traditional ways of thinking” entailed.
So let me ask: What do you propose as an alternative to multiculturalism?
Which somehow fails to translate to “off with their heads”, or anything like that.
Fine by me. But I believe the law tends to look on deliberate leaks a little differently than the accidental kind. I think, for example, that for Berger to accidentally place classified documents in his pants pocket, and then later accidentally destroy some of them, and accidentally try to replace others; that sort of beggars belief. Especially considering his former position as one of the people who surely do know the rules. Similarly, for CIA personnel to accidentally leak anything classified also beggars belief. Congresscritters, though, are mostly devoid of clue. Which is why they don’t get read into absolutely everything.
But, sure, bring them to justice.
In Berger’s case, was there anything anti-Bush involved? I can’t recall anything like that.
As for Shelby:
Interesting. I thought Republicans got a pass from other Republicans.
But, sure, bring them to justice.
7 more months and maybe we will.
Slarti, just to get timeline correct, Shelby’s leak and the subsequent request for a Justice Department investigation was in 2002. It was not discovered that it was Shelby until 2004, when suddenly the Justice departmentd ropped its investigation. At least that is what the article appears to say.
It was referred to the Ethics Committee, and AFAIK, has since disappeared form view.
But, sure, bring them to justice.
So I take it you think Bush should ask Justice to investigate and prosecute all leaks from White House personnel, and that he should start it by telling all he knows about the leaks?
Surprise, surprise.
Far afield from the point, but: sure, for what “should” is worth. Apples and oranges, though: Berger definitely committed a crime; McCarthy certainly broke CIA rules and probably broke some laws. As regards Berger, I can point to specific things that he did that were absolutely illegal.
AVI, I don’t think there’s a moral distinction between Stalin’s famine policies and the economic “policies” of Mobutu (i.e., mass looting of an entire nation). In cases like Mobutu (or under Chiang or under Marcos etc…) the power of government is used in the service of outright looting. In the case of Stalin, it was used to enforce an unworkable economic policy (and if people didn’t cooperate, they’d be killed). The end result is the same and the moral responsibilities of those in power is the same.
As for famine and free press and so forth, that’s Amartya Sen you’re indirectly quoting, I think. But maybe misquoting slightly. His argument is that democratic governments can’t starve their people in famines because the press will raise a stink, and voters will rebel. (The voters have to be starving, btw–British India presumably had a free press, but starving Indians couldn’t vote.) But he also goes on to say that malnutrition leading to death can be extremely high in democracies, and in his comparison of Maoist China to postcolonial India, China has the enormous famines, but overall, Maoist China actually had the better record in increasing life expectancy and cutting down on death from malnutrition. It sounds paradoxical, but it’s not.
But that’s tangential to our argument, since the governments allied to the US that I’m criticizing were authoritarian in nature and therefore free to let their people starve as they saw fit.
Our argument, in turn, is tangential to this thread (my fault, I think). I’ll sit back now and watch you and Charley fight. One thing about that Euston manifesto though–I don’t think you’ll find too many lefty supporters of it around here. I could be wrong. But I don’t want to get into another tangential argument.
I’d certainly be enraged if I were you. Carefully composing a reasonable, fact-based, argument only to be greeted with accusations of irrationality and racism… Oh wait, that’s me. That’s why I’m enraged. But really I’m just angry at myself because this is all my fault for ignoring the writing on the wall when I first read it.
You want both Berger and McCarthy to go to jail, right? Me too, sort of, except that I don’t care about the going to jail part so much as the trial-by-jury and rule-of-law part. In fact, just to give you a little perspective, I got on this train during the Reagan era. I am the exact opposite of a Reagan liberal — I’m a Carter conservative.
Just to offer one example (since racism has been mentioned) remember when Saint Ronald drove the welfare queens out of Americaland? I rolled my eyes, but I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a welfare queen. In fact it turned out there were no actual welfare queens, didn’t it? Does that mean that the Reaganites were delusional? That “welfare queen” was a code word?
Which is better, Slart? Were they staggeringly incompetent or were they using racism as a political tool? Or do you have some other explanation that I haven’t heard yet?
Or, to get back to the subject at hand, if hearings and trials are such great things then why don’t we know who was responsible for Iran-Contra? You think North and Poindexter did it all on their own say-so? If so, whey are they GOP heroes instead of outcasts?
Or 9/11 for that matter. Or Iraq. Or why W wasn’t thrown in the brig or sent to nam when he was supposed to be. The milk you’re concerned about got spilt a long long time ago and the reason I’m mad is that the national discourse has turned into a hairsplitting argument about how many teaspoons are still in the carton rather than how to clean up the most-of-a-gallon that’s all over the floor.
And now you’re trying to tell me that a couple of sentences of bloviation by Graham and Goss, followed by an aborted investigation disproves IOKIYAR? What about Katie Leung? What about Larry Franklin having lunch at Stetson’s whenever he feels like it, because of Rosen and Weissman’s trial, which is now pending Condi’s testimony, which will quite possibly never happen? (And if it does happen then anybody who questions her integrity will be accused of racism or partisanship or both.)
