Art Critique
Naked dancers, fine. Naked actors, maybe. Naked opera singers — so wrong.
April 11, 2008
February 5, 2008
February 3, 2008
December 4, 2007
Mike Gravel ad: Power to the People
Some are calling it the best political ad ever (they probably never saw the “Daisy” ad). While I think it hits some high notes, it is weird to see my favorite cranky old man - Mike Gravel, hammering the words out - while surrounded by images and music inspired by the 1960s. (Is that how I look to the young people around me?). Enjoy.
Spotlight
November 26, 2007
November 14, 2007
Why You Have To Be Brave To Live Here
Stephanie Strom writes for the New York Times:
In the genteel world of bridge, disputes are usually handled quietly and rarely involve issues of national policy. But in a fight reminiscent of the brouhaha over an anti-Bush statement by Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks in 2003, a team of women who represented the United States at the world bridge championships in Shanghai last month is facing sanctions, including a yearlong ban from competition, for a spur-of-the-moment protest.
At issue is a crudely lettered sign, scribbled on the back of a menu, that was held up at an awards dinner and read, “We did not vote for Bush.”
By e-mail, angry bridge players have accused the women of “treason” and “sedition.”
Judging by Memeorandum, this is the hottest news item on the blogosphere right now. The wingnuts are spewing about Bush Derangement Syndrome. “Shut up and play cards” is a common suggestion.
The players have been stunned by the reaction to what they saw as a spontaneous gesture, “a moment of levity,” said Gail Greenberg, the team’s nonplaying captain and winner of 11 world championships.
“What we were trying to say, not to Americans but to our friends from other countries, was that we understand that they are questioning and critical of what our country is doing these days, and we want you to know that we, too, are critical,” Ms. Greenberg said, stressing that she was speaking for herself and not her six teammates.
The controversy has gone global, with the French team offering support for its American counterparts.
“By trying to address these issues in a nonviolent, nonthreatening and lighthearted manner,” the French team wrote in by e-mail to the federation’s board and others, “you were doing only what women of the world have always tried to do when opposing the folly of men who have lost their perspective of reality.”
Jimmie at the Sundries Shack disagrees.
What these ladies should have done is reminded the Bush-haters that they were at a bridge tournament and not a political convention and that good manners prohibit the discussion of politics at a table where it is not welcome. I’m fairly sure that reminding your fellow bridge players of their manners would have solved the problem.
Then you beat the stuffing out of them and taunt them relentlessly from the winners’ podium. Maybe you even stack the losers up in a pyramid and have one of your team point at them and laugh while you take pictures.
I assume that last bit was another attempt at levity. But what this tells me is that wingnuts don’t get out much. These days, for Americans, to go abroad is to be treated with, at the very least, caution. We may look normal on the surface, but at the least provocation we may grow tusks and root up the shrubberies.
But these ladies appear to have run into some outright hostility, and they were trying to diffuse the situation. Any emotionally mature person might have done the same thing, which is why wingnuts don’t understand it.
Did they not notice they were playing cards in Communist China?
China- The same country that harvests prisoner’s body organs- The same country that jails Christians and people of faith- The same country that murdered 30-40 million of its own citizens less than 50 years ago.
Do these pampered loons have any perspective of history?
Standard wingnut moral relativism — whatever we do is OK, because China is worse. But in the real world, people who claim a higher standard had better live up to it or face the snarking.
The bridge lady might have written this on her menu instead:
It is not fair for bridge players to criticize GWB. He exemplifies something essential to playing every hand of bridge.
The dummy.
But what does it say about a nation that allows a dummy to be its head of state for eight years?
Spotlight
November 6, 2007
MSNBC: Going Our Way?
Jacques Steinberg (great name!) writes in today’s New York Times that MSNBC wants to create a nightime lineup that liberals can love. I’m not sure they’ve figured out how to do this, however.
Riding a ratings wave from “Countdown With Keith Olbermann,” a program that takes strong issue with the Bush administration, MSNBC is increasingly seeking to showcase its nighttime lineup as a welcome haven for viewers of a similar mind.
Lest there be any doubt that the cable channel believes there is ratings gold in shows that criticize the administration with the same vigor with which Fox News’s hosts often champion it, two NBC executives acknowledged yesterday that they were talking to Rosie O’Donnell about a prime-time show on MSNBC.
Um, Rosie O’Donnell? She raised viewership while she was on “The View,” Steinberg says. Yeah, but that was daytime. I agree with Jeralyn that Rosie would be a huge mistake. One of Jeralyn’s commenters suggested either David Schuster or Rachel Maddow. My only objection is that if David Schuster becomes a regular program host he’ll have less time for reporting.
But even without Ms. O’Donnell, MSNBC already presents a three-hour block of nighttime talk — Chris Matthews’s “Hardball” at 7, Mr. Olbermann at 8, and “Live With Dan Abrams” at 9 — in which the White House takes a regular beating. The one early-evening program on MSNBC that is often most sympathetic to the administration, “Tucker” with Tucker Carlson at 6 p.m., is in real danger of being canceled, said one NBC executive, who, like those who spoke of Ms. O’Donnell, would do so only on condition of anonymity.
Well, OK, Carlson is a complete waste of time. That’s the one time slot O’Donnell might improve.
Having a prime-time lineup that tilts ever more demonstrably to the left could be risky for General Electric, MSNBC’s parent company, which is subject to legislation and regulation far afield of the cable landscape. Officials at MSNBC emphasize that they never set out to create a liberal version of Fox News.
Note that Faux News, which is nothing but the propaganda arm of the GOP, doesn’t have to worry about legislation and regulation.
The NBC executive in charge of MSNBC, Phil Griffin, says that the cable channel didn’t set out to favor any political position. He implies the apparent move to the left is being driven by ratings. I suspect that’s true. For years they tried to compete with Faux News by being Faux News Lite. Olbermann has showed them the real way to compete is offering viewers something they can’t see on Faux News. Like, you know, truth and facts and stuff.