Suppose, hypothetically, that Rosen and Weissman are found not guilty or there’s a mistrial and the Feds decide not to try again? Once again, the press lose interest and nobody goes to jail. Franklin loses his right to own a handgun in certain states and to vote in others. Business as usual.
Yeah, I’m angry. Appropriate consequences my [deleted] [deleted]. </rant>
Uncle Kvetch — perfect. You left out the very next sentence of Derbyshire’s quote. I recommend the entire article to the readers, to see if it suggests violence.
I never said it did, AVI–I’m fully aware that Derbyshire was not literally calling for Chelsea Clinton’s head. You contended that no one “laughed” about killing Clinton, and I provided an example of someone making a joke about having his daughter executed–to paraphrase, “Hitler and Stalin knew what to do with people like her”–which I think is roughly in the same ballpark…don’t you?
Ann Coulter was “joking” when she regretted that McVeigh didn’t blow up the New York Times building. Likewise, she was “joking” when she expressed her hope that someone would poison Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. In the exact same manner, Derbyshire “joked” about putting Chelsea Clinton to death. So why is Coulter outrageous while Derbyshire needs to be taken in context?
You slip back and forth between types of multiculturalism. You focus on the narrow anthropological category without seeing how much broader the multicultural arguments has gotten when it has escaped those bounds. This is ironic coming from someone whose life work appears to include a focus on tenuous “transmission” arguments. When someone says “Who are we to judge? They are from another culture.” they are expressing the popular multiculturalism that the conservatives you want to tar find disturbing.
What do I propose as an alternative? I propose that we reject the moral relativist position that multiculturalism so easily slides into while embracing an evolutionary understanding of cultural practices. A great many Western cultural practices are better than many cultural practices of other cultures. It isn’t a racial issue–black, white and presumabely purple people are perfectly capable of striving to have equal rights for women and are all perfectly capable of avoiding locking them up inside or covering them with veils.
I’m a conservative, but I’m market-informed so I am not at all for cultural stasis. It is inevitable that other cultures will be better at certain other things than we are. We should strive to identify those practices and integrate them into our society. One of the great attributes of Western culture is its willingness to adopt successful strategies from other cultures while discarding most (though not all) of the unsuccessful ones. This process–a direct mirror of the scientific method and market survival mechanisms–fuels success.
There are also taste issues–things which have little to do with cultural success (at least in a material welfare sense) but lots to do with cultural variety. There is no reason to resist those.
The key problem is determining which things are successes and which ones aren’t or figuring out which ones are taste issues and which ones are materially important. This is a difficult task (full of close calls), but its difficulty shouldn’t cause it to be abandoned. Just because I can’t draw a perfectly obvious line about morality in every situation doesn’t mean that I can’t say “That is just wrong” to female genital mutilation.
Multiculturalism as commonly practiced is a shortcut to avoid these questions. “Who’s to judge” just avoids the issue. “Celebrate Diversity” just avoids the issue. It is understandable that people like to avoid dealing with hard issues. That doesn’t mean we should enable it with our rhetoric.
Your equation of anti-multiculturalism = Nazi racism isn’t helping things.
Well, my perspective is no doubt tainted by the fact that I first started hearing rants against multiculturalism in the early 1980s while dealing with white supremacists. Then I saw virtually the same arguments, stripped of overt racism, being floated by mainstream conservatives like Weyrich. Then I heard it being carried further by folks like Limbaugh and O’Reilly. So perhaps there are reasons I tend to see this thread.
I actually think your critique of multiculturalism is about right, at least in several key regards (especially the matter of moral relativism). I wish you could, however, point me to other conservatives whose take is equally nuanced. I’m afraid voices like yours tend to be washed out by people like Weyrich and Jared Taylor, whose approaches to multiculturalism are clearly white nationalist, and who both enjoy far more influence in conservative circles than you or anyone as thoughtful as you.
Translation to English, please?
Hey, someone points me to an article, I say something relevant to that article, and all of a sudden radish is pissed off about a whole bunch of other things that, well, aren’t. Why I should care about this is anyone’s guess.
Similarly, I had noticed that Nazis have been doing this thing called breathing. Then I noticed, that, shockingly, so were Republicans! Breathing, to be sure, stripped of the overtly Nazi racist overtones.
Hey, if it wasn’t for breathing, there wouldn’t be all that goose stepping going on among the Nazis. And, can we help it that some Republicans find the uniforms kind of spiffy?
No, I’m not talking to you, Slart unless it’s to say that I hope your eye has recovered at 20/20 and could you please buy a nail gun for the floors? Now that’s personal.
Also, it’s odd to me that I shouldn’t take Ann Coulter and the rest of the comedians literally when they spend so much time in the voting booth with so many who take every word of the Bible literally.
What gives there? Because if it’s all merely metaphor, then I can go back to minding my own business.
Slather all of that with smiley emoticons…literally. On the other hand, maybe Homeland Security ought to monitor my movements. Do they have a snark division?
Breathing was never a distinctive activity for neo-Nazis. It’s something they share with all mammals, for that matter.
But bashing multiculturalism and claiming it is responsible for all of society’s ills? That is something they have specialized in for many years — well before mainstream conservatives picked up the same habit.
I’d like to make one more note: While the difference Sebastian (correctly, I think) observes between anthropological multiculturalism and its popular expression is well worth taking into account, one cannot say that the loudest critics of multiculturalism — ranging from Weyrich and Taylor to Limbaugh — make that distinction, either.
I would like to register my disgust with female circumcision. All in favor of that, go sit over there. How come nodody’s moving?
On the other, if you practice female mutilation AND you favor abolishing the capital gains tax and mandating home schooling for all, check your messages, because Karl Rove may be reconsidering his previous excitement for invading whatever country it is that practices female circumcision, at least until after the election.
Got to keep that slim majority.
Just like tag team in here, I tell you.
You [Seb to Neiwert] slip back and forth between types of multiculturalism. You focus on the narrow anthropological category without seeing how much broader the multicultural arguments has gotten when it has escaped those bounds.
But these are two types that you have conveniently defined to suggest that one is moral relativity gone amok. That people will use this argument poorly shouldn’t be a surprise, people will use any argument poorly. But, as I argued, your type 2 multiculturalism is in some ways a reaction to type 1 multiculturalism. That some ostensible white progressives (cf gwangung’s comment) attach themselves to this argument is no more a criticism against multiculturalism than Leopold and Leob are a refutation of Nietzsche (he says, deftly attempting to skirt Godwin)
I propose that we reject the moral relativist position that multiculturalism so easily slides into while embracing an evolutionary understanding of cultural practices.
Given the problems that arose from social darwinism, I am more than a little hesitant to take up the banner of evolutionary understanding of cultural practices. Especially when multiculturalism fosters a piecemeal approach to taking on board non majority cultures. This is not to claim of support for female circumcision, or sati, or caste systems. However, for any cultural practice that is no longer adaptive or exacts too great a price, the best way to eradicate it is to have the members of the society themselves agree to do so. This may not always be acceptable, and perhaps it is necessary to take steps to forcibly change things cf the Roman Catholic church’s stance on contraception ;^).
As far as Western success driven by superior adaptation, I’m more a fan of Diamond’s argument that the West just got a head start, and it’s been Achilles and the turtle ever since. But as always, YMM and probably will V.
Dave, it’s your contention that white supremacists invented opposition to multiculturalism (in policy, if not in name)?
I mean, arguably rejection of other cultures, tribes, etc has not only been part of the package of humanity, but also of other species. I could just as credibly argue that white supremacy springs from it, rather than vice versa.
Which is not to say that there are never any good reasons to consider one’s own cultural values to be superior to those of another, for example when the other culture has an avowed intent to eradicate yours, or has decided that it’s perfectly ok to murder various members of yours for the reason that they looked Jewish.
Other than that, though, I do love me a man in a uniform.
Dave,
and,
and L_J,
The issue here is that Rush and many of his ilk, at the very least, aren’t attacking the first (anthropological) expression of multiculturalism at all. They aren’t interested in it and they probably don’t know much about it. And that is appropriate because it isn’t very important or related to multi-culturalism as it plays out in the wider culture. For every tightly limited anthropologist there are tens or hundreds of people who have acquired the idea that “Who’s to judge?” is a smart response to moral judgments they don’t personally agree with. People who use that argument are everywhere–and it isn’t completely limited to the left either. They are college students, professors, high school teachers, annoying lawyers and all sorts of other semi-educated people (interestingly it seems to be more of an educated person’s fallacy). Fighting that is fighting one of the two dominant expressions of multiculturalsim. The other dominant expression is a benign embracing of what I called taste issues above–I don’t think Rush and company have much issue with Mexican food. Neither case has anything to do the limited anthropological context you spend so much time on. Conservatives who think about multiculturalism aren’t talking about what you are talking about, because the technical anthropological definition isn’t an important expression of how discussions about multiculturalism play out in real life.
While Dave thinks about that question…
..my contention (though not marinated in contentioniousness) is that opposition to multiculturalism was hijacked early on by some savvy political operatives who needed to demagogue certain issues to bring some Southern Democrats into the Republican fold, but only so taxes could be lowered.
Question: Would my advocacy of Jackie Robinson’s style of stealing home (the taunting dance, the head juke, the ease of the act itself) be considered an example of multiculturalism by the likes of Enos Slaughter and Solly Hemus in 1948? We’ll leave out the lodging situation after the game.
Not that Robinson, Slaughter, or Hemus practiced female mutilation. Although who knows what Slaughter did in his free time?
there are tens or hundreds of people who have acquired the idea that “Who’s to judge?” is a smart response to moral judgments they don’t personally agree with.