MSNBC’s other evening stars, Chris “Tweety” Matthews and Dan Abrams, are hardly fellow travelers of Noam Chomsky, and both still give plenty of time to right-wing mouthpieces. I find Abrams less annoying than Matthews, however. Those of you who miss Joe Scarborough (anybody?) probably already know he moved to mornings awhile back.
Meanwhile, at the Los Angeles Times Jonah Goldberg laments that “fake news,” a la Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, is becoming the new standard in news reporting.
Indeed, while the network news broadcasts are sustained by the consumers of denture cream, adult diapers and pharmacological marital aides, it’s “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” that have a grip on the hip, iPhone crowd. And plenty of those younger viewers seem to believe that they can deduce what’s going on in the real world from jokes on a fake newscast. It’s no longer funny because it’s true. It’s true because it’s funny.
He had it right the first time — it’s funny because it’s true. Great satire functions by cutting through sugar-coatings and qualifiers to find the absurdities inherent in unvarnished truth. Satirists don’t make up jokes. They reveal The Joke.
For example, in the next paragraph, Jonah blames the problems of modern journalism on the old TV sitcom “Murphy Brown.”
When Brown had a baby out of wedlock, Vice President Dan Quayle criticized the writers of the show. Liberals then reacted as though Quayle had insulted a real person. Ever since, journalists and politicians have been playing themselves in movies and TV series, perhaps trying to disprove the cliche that Washington is Hollywood for ugly people.
He’s serious, mind you, and there’s The Joke. You can’t make this shit up. I couldn’t, anyway.
Spotlight
October 27, 2007
Saturday Funnies
Bill Maher’s “New Rules”:
Sad that the best political commentary is from comedians, on cable, and not the free airwaves. One quick barb:
On the flap by conservatives over Dumbledore’s sexual orientation: “If I had the slightest interest in homosexuals with powers, I’d BE a Republican!”
But it’s even better than that - Enjoy.
Spotlight
October 15, 2007
Malkin Quits O’Reilly Factor
Giraldo Rivera was mean to her. Poor baby. See also Tbogg and Gavin.
There is speculation that the Powers That Be of the Right see her as a liability, particularly after her unhinged performance over the Frost family (which goes on, unabated, on her blog), and she was encouraged to resign. Unless there’s a new twist I don’t know about — it’s not like I actually watch Faux Snooze — the Rivera flap happened over a month ago. Why quit now?
Update: I hope somebody posts a video of what Olbermann said. Hysterical.
Spotlight
September 15, 2007
Tribal Loyalty and Free Expression
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about the role of scripture in either causing or justifying armed conflicts around the planet. The “hook” for the post was an article by a Turkish Muslim who argued that Muslim extremists don’t learn to hate from reading the Koran. They hate, and then they cherry pick words out of the Koran to justify their hatred. I took his word on this, because I’m unfamiliar with the Koran.
I’ve seen the same phenomenon elsewhere. Propagandists on “our” side like to cherry-pick verses from the Koran to argue that Islam teaches hatred. Muslim propagandists have have cranked out similar hate material about Jews. People hostile to Christianity cherry-pick verses from the New Testament to argue that Jesus was some sort of bloodthirsty rabble rouser. Interestingly, fundies use these same verses to justify their bigotry toward everyone who isn’t Them, homosexuals in particular.
I also once got an email from an atheist who had pulled a verse from the murky depths of early Sanskrit Buddhist texts — possibly a bad translation — to inform me that Buddhism teaches that women cannot enter Nirvana. My understanding is that no individual of whatever gender can “enter” Nirvana, however, so I’m not worried about gender bias in the dharmakaya. (See, for example, the Diamond Sutra, section III.)
Anyway, one commenter to the scripture post concluded I was either taking sides with or making excuses for Muslims. In fact, the only “side” I was taking is that people around the planet misuse scripture to justify their hatred and bigotry. Essentially, this individual mistook objectivity for “taking sides.” That’s fairly common with bigots. If you aren’t avowedly with them, they assume you’re “for” the other side. And attempting to understand what motivates The Enemy is tantamount to making excuses.
A couple of days ago Glenn Greenwald wrote a post called “Selective defenders of free expression,” pointing out that wingnuts promote anti-Muslim expression but try to suppress anti-Christian expression. A comment by Kathy Griffith Griffin — “suck it, Jesus” — has been cut from a pre-taped telecast of the Emmy Awards show after Catholic crusader Bill Donohue threw a fit about it. Donohue still wants Griffith Griffin to apologize to Christians. We can only hope he holds his breath until she does.
Anyway, Kathryn Jean Lopez at the Corner celebrated the “victory over Kathy Griffin’s mouth.” Meanwhile, Lulu and other righties are still flogging the Mohammad cartoon controversy, demanding that mostly crude and hateful depictions of Mohammad not be surpressed.
I’m not surprised by, and not really critical of, Fox’s decision to cut Kathy Griffin’s comment from the show. Commercial publishers and entertainment outlets often cut material they think might offend consumers or advertisers. By the same token, however, Michelle Malkin has no right to demand a newspaper publish anything it judges not to be fit for publishing.
About a year ago Little Lulu was up in arms because the Berlin Opera had canceled a production of Mozart’s Idomeneo that was disrespectful of Mohammad and might have given offense to Muslims. “Jihadists hate Western art and music,” she said. But last March she crusaded against a sculpture that she decided — purely a matter of opinion — was disrespectful of Jesus. Lulu doesn’t think much of Western art either, I guess.
This nation is being jerked around by brute mob hysteria wrapped in sanctimony, and I’m damn sick of it. Ed Pilkington writes in today’s Guardian:
Given the reception John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt received for their London Review of Books essay last year on what they called the Israel Lobby, it would have been understandable had they crawled away to a dark corner of their respective academic institutions to lick their wounds. Their argument that US foreign policy has been distorted by the stultifying power of pro-Israeli groups and individuals was met with a firestorm of protest that has smouldered ever since.
The authors were assailed with headlines such as the Washington Post’s: “Yes, it’s anti-semitic.” The neocon pundit William Kristol accused them in the Wall Street Journal of “anti-Judaism” while the New York Sun linked them with the white supremacist David Duke.