Wouldn’t another way of putting this same sentiment be “it’s not my business”? I hear that a lot from my conservative libertarian father.
What kind of moral judgments are you talking about?
Surely not, say, spousal or child abuse, which used to be rather widely accepted, because we now have laws against that. I haven’t checked, but I think we also have laws against female genital mutilation.
Or are you talking about foreign policy debates, or the ambiguities in human rights campaigns? Or what?
Slarti, really.
“I first started hearing rants against multiculturalism”
does not equal
“white supremacists invented opposition to multiculturalism”
Sebastian
And that is appropriate because it isn’t very important or related to multi-culturalism as it plays out in the wider culture.
So your proposal is to try and make multiculturalism out to be like total moral relativity so that we are safe from slipping down that road. Mine is to point out that multiculturalism is here to stay, if Rush is going continue to be wolfing down his fritatas and beans (probably harvested, cooked and served by illegal immigrants) so it would be in everyone’s best interests to try and realize what the true context of the term means.
A bit of a harsh example, but please read to the end before you start typing. Your umbrage at your UCSD prof suggests that you don’t understand the true context, or if you do, that you really don’t care. If you really wanted to put that prof on the spot, you might have asked him if he was defending the South Asian caste system. Instead, you tried to trip him up with apartheid. My point is that there are legitimate reasons to question the rush to multiculturalism and there are illegitimate reasons. If you had truly been agnonizing over what to do about apartheid in a way that was true to your committment to multiculturalism, that is one thing, but you were asking the question to try and expose what you perceived as the hypocrisy of the prof. That he picked up on it and slapped you down hard (which, as an educator, I don’t agree with at all) is not a surprising outcome.
And I would now note that my basic reading about how Neiwert intended his post is the same as how it was actually intended, so I think you owe me a bit of an acknowledgement on that front.
It’s nice to get confirmation that my point has been made; thanks.
Slart:
Yes, though I wouldn’t exactly say “invented.” Multiculturalism was specifically a reaction against white supremacism, and those elements have never gone away entirely, nor have they ever ceased being opposed to the basic principles of multiculturalism.
So of course it wasn’t surprising to hear Richard Butler rant about it back in 1978, nor David Duke in 1980, because the old segregationists and fascists from whom they got their starts had always been opposed to it.
What was surprising was to hear it being discussed in remarkably similar terms among mainstream conservatives beginning in the late 1980s.
Sebastian:
Well, I think Boas would disagree with you; major components of his vision (see, e.g., Race and Democratic Society) have certainly come to pass, particularly the passage of antidiscrimination laws and the like.
And yet it’s not uncommon to hear a mainstream conservative like Michael Medved go on the air and rant against antidiscrimination laws.
So I think you’re wrong: Much of what I hear coming from the critics of popular multiculturalism is in fact an attack on its broader foundations.
How else can you explain Weyrich’s and Lind’s nonsensical insistence that multiculturalism originated with “the Frankfurt School” and is actually a form of “cultural Marxism”?
I agree with SH’s concerns over moral relativism, but back in the early 90’s when I remember the debate over multiculturalism and PCness on campus taking place, what I remember is that the news media (including the so-called liberal NYT) was crammed full of articles screaming about the PC thought police who didn’t let anyone say anything they didn’t agree with. And people seemed to be conflating what I considered sometimes legitimate concerns over moral relativism with not-so-subtle chestpounding about the superiority of Western civilization over all others and in its ugliest manifestations it turned into a campaign to denigrate Western atrocities against nonwhites as not being significant compared to those committed by, say, the Nazis. I remember this issue coming up in 1992 and the 500 year Columbus anniversy. One writer in the NYT if I remember correctly claimed that to speak of genocide against the Native Americans was to trivialize the Holocaust. I wouldn’t compare the two because the details are so different, but that word “trivialize” was repulsive in this context. And morally relativistic. Then I also remember one bizarre conversation with a friend about his insistence that Western classical music was obviously far superior to the music of other cultures. There was something in the air back then that turned otherwise sensible people into Western cultural jingoists. I suppose, post 9/11, it’s back with a vengeance.
Me, I sorta like Edward Said’s take on it, if I understood it correctly–there is no monolithic Western civilization, but rather, it’s something that has worked by accumulating ideas from many different sources over the centuries. Western civilization, if you want to characterize such a thing, is and always has been multicultural–it’s just that at any given time some people forget the history and want to freeze it in place as it exists now. Which sounds something like what SH said.
Ok, one more time:
“White supremacists oppose multiculturalism” does NOT imply “Everyone who opposes multiculturalism does so for reasons that spring from racism”.
Unless, of course, you’ve got some other logical arguments in reserve that might tend to fill the gigantic holes in that notion.
“How else can you explain Weyrich’s and Lind’s nonsensical insistence that multiculturalism originated with “the Frankfurt School” and is actually a form of “cultural Marxism”?”
That is entirely too easy. Lind apparently thinks that anything he doesn’t like is some form or another of Marxism.
As for Medved, I have never listened to him (I know Rush, Hugh Hewitt, Hannity and the repellant Savage) but when I see “rant against antidiscrimination laws” I have a sneaking suspicion you might mean “doesn’t like the quota-requiring and anti-historical modern judicial interpretation of antidiscrimination laws” or “not a big fan of reverse discrimination”.
my take on this thread:
“a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”
alternatively, a kindergarten argument of:
“your side is more intolerant.” “no, your side is more intolerant.”
there is, buried somewhere in all the wailing, gnashing of teeth and argument by anecdote, a legitimate point in this thread, which is how western countries generally and the US in particular should tolerate intolerance.
Jimmy Carter left the Southern Baptists when they decided that a woman should be subservient to her husband as a man is to god.
South Dakotan legislators believe that a 13 year old girl raped by her father should carry the fetus to term.
David Koresh and the Militiamen movement could not tolerate our modern regulatory society.
oh, and a small group of radical Saudi Arabians penetrated our laughably weak airplane security and successfully launched a pinprick (yes, pinprick) attack on the US economy.
so, how as a society should we tolerate intolerance? the same way we always do, by requiring that those who subject themselves to the laws of this country obey ALL the laws of this country.
i concede that theocracies based on any of the three major Abrahamic religions contain levels of intolerance that I could not tolerate. (see, eg, israel, iran, certain american states.)
but there’s an ENORMOUS difference between trying to use our ever-diminishing powers of persuasion (see, eg, poland, turkey) and our ever diminishing military power in trying to change what other people perceive as acceptable (even preferable) levels of intolerance.
here’s a thought experiment: Imagine in 30 years’ time the US is invaded by a coalition of Islamic countries that are horrified about the rampant secularism in our government. Having been persuaded by Ann Coulter, they decide to invade, kill off our leaders and convert us to Islam, by force if necessary.
How many people here are heading to the mosque, and how many are taking up arms against the invaders?
now, try to imagine how Iranians feel these days.
returning to the point about who gets to choose. mostly, that argument is sophomoric mental masturbation (briefly satisfactory, but not actually leading to changed circumstances). Who gets to choose?
Duh, the people in power. Bush chose to invade Iraq; the resurgent Taliban in southern Afghanistan will choose the kind of sharia they will impose. both ideas will have tremendous adverse consequences for large groups of people (but tremendous positive consequences for a sizeable group, which is why those governments are in power at all), and the policies will continue in force until the subjects change their government.
Sebastian: Just because I can’t draw a perfectly obvious line about morality in every situation doesn’t mean that I can’t say “That is just wrong” to female genital mutilation.
Why female genital mutilation and not male genital mutilation? If you talk about Western Culture do you mean US culture, European Culture, Judeo-Christian culture? And can you name a few things you feel Western Culture should take over from other cultures?
Just today I blogged (Dutch) about an interview I read with our minister of… eh… loosely tranlated “infrastructure”. She said that she visited Abu Dhabi in March, for the conference ‘women als worldleaders’. Before her visit she was totally opposed to the headscarf and chador, she saw them just as a symbol of women oppression. After her visit she was totally turned around. She had seen how many women – with headscarf – had studied on universities and how many of them had good jobs with lots of social standing. According to her many more Arab women study the exact sciences than in the Netherlands, and a high percentage of women have good jobs in area’s that are mostly male in the Netherlands.
She declared herself a practical person and said that she’d rather have women WITH headscarf as a normal part of society, with good education and economic independency, than a large group of women who stayed home because they were not allowed to wear their headscarfs. She also added that she might be less allergic for the headscarf because she had been schooled solely on katholic girlschools, by nuns – very covered in their clothing but very stimulating in their motivating their girl charges to get the best education they could.
Is that strong multicultarism? you say ” A great many Western cultural practices are better than many cultural practices of other cultures. It isn’t a racial issue–black, white and presumabely purple people are perfectly capable of striving to have equal rights for women and are all perfectly capable of avoiding locking them up inside or covering them with veils.”. But what if equal rights means allowing them veils?
“But what if equal rights means allowing them veils?”
I’m all for allowing them veils. I’m not for their compatriots threatening them with rape if they choose not to.
I’m not for their compatriots threatening them with rape if they choose not to.
I wonder what would happen in our society should women choose to exercise their right to walk around outside topless, as men often do?
It’s nice to get confirmation that my point has been made; thanks.
Before you even typed it! Service with a smile!
Do you think that threatening them with rape would be ok? What if their culture said that rape was the appropriate response? Would that make it better?
Sebastian – I grew up in a society that assumed that the way a girl dressed could be rape inviting. And that was a very western culture.
I recently read the comment of one of the conservative public figures about rape:
Appearantly she believes the lives in a culture where rape might not be the appropriate response, but should be the expected response if you do not follow the unwritten rules of good girly behaviour.