The row became a focal point of a much wider debate about the limits of permitted criticism of the state of Israel and its American-based supporters that has ensnared several academics and writers, including a former president. Jimmy Carter was castigated earlier this year when he published a plea for a renewed engagement in the Middle-East peace process under the admittedly provocative title, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. He was labelled an anti-semitic “Jew hater” and even a Nazi sympathiser. Meanwhile, a British-born historian at New York University, Tony Judt, has been warned off or disinvited from four academic events in the past year. On one occasion, he was asked to promise not to mention Israel in a speech on the Holocaust. He refused.
Naturally, much of the backlash targeted Mearsheimer and Walt personally and ignored what they actually said.
Mearsheimer and Walt have now come out with a book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, making the same argument.
As night follows day, the dispute has started anew. The New York Sun has dedicated a section of its website to the controversy; Dershowitz has revved up again, calling the book “a bigoted attack on the American Jewish community”; and Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, has gone to the trouble of writing his own book in riposte - and it’s in the bookshops a week before The Israel Lobby appears. …
…But the authors have brought into the open aspects of American intellectual life that needed airing. They cast light on the overweening activities of specific pro-Israeli groups, most importantly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Aipac is a self-avowed lobby (it calls itself America’s pro-Israel lobby) and has been ranked the second most powerful such body in the US. With a staff of more than 150 and a budget of $60m, it wields extensive influence among Congressmen, working to ensure criticism of Israel is rarely aired on Capitol Hill. The Guardian invited it to comment, but it declined.
Though Foxman insists the furore is proof that debate is alive and kicking, Walt and Mearsheimer have also put their finger on the limits of acceptable discourse in the US. It is notable that none of the candidates standing for president in 2008 have a word of criticism for Israeli state behaviour; this week Barack Obama pulled an advert for his campaign from the Amazon page selling The Israel Lobby, denouncing the book as “just wrong”.
So what happened to America’s commitment to free speech, the First Amendment? “We knew from De Tocqueville this country is driven by conformity,” Judt says. “The law can’t make people speak out - it can only prevent people from stopping free speech. What’s happened is not censorship, but self-censorship.” Judt believes that a few well-organised groups including Aipac have succeeded in proscribing debate. He recalls a prominent Democratic senator confiding to him that he would never criticise Israel in public. “He told me that if he did so, for the rest of his career he would never be able to get a majority for what he cared about. He would be cut off at the knees.”
In the final chapter of the book, Walt and Mearsheimer make a shopping list of reforms. They call for: a two-state solution to the Middle East crisis; greater separation of US foreign policy from Israel for both nations’ sake; and campaign finance reform to reduce the power of pro-Israeli groups.
Nothing outlandish, or even controversial, there. Coming at the end of such a bumpy ride of claim and counter-claim, the conclusion feels almost disappointingly gentle. That in itself bears eloquent witness to the state of affairs in America today, where thoughts considered unremarkable elsewhere are deemed beyond the pale.
I haven’t read Walt and Mearsheimer’s London Review of Books article or their book, and I’m not going to endorse either sight unseen. I’m just saying I know a mob when I see it.
Although one never knows what’s in another person’s heart, I would take people like Donohue and Malkin more seriously if I saw an occasional spark of genuine piety or devotion in them. I believe that for them and for many allegedly “religious” Americans, religion is merely a matter of tribal loyalty. And I don’t care if you’re Christian, Muslim, Jew, or Buddhist; when religion is merely part of your tribal identity, it’s a piss-poor excuse for religion.
Also at The Guardian, Andrew Brown writes,
The point about theological disagreement is that it is almost entirely arbitrary. Perhaps, among philosophers trained in the discipline, there are rules of argument. But it is not philosophers we have to fear; and theological disputes certainly become entirely arbitrary at those unhappy times when they become really popular, which is to say divisive. The more arcane a theological point can be, the better it will serve as a tribal rallying point.
This isn’t because theology is wicked, but because people are.
If we see politics as essentially a matter of conflict between shifting coalitions, one of the functions of religious argument is to strengthen and enlarge your own coalition in a way that pure politics, with their suggestion of grubby self-interest and compromise, just won’t do. Appeals to theology function to make your position inflexible when it needs be, because they are by definition appealing to a supreme value; but they can also have the opposite effect, when surrender becomes inevitable, they have the further advantage over merely political claims that the sacred text can be reinterpreted without losing any of its immemorial authority. Look at the role that Christianity played first in justifying apartheid, and then in proving the need to demolish it.
All these are good reasons, perhaps, for liberal democracies to be suspicious of political movements animated by theology. But they are absolutely not reasons to suppose that religious belief will shrivel, or that it is irrational. If it is true that appeals to the sacred are among the most effective political technologies mankind has ever stumbled on, no Darwinian should expect them to be replaced by less effective pieties.
This takes us back to my original point about the misuse of scripture. People who are desperate to defend whatever conceptual boxes they live in will grab at anything for support. Religion can be the ideal crutch, because it is both infinitely malleable and infinitely authoritative. I believe most of the world’s Malkins, Donohues, etc. would lose all interest in religion if it stopped reinforcing their bigotries. And if that ever happened, they’d find another crutch.
Spotlight
— Next Page »
February 3, 2008
December 4, 2007
Mike Gravel ad: Power to the People
Some are calling it the best political ad ever (they probably never saw the “Daisy” ad). While I think it hits some high notes, it is weird to see my favorite cranky old man - Mike Gravel, hammering the words out - while surrounded by images and music inspired by the 1960s. (Is that how I look to the young people around me?). Enjoy.
Spotlight
November 26, 2007
November 14, 2007
Why You Have To Be Brave To Live Here
Stephanie Strom writes for the New York Times:
In the genteel world of bridge, disputes are usually handled quietly and rarely involve issues of national policy. But in a fight reminiscent of the brouhaha over an anti-Bush statement by Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks in 2003, a team of women who represented the United States at the world bridge championships in Shanghai last month is facing sanctions, including a yearlong ban from competition, for a spur-of-the-moment protest.
At issue is a crudely lettered sign, scribbled on the back of a menu, that was held up at an awards dinner and read, “We did not vote for Bush.”
By e-mail, angry bridge players have accused the women of “treason” and “sedition.”
Judging by Memeorandum, this is the hottest news item on the blogosphere right now. The wingnuts are spewing about Bush Derangement Syndrome. “Shut up and play cards” is a common suggestion.
The players have been stunned by the reaction to what they saw as a spontaneous gesture, “a moment of levity,” said Gail Greenberg, the team’s nonplaying captain and winner of 11 world championships.
“What we were trying to say, not to Americans but to our friends from other countries, was that we understand that they are questioning and critical of what our country is doing these days, and we want you to know that we, too, are critical,” Ms. Greenberg said, stressing that she was speaking for herself and not her six teammates.
The controversy has gone global, with the French team offering support for its American counterparts.
“By trying to address these issues in a nonviolent, nonthreatening and lighthearted manner,” the French team wrote in by e-mail to the federation’s board and others, “you were doing only what women of the world have always tried to do when opposing the folly of men who have lost their perspective of reality.”
Jimmie at the Sundries Shack disagrees.
What these ladies should have done is reminded the Bush-haters that they were at a bridge tournament and not a political convention and that good manners prohibit the discussion of politics at a table where it is not welcome. I’m fairly sure that reminding your fellow bridge players of their manners would have solved the problem.
Then you beat the stuffing out of them and taunt them relentlessly from the winners’ podium. Maybe you even stack the losers up in a pyramid and have one of your team point at them and laugh while you take pictures.
I assume that last bit was another attempt at levity. But what this tells me is that wingnuts don’t get out much. These days, for Americans, to go abroad is to be treated with, at the very least, caution. We may look normal on the surface, but at the least provocation we may grow tusks and root up the shrubberies.
But these ladies appear to have run into some outright hostility, and they were trying to diffuse the situation. Any emotionally mature person might have done the same thing, which is why wingnuts don’t understand it.
Did they not notice they were playing cards in Communist China?
China- The same country that harvests prisoner’s body organs- The same country that jails Christians and people of faith- The same country that murdered 30-40 million of its own citizens less than 50 years ago.
Do these pampered loons have any perspective of history?
Standard wingnut moral relativism — whatever we do is OK, because China is worse. But in the real world, people who claim a higher standard had better live up to it or face the snarking.
The bridge lady might have written this on her menu instead:
It is not fair for bridge players to criticize GWB. He exemplifies something essential to playing every hand of bridge.
The dummy.
But what does it say about a nation that allows a dummy to be its head of state for eight years?
Spotlight
November 6, 2007
MSNBC: Going Our Way?
Jacques Steinberg (great name!) writes in today’s New York Times that MSNBC wants to create a nightime lineup that liberals can love. I’m not sure they’ve figured out how to do this, however.
Riding a ratings wave from “Countdown With Keith Olbermann,” a program that takes strong issue with the Bush administration, MSNBC is increasingly seeking to showcase its nighttime lineup as a welcome haven for viewers of a similar mind.
Lest there be any doubt that the cable channel believes there is ratings gold in shows that criticize the administration with the same vigor with which Fox News’s hosts often champion it, two NBC executives acknowledged yesterday that they were talking to Rosie O’Donnell about a prime-time show on MSNBC.
Um, Rosie O’Donnell? She raised viewership while she was on “The View,” Steinberg says. Yeah, but that was daytime. I agree with Jeralyn that Rosie would be a huge mistake. One of Jeralyn’s commenters suggested either David Schuster or Rachel Maddow. My only objection is that if David Schuster becomes a regular program host he’ll have less time for reporting.
But even without Ms. O’Donnell, MSNBC already presents a three-hour block of nighttime talk — Chris Matthews’s “Hardball” at 7, Mr. Olbermann at 8, and “Live With Dan Abrams” at 9 — in which the White House takes a regular beating. The one early-evening program on MSNBC that is often most sympathetic to the administration, “Tucker” with Tucker Carlson at 6 p.m., is in real danger of being canceled, said one NBC executive, who, like those who spoke of Ms. O’Donnell, would do so only on condition of anonymity.
Well, OK, Carlson is a complete waste of time. That’s the one time slot O’Donnell might improve.
Having a prime-time lineup that tilts ever more demonstrably to the left could be risky for General Electric, MSNBC’s parent company, which is subject to legislation and regulation far afield of the cable landscape. Officials at MSNBC emphasize that they never set out to create a liberal version of Fox News.
Note that Faux News, which is nothing but the propaganda arm of the GOP, doesn’t have to worry about legislation and regulation.
The NBC executive in charge of MSNBC, Phil Griffin, says that the cable channel didn’t set out to favor any political position. He implies the apparent move to the left is being driven by ratings. I suspect that’s true. For years they tried to compete with Faux News by being Faux News Lite. Olbermann has showed them the real way to compete is offering viewers something they can’t see on Faux News. Like, you know, truth and facts and stuff.
MSNBC’s other evening stars, Chris “Tweety” Matthews and Dan Abrams, are hardly fellow travelers of Noam Chomsky, and both still give plenty of time to right-wing mouthpieces. I find Abrams less annoying than Matthews, however. Those of you who miss Joe Scarborough (anybody?) probably already know he moved to mornings awhile back.
Meanwhile, at the Los Angeles Times Jonah Goldberg laments that “fake news,” a la Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, is becoming the new standard in news reporting.
Indeed, while the network news broadcasts are sustained by the consumers of denture cream, adult diapers and pharmacological marital aides, it’s “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” that have a grip on the hip, iPhone crowd. And plenty of those younger viewers seem to believe that they can deduce what’s going on in the real world from jokes on a fake newscast. It’s no longer funny because it’s true. It’s true because it’s funny.
He had it right the first time — it’s funny because it’s true. Great satire functions by cutting through sugar-coatings and qualifiers to find the absurdities inherent in unvarnished truth. Satirists don’t make up jokes. They reveal The Joke.
For example, in the next paragraph, Jonah blames the problems of modern journalism on the old TV sitcom “Murphy Brown.”
When Brown had a baby out of wedlock, Vice President Dan Quayle criticized the writers of the show. Liberals then reacted as though Quayle had insulted a real person. Ever since, journalists and politicians have been playing themselves in movies and TV series, perhaps trying to disprove the cliche that Washington is Hollywood for ugly people.