I’m for allowing them to wear veils, too, though I don’t recall them, or those who want to force them to wear veils or force them not to wear veils asking me.
Neither am I for their compatriots threatening them with rape if they choose not to. That’s for their courts to decide. Wait, that can’t be right. They must wait until their legislatures decide and if they don’t, the courts still shouldn’t decide because, well, universal truth must cool its heels and the world is way too complicated and I conflate …
Better to invade with tactical nukes, change the regime, let those who want to wear the veil do so and those who do not, not. Then get bogged down in a vicious insurrection between the two sides.
They have a myriad of choices, all absolute.
Wear the veil and wear a condom. Wear the veil and do not wear a condom. Do not wear the veil and do not wear a condom. Do not wear the veil but be safe and wear the condom. Put the condom where the veil goes and vice versa.
Somewhere, at any particular time, you can find a mullah or an American who will tell you that each one of those combinations is
the absolute final morality or else.
Why? Because the world is Dada.
But, right, no female genital mutilation. Although it does solve Pat Robertson’s and James Dobson’s problem with teenaged female promiscuity. Wait, what about those girls they met in the Navy on shore leave?
O.K., scratch that. And they mean that absolutely.
To be prefectly clear: I think rape and threats of rape are completely wrong in all circumstances.
Are you going to answer my other questions too? I’m curious where and how you put your limits. Also because in my environment a lot of people are against multiculturalism and want total assimilation instead. I allready gave a few examples in this thread, but unfortunately there are many more to give.
My general approach is that if a woman says No or is not in a position to say Yes, then we go with that opinion.
Now if the woman says Yes but Jerry Falwell butts in and says No, then the woman wins.
If the woman somehow desires female genital mutilation and Jerry Falwell and I don’t feel like it in a culturally absolute sort of way, that’s a coincidence. I finish my drink and get the heck out of there because sometimes everyone in the room is just crazy.
Sebastian: Do you think that threatening them with rape would be ok? What if their culture said that rape was the appropriate response? Would that make it better?
Sorry, was that directed at my comment?
I had forgotten how hard it was to keep track of people on an unfamiliar thread. I was remembering inaccurately that it was Charleycarp who had accused me of lying. While I never referenced it, it may well have leaked out in my tone, and I apologize. The comment was made by another, as I discovered reviewing the thread to (fortunately) make sure I had things right.
The evidence, BTW, is now up on my site: http://assistantvillageidiot.blogspot.com/2006/04/for-person-who-accused-me-of-lying.html
After that error, I am in a poor position to complain that people did not read my comments accurately. I will only say that several times people clearly did not follow my offered links, assuming they knew what was behind them, and other times have gotten basic facts wrong about what I have claimed. Perhaps they have the same complaint about me. Blog commenters tend to be bright, information-junkie type folks who scan and absorb quickly – sometimes too quickly. Though I am guilty of it myself, I have elsewhere commented that this type of thinking seems to lead more often to liberalism than conservatism. One sucks up the information, stamps it, categorizes it, files it, and goes off in search of new informational drugs. That is an efficient strategy in a world with so much information coming at you, but it has its limitations.
I had also forgotten how hard it is at first to divide those who wish to debate with you from those who merely wish to show off new put-downs to their friends. The debaters can also seem insulting, of course, and sometimes it takes several exchanges to figure that out.
With the three I have been having debate, we have resolved down to a familiar point, with one side saying “No, you just don’t get how bad some of the things are that America and her allies have done,” which is of course countered by “No, you just don’t get how bad our enemies are, and how much latitude that gives us.” If I seem to trivialize the points, I mean the opposite. That debate is indeed one of the central questions of our age and where we shall go from here. (A similar debate which can be made to seem childish but is also deep and fraught with meaning is “You don’t understand how much damage Christianity has done,” and “No, you don’t understand how much benefit Christianity has provided.”)
For those three – figure it out yourselves – I remain unpersuaded, but I am not uninfluenced. Your arguments are at least not bizarre, hackneyed, or sophistical. Okay, most of your arguments aren’t.
AVI:
I take offense that you don’t consider my arguments to be bizarre. I put a lot of effort into being bizarre…
….wait, you weren’t talking about me..never mind.
At this point, Slart enters and points out that “John, AVI meant you when he said “hackneyed” and “sophistical”.
O.K., then
AVI, while I take your point about how bad our enemies may be, I disagree that it grants us any latitude in our response. If you read hilzoy’s link you’ll understand what I mean — we are not responsible for our enemies’ behavior, but we are responsible for our own.
well, at least know that I have not come to it lightly. My Christian teachers, especially Lewis and Bonhoefer, devoted much thought to this, and I have tried to learn from them.
Your principle is unarguable in the abstract, because right things are right, evil things are evil. But people, nations, situations, and choices are usually much messier. In simple slogan terms, I believe in the minimum necessary force – but no less than that. I find that arguments for greater purity than that – and I believe black-and-white morality, except on sexual issues, is more common on the left – too easily neglect that minimum. We live too comfortably, and believe that things are solvable in (exagerration for effect) suburban PTA fashion.
AVI
Thanks for taking the time to comment and I agree completely that we read too quickly and it is often difficult to go back and say ‘I misread that’ (though why this is so true, I am baffled).
But I was struck by this comment
I find that arguments for greater purity than that – and I believe black-and-white morality, except on sexual issues, is more common on the left
I admit that this has often been the case, but with the rise of the neo-cons and the movement of those on the left (like Hitchens, the whole Euston Manifesto crew) to support the war, do you think that the left still has a corner on that?
AVI, as a rule I am not faced with life or death decisions, so my criticism of the administration’s policies must be to some degree abstract, not informed by direct personal experience. I grant you that these choices can be difficult. Still, we have to be guided by some set of principles.
I agree with you that sometimes force can be necessary and that when it is, the minimum is the right amount to use. Not just because it’s right, but also because the use of force carries serious consequences, often unintended ones.
In my opinion, President Bush displays a lack of appreciation of the consequences of his actions. That’s just my opinion, of course. I trust you will accept that I do not come to it lightly, just as I take you at your word.
Slart:
You implied that Porter Goss’ request for an investigation refuted the proposition that It’s OKay If You Are Republican (sometimes shortened to IOKIYAR). In fact, it doesn’t even falsify the “strong” version of IOKIYAR because Goss was presumably not aware who leaked when he requested the investigation. The strong form of the hypothesis is of course false anyway, but IOKIYAR is generally taken to be a statistical observation…
Actually, the central point of all that was that it has taken me many years to get this pissed off, and that among the root causes of that anger are the lopsided and haphazard enforcement of laws by individuals who spend a lot of time fussing about rule of law. Selective enforcement is not something that I believe can be eliminated entirely, but I see no reason to politely pretend that it doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter.
AVI:
Sorry to create confusion. I stand corrected, and I apologize for my hasty conclusion. Such a bumper sticker evidently exists, and is on a car, and I can only assume that if your colleague has been driving around with it for six months others must exist.
I can also only assume that I fall into your sophistical insulters with bizarre (or perhaps hackneyed) arguments category, and won’t be seeing any substantive response to any other points I made. Too bad. You seem like a very interesting guy. Your post about the Nazi accusation was particularly thought-provoking, not only because it corresponds pretty closely to my own view but because of your earlier inexplicable omission of Germany as a democratic aggressor. Your perspective on the letter your uncle sent you was fascinating (and confusing) as well. I wouldn’t have guessed that someone who admired Bonhoeffer (we are both talking about this guy, right?) would joke about categorizing as a mental disorder a fellow human’s passionate political opposition based on the call of their own conscience.
Maybe you’re right though. Maybe Mr. Helm is either too deranged to hear the still small voice or too poorly informed to understand what it’s telling him.
The strong form of the hypothesis is of course false anyway, but IOKIYAR is generally taken to be a statistical observation…
The fact that there hasn’t been any dicussion of Mary McCarthy on Obwi is sort of a statistical observation as well.
In other words, Its OK If You Are A Democrat To Leak Classified Information To The MSM, Even If You Can not Prove It To Be True, Just So Long As It Harms President Bush,
or
IOKIYAADTLCITTMSMEIFYCNPITBTJSLAIHPB,
for short.
The fact that there hasn’t been any dicussion of Mary McCarthy on Obwi is sort of a statistical observation as well.
Cant’s speak for my fellow man the barricades partners, but as for me, I can only think of Dorothy Parker’s line “What fresh hell is this?”
DaveC, the primary purpose is not to harm Bush. The primary purpose is to help the country. If Bush is on the other side of that — and he is, with his war of choice and his claims of unprecedented power — that’s not our fault.
The fact that there hasn’t been any dicussion of Mary McCarthy on Obwi is sort of a statistical observation as well.
and that’s as far as you should take it, as there an infinite number of other things not discussed here, too.
for example, why does ObWi choose to withhold the news that Bush’s approval is now down around 32% ?
No I didn’t, actually; just was wondering how that happened, given that IOKIYAR seems to be the claim. There is a bit of space between a claimed refutation and an example of a headscratcher; my comment fell into that space.
It’s also a bit of a headscratcher, given that over half of the members of the Senate Intelligence Committee members are Republican. Given random odds, the probability of an investigation yielding a Republican perp are pretty high. Of course, you can always just shut everything down if it turns out a Republican; is that the implication? When’s the last time a Democratic Congresscritter was prosecuted for leaking?
Not IOKIYAR, quite; more like IOKIYAC.
Thanks for the translation, though. I see that acronym a lot, but I can never remember what it’s for.
I think we can agree, here. I’m all for clamping down hard on Congressional leaks, but I doubt it will ever happen. Once again, I’d say that leaks are probably at least three reasons out of four why Congress isn’t briefed more fully on intelligence operations, for example.