He’s serious, mind you, and there’s The Joke. You can’t make this shit up. I couldn’t, anyway.
Spotlight
October 27, 2007
Saturday Funnies
Bill Maher’s “New Rules”:
Sad that the best political commentary is from comedians, on cable, and not the free airwaves. One quick barb:
On the flap by conservatives over Dumbledore’s sexual orientation: “If I had the slightest interest in homosexuals with powers, I’d BE a Republican!”
But it’s even better than that - Enjoy.
Spotlight
October 15, 2007
Malkin Quits O’Reilly Factor
Giraldo Rivera was mean to her. Poor baby. See also Tbogg and Gavin.
There is speculation that the Powers That Be of the Right see her as a liability, particularly after her unhinged performance over the Frost family (which goes on, unabated, on her blog), and she was encouraged to resign. Unless there’s a new twist I don’t know about — it’s not like I actually watch Faux Snooze — the Rivera flap happened over a month ago. Why quit now?
Update: I hope somebody posts a video of what Olbermann said. Hysterical.
Spotlight
September 15, 2007
Tribal Loyalty and Free Expression
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about the role of scripture in either causing or justifying armed conflicts around the planet. The “hook” for the post was an article by a Turkish Muslim who argued that Muslim extremists don’t learn to hate from reading the Koran. They hate, and then they cherry pick words out of the Koran to justify their hatred. I took his word on this, because I’m unfamiliar with the Koran.
I’ve seen the same phenomenon elsewhere. Propagandists on “our” side like to cherry-pick verses from the Koran to argue that Islam teaches hatred. Muslim propagandists have have cranked out similar hate material about Jews. People hostile to Christianity cherry-pick verses from the New Testament to argue that Jesus was some sort of bloodthirsty rabble rouser. Interestingly, fundies use these same verses to justify their bigotry toward everyone who isn’t Them, homosexuals in particular.
I also once got an email from an atheist who had pulled a verse from the murky depths of early Sanskrit Buddhist texts — possibly a bad translation — to inform me that Buddhism teaches that women cannot enter Nirvana. My understanding is that no individual of whatever gender can “enter” Nirvana, however, so I’m not worried about gender bias in the dharmakaya. (See, for example, the Diamond Sutra, section III.)
Anyway, one commenter to the scripture post concluded I was either taking sides with or making excuses for Muslims. In fact, the only “side” I was taking is that people around the planet misuse scripture to justify their hatred and bigotry. Essentially, this individual mistook objectivity for “taking sides.” That’s fairly common with bigots. If you aren’t avowedly with them, they assume you’re “for” the other side. And attempting to understand what motivates The Enemy is tantamount to making excuses.
A couple of days ago Glenn Greenwald wrote a post called “Selective defenders of free expression,” pointing out that wingnuts promote anti-Muslim expression but try to suppress anti-Christian expression. A comment by Kathy Griffith Griffin — “suck it, Jesus” — has been cut from a pre-taped telecast of the Emmy Awards show after Catholic crusader Bill Donohue threw a fit about it. Donohue still wants Griffith Griffin to apologize to Christians. We can only hope he holds his breath until she does.
Anyway, Kathryn Jean Lopez at the Corner celebrated the “victory over Kathy Griffin’s mouth.” Meanwhile, Lulu and other righties are still flogging the Mohammad cartoon controversy, demanding that mostly crude and hateful depictions of Mohammad not be surpressed.
I’m not surprised by, and not really critical of, Fox’s decision to cut Kathy Griffin’s comment from the show. Commercial publishers and entertainment outlets often cut material they think might offend consumers or advertisers. By the same token, however, Michelle Malkin has no right to demand a newspaper publish anything it judges not to be fit for publishing.
About a year ago Little Lulu was up in arms because the Berlin Opera had canceled a production of Mozart’s Idomeneo that was disrespectful of Mohammad and might have given offense to Muslims. “Jihadists hate Western art and music,” she said. But last March she crusaded against a sculpture that she decided — purely a matter of opinion — was disrespectful of Jesus. Lulu doesn’t think much of Western art either, I guess.
This nation is being jerked around by brute mob hysteria wrapped in sanctimony, and I’m damn sick of it. Ed Pilkington writes in today’s Guardian:
Given the reception John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt received for their London Review of Books essay last year on what they called the Israel Lobby, it would have been understandable had they crawled away to a dark corner of their respective academic institutions to lick their wounds. Their argument that US foreign policy has been distorted by the stultifying power of pro-Israeli groups and individuals was met with a firestorm of protest that has smouldered ever since.
The authors were assailed with headlines such as the Washington Post’s: “Yes, it’s anti-semitic.” The neocon pundit William Kristol accused them in the Wall Street Journal of “anti-Judaism” while the New York Sun linked them with the white supremacist David Duke.
The row became a focal point of a much wider debate about the limits of permitted criticism of the state of Israel and its American-based supporters that has ensnared several academics and writers, including a former president. Jimmy Carter was castigated earlier this year when he published a plea for a renewed engagement in the Middle-East peace process under the admittedly provocative title, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. He was labelled an anti-semitic “Jew hater” and even a Nazi sympathiser. Meanwhile, a British-born historian at New York University, Tony Judt, has been warned off or disinvited from four academic events in the past year. On one occasion, he was asked to promise not to mention Israel in a speech on the Holocaust. He refused.
Naturally, much of the backlash targeted Mearsheimer and Walt personally and ignored what they actually said.
Mearsheimer and Walt have now come out with a book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, making the same argument.
As night follows day, the dispute has started anew. The New York Sun has dedicated a section of its website to the controversy; Dershowitz has revved up again, calling the book “a bigoted attack on the American Jewish community”; and Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, has gone to the trouble of writing his own book in riposte - and it’s in the bookshops a week before The Israel Lobby appears. …
…But the authors have brought into the open aspects of American intellectual life that needed airing. They cast light on the overweening activities of specific pro-Israeli groups, most importantly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Aipac is a self-avowed lobby (it calls itself America’s pro-Israel lobby) and has been ranked the second most powerful such body in the US. With a staff of more than 150 and a budget of $60m, it wields extensive influence among Congressmen, working to ensure criticism of Israel is rarely aired on Capitol Hill. The Guardian invited it to comment, but it declined.