Well, as Allah says, this is one of those issues that you can fall behind the power curve on really quickly. As far as I’m concerned, the only thing we really know is that Mary McCarthy was fired by the CIA because she failed (more than once, IIRC) lie-detector tests concerning whether she leaked information to the media without CIA approval. There’s lots and LOTS of juicy conjecture about why she did so, but conjecture is really all there is right now. It’s not even really clear whether she revealed classified information or not. I imagine 60 Minutes will be doing a fact-filled segment on her soon, though, and that she’ll be putting a book to print in short order. That’s the way these things seem to go.
I sense a whole new acronym in the works: It’s OK If You Maintain That It’s To Help The Country: IOKIYMITHTC. Cool; I now have an escape if I should happen to (advertently or not) spill the beans.
I sense a whole new acronym in the works: It’s OK If You Maintain That It’s To Help The Country: IOKIYMITHTC. Cool.
Actually, I think it’s a pragmatic post-facto test. Bush deciding to leak bits of a report that supported his administration’s wish to attack Iraq? Demonstrably, did not help the country. Rove or Cheney or Libby or whoever is finally nailed for leaking Valerie Plame’s identity in order to punish Joseph Wilson? Demonstrably, did not help the country.
Mary McCarthy’s leak? I don’t know enough about it one way or the other to judge. (Really, I don’t.) But if she’s indicted and tried and found guilty, I would hope that the judge who sentenced her would decide her sentence based on the harm it could be demonstrated her leak had caused: just as I hope a judge will someday sentence George W. Bush for the harm his leak caused, if it can be shown that his leak was intended to support the unjust, illegal, and demonstrably damaging-to-the-US attack on Iraq.
(Hope, not expect. The chances of Bush ever appearing in court for his crimes are about the same as the chances of Kissinger appearing in court…)
I move that OBWI ask Mary McCarthy to become a front-page poster. Then we discuss.
I find it mildly amusing that Slart points out that we are still in the heavy conjecture stage of the McCarthy case and perhaps folks will have more to say as the smoke clears. Though I do respect Slart’s respect for facticity.
After all, it is Slart who can interrupt a 5-year-long hurricane of conjecture regarding the sinister motives of Tom Delay by modestly raising his hand, clearing his throat, and innocently asking, “Who is Tom Delay?”
I’ve been under the impression that a political blog’s job is to disbelieve all authority, whether it is DaveC.’s dreaded MSM, government, the academy, Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Baseball Encyclopedia, my mother’s household tips, and the laws of physics and seek a more direct, away-with-the-middle-men sort of experience with the world — sort of a Martin Lutherizing of the political world where the priests are defrocked and stripped of their authority —
… and we get to dismiss all of the conjectural work the above-mentioned authorities once did for us and conjecture to our heart’s content and scream “Truth” every 30 seconds or so, free of the intermediaries.
Also, I feel comfortable placing my jones to hurt George Bush slightly above helping the country. After all, I’ve read Adam Smith and pretty much buy into his idea of the Invisible Hand, wherein my self-interested concerns can, unintentionally, ripple outwards and make the world a better place.
Carry on.
I sense a whole new acronym in the works: It’s OK If You Maintain That It’s To Help The Country: IOKIYMITHTC. Cool; I now have an escape if I should happen to (advertently or not) spill the beans.
Given that that’s the snarky summary of the whistleblower laws… well, yes, if that’s actually why you’re doing it, you’d probably be both right and possibly even legal in so doing. It’d depend on the content and context, of course, but I’ve enough faith in you that your actions would have been warranted. If, however, you’re just shooting your mouth off for no good reason, mouthing an acronym is probably going to be less than useful.
Slarti, who was your 5:06 post aimed at? It’s right below mine, which made me wonder if I was the target, but maybe that was just collateral damage. I don’t think all criticism of multiculturalism is motivated by white supremacism–just big chunks of it. I agree to some estent with Sebastian’s point on moral relativism.
It was directed at Neiwert, Donald. I was despairing of ever getting the point across, and I’m still not sure if I did.
Sebastian: “I don’t actually buy it. My plausible-to-me nightmare scenario goes sort of like the above, but a couple of thousand people killed in France, or a nuclear bomb going off in New York, or something like that happens in Germany after years of being emboldened by hundreds of small gestures. Like Hitler, a few important Middle East political leaders take that as a sign that we are too weak to resist and fund a major atrocity. That touches off a genuine genocidal counter-reaction in which our technical means of destruction far outstrip our moral guideposts and one or another Western country decides to kill tens or hundreds of millions in the Middle East. That doesn’t lead to the imposition of Sharia law in my nightmare, but it leads to something very grotesque.”
IIRC, some light of the neocon right put it better as ‘Every ten years or so, we’ve got to throw a crappy little country against the wall, just to show that we can.’ (quote from memory).