Though Foxman insists the furore is proof that debate is alive and kicking, Walt and Mearsheimer have also put their finger on the limits of acceptable discourse in the US. It is notable that none of the candidates standing for president in 2008 have a word of criticism for Israeli state behaviour; this week Barack Obama pulled an advert for his campaign from the Amazon page selling The Israel Lobby, denouncing the book as “just wrong”.
So what happened to America’s commitment to free speech, the First Amendment? “We knew from De Tocqueville this country is driven by conformity,” Judt says. “The law can’t make people speak out - it can only prevent people from stopping free speech. What’s happened is not censorship, but self-censorship.” Judt believes that a few well-organised groups including Aipac have succeeded in proscribing debate. He recalls a prominent Democratic senator confiding to him that he would never criticise Israel in public. “He told me that if he did so, for the rest of his career he would never be able to get a majority for what he cared about. He would be cut off at the knees.”
In the final chapter of the book, Walt and Mearsheimer make a shopping list of reforms. They call for: a two-state solution to the Middle East crisis; greater separation of US foreign policy from Israel for both nations’ sake; and campaign finance reform to reduce the power of pro-Israeli groups.
Nothing outlandish, or even controversial, there. Coming at the end of such a bumpy ride of claim and counter-claim, the conclusion feels almost disappointingly gentle. That in itself bears eloquent witness to the state of affairs in America today, where thoughts considered unremarkable elsewhere are deemed beyond the pale.
I haven’t read Walt and Mearsheimer’s London Review of Books article or their book, and I’m not going to endorse either sight unseen. I’m just saying I know a mob when I see it.
Although one never knows what’s in another person’s heart, I would take people like Donohue and Malkin more seriously if I saw an occasional spark of genuine piety or devotion in them. I believe that for them and for many allegedly “religious” Americans, religion is merely a matter of tribal loyalty. And I don’t care if you’re Christian, Muslim, Jew, or Buddhist; when religion is merely part of your tribal identity, it’s a piss-poor excuse for religion.
Also at The Guardian, Andrew Brown writes,
The point about theological disagreement is that it is almost entirely arbitrary. Perhaps, among philosophers trained in the discipline, there are rules of argument. But it is not philosophers we have to fear; and theological disputes certainly become entirely arbitrary at those unhappy times when they become really popular, which is to say divisive. The more arcane a theological point can be, the better it will serve as a tribal rallying point.
This isn’t because theology is wicked, but because people are.
If we see politics as essentially a matter of conflict between shifting coalitions, one of the functions of religious argument is to strengthen and enlarge your own coalition in a way that pure politics, with their suggestion of grubby self-interest and compromise, just won’t do. Appeals to theology function to make your position inflexible when it needs be, because they are by definition appealing to a supreme value; but they can also have the opposite effect, when surrender becomes inevitable, they have the further advantage over merely political claims that the sacred text can be reinterpreted without losing any of its immemorial authority. Look at the role that Christianity played first in justifying apartheid, and then in proving the need to demolish it.
All these are good reasons, perhaps, for liberal democracies to be suspicious of political movements animated by theology. But they are absolutely not reasons to suppose that religious belief will shrivel, or that it is irrational. If it is true that appeals to the sacred are among the most effective political technologies mankind has ever stumbled on, no Darwinian should expect them to be replaced by less effective pieties.
This takes us back to my original point about the misuse of scripture. People who are desperate to defend whatever conceptual boxes they live in will grab at anything for support. Religion can be the ideal crutch, because it is both infinitely malleable and infinitely authoritative. I believe most of the world’s Malkins, Donohues, etc. would lose all interest in religion if it stopped reinforcing their bigotries. And if that ever happened, they’d find another crutch.
Spotlight
— Next Page »
Mike Gravel ad: Power to the People
Some are calling it the best political ad ever (they probably never saw the “Daisy” ad). While I think it hits some high notes, it is weird to see my favorite cranky old man - Mike Gravel, hammering the words out - while surrounded by images and music inspired by the 1960s. (Is that how I look to the young people around me?). Enjoy.
November 26, 2007
November 14, 2007
Why You Have To Be Brave To Live Here
Stephanie Strom writes for the New York Times:
In the genteel world of bridge, disputes are usually handled quietly and rarely involve issues of national policy. But in a fight reminiscent of the brouhaha over an anti-Bush statement by Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks in 2003, a team of women who represented the United States at the world bridge championships in Shanghai last month is facing sanctions, including a yearlong ban from competition, for a spur-of-the-moment protest.
At issue is a crudely lettered sign, scribbled on the back of a menu, that was held up at an awards dinner and read, “We did not vote for Bush.”
By e-mail, angry bridge players have accused the women of “treason” and “sedition.”
Judging by Memeorandum, this is the hottest news item on the blogosphere right now. The wingnuts are spewing about Bush Derangement Syndrome. “Shut up and play cards” is a common suggestion.
The players have been stunned by the reaction to what they saw as a spontaneous gesture, “a moment of levity,” said Gail Greenberg, the team’s nonplaying captain and winner of 11 world championships.
“What we were trying to say, not to Americans but to our friends from other countries, was that we understand that they are questioning and critical of what our country is doing these days, and we want you to know that we, too, are critical,” Ms. Greenberg said, stressing that she was speaking for herself and not her six teammates.
The controversy has gone global, with the French team offering support for its American counterparts.
“By trying to address these issues in a nonviolent, nonthreatening and lighthearted manner,” the French team wrote in by e-mail to the federation’s board and others, “you were doing only what women of the world have always tried to do when opposing the folly of men who have lost their perspective of reality.”
Jimmie at the Sundries Shack disagrees.
What these ladies should have done is reminded the Bush-haters that they were at a bridge tournament and not a political convention and that good manners prohibit the discussion of politics at a table where it is not welcome. I’m fairly sure that reminding your fellow bridge players of their manners would have solved the problem.
Then you beat the stuffing out of them and taunt them relentlessly from the winners’ podium. Maybe you even stack the losers up in a pyramid and have one of your team point at them and laugh while you take pictures.
I assume that last bit was another attempt at levity. But what this tells me is that wingnuts don’t get out much. These days, for Americans, to go abroad is to be treated with, at the very least, caution. We may look normal on the surface, but at the least provocation we may grow tusks and root up the shrubberies.
But these ladies appear to have run into some outright hostility, and they were trying to diffuse the situation. Any emotionally mature person might have done the same thing, which is why wingnuts don’t understand it.
Did they not notice they were playing cards in Communist China?
China- The same country that harvests prisoner’s body organs- The same country that jails Christians and people of faith- The same country that murdered 30-40 million of its own citizens less than 50 years ago.
Do these pampered loons have any perspective of history?
Standard wingnut moral relativism — whatever we do is OK, because China is worse. But in the real world, people who claim a higher standard had better live up to it or face the snarking.
The bridge lady might have written this on her menu instead:
It is not fair for bridge players to criticize GWB. He exemplifies something essential to playing every hand of bridge.
The dummy.
But what does it say about a nation that allows a dummy to be its head of state for eight years?
Spotlight
November 6, 2007
MSNBC: Going Our Way?
Jacques Steinberg (great name!) writes in today’s New York Times that MSNBC wants to create a nightime lineup that liberals can love. I’m not sure they’ve figured out how to do this, however.
Riding a ratings wave from “Countdown With Keith Olbermann,” a program that takes strong issue with the Bush administration, MSNBC is increasingly seeking to showcase its nighttime lineup as a welcome haven for viewers of a similar mind.
Lest there be any doubt that the cable channel believes there is ratings gold in shows that criticize the administration with the same vigor with which Fox News’s hosts often champion it, two NBC executives acknowledged yesterday that they were talking to Rosie O’Donnell about a prime-time show on MSNBC.
Um, Rosie O’Donnell? She raised viewership while she was on “The View,” Steinberg says. Yeah, but that was daytime. I agree with Jeralyn that Rosie would be a huge mistake. One of Jeralyn’s commenters suggested either David Schuster or Rachel Maddow. My only objection is that if David Schuster becomes a regular program host he’ll have less time for reporting.
But even without Ms. O’Donnell, MSNBC already presents a three-hour block of nighttime talk — Chris Matthews’s “Hardball” at 7, Mr. Olbermann at 8, and “Live With Dan Abrams” at 9 — in which the White House takes a regular beating. The one early-evening program on MSNBC that is often most sympathetic to the administration, “Tucker” with Tucker Carlson at 6 p.m., is in real danger of being canceled, said one NBC executive, who, like those who spoke of Ms. O’Donnell, would do so only on condition of anonymity.
Well, OK, Carlson is a complete waste of time. That’s the one time slot O’Donnell might improve.
Having a prime-time lineup that tilts ever more demonstrably to the left could be risky for General Electric, MSNBC’s parent company, which is subject to legislation and regulation far afield of the cable landscape. Officials at MSNBC emphasize that they never set out to create a liberal version of Fox News.
Note that Faux News, which is nothing but the propaganda arm of the GOP, doesn’t have to worry about legislation and regulation.
The NBC executive in charge of MSNBC, Phil Griffin, says that the cable channel didn’t set out to favor any political position. He implies the apparent move to the left is being driven by ratings. I suspect that’s true. For years they tried to compete with Faux News by being Faux News Lite. Olbermann has showed them the real way to compete is offering viewers something they can’t see on Faux News. Like, you know, truth and facts and stuff.
MSNBC’s other evening stars, Chris “Tweety” Matthews and Dan Abrams, are hardly fellow travelers of Noam Chomsky, and both still give plenty of time to right-wing mouthpieces. I find Abrams less annoying than Matthews, however. Those of you who miss Joe Scarborough (anybody?) probably already know he moved to mornings awhile back.
Meanwhile, at the Los Angeles Times Jonah Goldberg laments that “fake news,” a la Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, is becoming the new standard in news reporting.
Indeed, while the network news broadcasts are sustained by the consumers of denture cream, adult diapers and pharmacological marital aides, it’s “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” that have a grip on the hip, iPhone crowd. And plenty of those younger viewers seem to believe that they can deduce what’s going on in the real world from jokes on a fake newscast. It’s no longer funny because it’s true. It’s true because it’s funny.
He had it right the first time — it’s funny because it’s true. Great satire functions by cutting through sugar-coatings and qualifiers to find the absurdities inherent in unvarnished truth. Satirists don’t make up jokes. They reveal The Joke.
For example, in the next paragraph, Jonah blames the problems of modern journalism on the old TV sitcom “Murphy Brown.”
When Brown had a baby out of wedlock, Vice President Dan Quayle criticized the writers of the show. Liberals then reacted as though Quayle had insulted a real person. Ever since, journalists and politicians have been playing themselves in movies and TV series, perhaps trying to disprove the cliche that Washington is Hollywood for ugly people.
He’s serious, mind you, and there’s The Joke. You can’t make this shit up. I couldn’t, anyway.
Spotlight
October 27, 2007
Saturday Funnies
Bill Maher’s “New Rules”:
Sad that the best political commentary is from comedians, on cable, and not the free airwaves. One quick barb:
On the flap by conservatives over Dumbledore’s sexual orientation: “If I had the slightest interest in homosexuals with powers, I’d BE a Republican!”
But it’s even better than that - Enjoy.
Spotlight
October 15, 2007
Malkin Quits O’Reilly Factor
Giraldo Rivera was mean to her. Poor baby. See also Tbogg and Gavin.
There is speculation that the Powers That Be of the Right see her as a liability, particularly after her unhinged performance over the Frost family (which goes on, unabated, on her blog), and she was encouraged to resign. Unless there’s a new twist I don’t know about — it’s not like I actually watch Faux Snooze — the Rivera flap happened over a month ago. Why quit now?
Update: I hope somebody posts a video of what Olbermann said. Hysterical.
Spotlight
September 15, 2007
Tribal Loyalty and Free Expression
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about the role of scripture in either causing or justifying armed conflicts around the planet. The “hook” for the post was an article by a Turkish Muslim who argued that Muslim extremists don’t learn to hate from reading the Koran. They hate, and then they cherry pick words out of the Koran to justify their hatred. I took his word on this, because I’m unfamiliar with the Koran.
I’ve seen the same phenomenon elsewhere. Propagandists on “our” side like to cherry-pick verses from the Koran to argue that Islam teaches hatred. Muslim propagandists have have cranked out similar hate material about Jews. People hostile to Christianity cherry-pick verses from the New Testament to argue that Jesus was some sort of bloodthirsty rabble rouser. Interestingly, fundies use these same verses to justify their bigotry toward everyone who isn’t Them, homosexuals in particular.
I also once got an email from an atheist who had pulled a verse from the murky depths of early Sanskrit Buddhist texts — possibly a bad translation — to inform me that Buddhism teaches that women cannot enter Nirvana. My understanding is that no individual of whatever gender can “enter” Nirvana, however, so I’m not worried about gender bias in the dharmakaya. (See, for example, the Diamond Sutra, section III.)
Anyway, one commenter to the scripture post concluded I was either taking sides with or making excuses for Muslims. In fact, the only “side” I was taking is that people around the planet misuse scripture to justify their hatred and bigotry. Essentially, this individual mistook objectivity for “taking sides.” That’s fairly common with bigots. If you aren’t avowedly with them, they assume you’re “for” the other side. And attempting to understand what motivates The Enemy is tantamount to making excuses.
A couple of days ago Glenn Greenwald wrote a post called “Selective defenders of free expression,” pointing out that wingnuts promote anti-Muslim expression but try to suppress anti-Christian expression. A comment by Kathy Griffith Griffin — “suck it, Jesus” — has been cut from a pre-taped telecast of the Emmy Awards show after Catholic crusader Bill Donohue threw a fit about it. Donohue still wants Griffith Griffin to apologize to Christians. We can only hope he holds his breath until she does.
Anyway, Kathryn Jean Lopez at the Corner celebrated the “victory over Kathy Griffin’s mouth.” Meanwhile, Lulu and other righties are still flogging the Mohammad cartoon controversy, demanding that mostly crude and hateful depictions of Mohammad not be surpressed.
I’m not surprised by, and not really critical of, Fox’s decision to cut Kathy Griffin’s comment from the show. Commercial publishers and entertainment outlets often cut material they think might offend consumers or advertisers. By the same token, however, Michelle Malkin has no right to demand a newspaper publish anything it judges not to be fit for publishing.
About a year ago Little Lulu was up in arms because the Berlin Opera had canceled a production of Mozart’s Idomeneo that was disrespectful of Mohammad and might have given offense to Muslims. “Jihadists hate Western art and music,” she said. But last March she crusaded against a sculpture that she decided — purely a matter of opinion — was disrespectful of Jesus. Lulu doesn’t think much of Western art either, I guess.
This nation is being jerked around by brute mob hysteria wrapped in sanctimony, and I’m damn sick of it. Ed Pilkington writes in today’s Guardian:
Given the reception John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt received for their London Review of Books essay last year on what they called the Israel Lobby, it would have been understandable had they crawled away to a dark corner of their respective academic institutions to lick their wounds. Their argument that US foreign policy has been distorted by the stultifying power of pro-Israeli groups and individuals was met with a firestorm of protest that has smouldered ever since.
The authors were assailed with headlines such as the Washington Post’s: “Yes, it’s anti-semitic.” The neocon pundit William Kristol accused them in the Wall Street Journal of “anti-Judaism” while the New York Sun linked them with the white supremacist David Duke.
The row became a focal point of a much wider debate about the limits of permitted criticism of the state of Israel and its American-based supporters that has ensnared several academics and writers, including a former president. Jimmy Carter was castigated earlier this year when he published a plea for a renewed engagement in the Middle-East peace process under the admittedly provocative title, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. He was labelled an anti-semitic “Jew hater” and even a Nazi sympathiser. Meanwhile, a British-born historian at New York University, Tony Judt, has been warned off or disinvited from four academic events in the past year. On one occasion, he was asked to promise not to mention Israel in a speech on the Holocaust. He refused.
Naturally, much of the backlash targeted Mearsheimer and Walt personally and ignored what they actually said.
Mearsheimer and Walt have now come out with a book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, making the same argument.
As night follows day, the dispute has started anew. The New York Sun has dedicated a section of its website to the controversy; Dershowitz has revved up again, calling the book “a bigoted attack on the American Jewish community”; and Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, has gone to the trouble of writing his own book in riposte - and it’s in the bookshops a week before The Israel Lobby appears. …
…But the authors have brought into the open aspects of American intellectual life that needed airing. They cast light on the overweening activities of specific pro-Israeli groups, most importantly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Aipac is a self-avowed lobby (it calls itself America’s pro-Israel lobby) and has been ranked the second most powerful such body in the US. With a staff of more than 150 and a budget of $60m, it wields extensive influence among Congressmen, working to ensure criticism of Israel is rarely aired on Capitol Hill. The Guardian invited it to comment, but it declined.
Though Foxman insists the furore is proof that debate is alive and kicking, Walt and Mearsheimer have also put their finger on the limits of acceptable discourse in the US. It is notable that none of the candidates standing for president in 2008 have a word of criticism for Israeli state behaviour; this week Barack Obama pulled an advert for his campaign from the Amazon page selling The Israel Lobby, denouncing the book as “just wrong”.
So what happened to America’s commitment to free speech, the First Amendment? “We knew from De Tocqueville this country is driven by conformity,” Judt says. “The law can’t make people speak out - it can only prevent people from stopping free speech. What’s happened is not censorship, but self-censorship.” Judt believes that a few well-organised groups including Aipac have succeeded in proscribing debate. He recalls a prominent Democratic senator confiding to him that he would never criticise Israel in public. “He told me that if he did so, for the rest of his career he would never be able to get a majority for what he cared about. He would be cut off at the knees.”
In the final chapter of the book, Walt and Mearsheimer make a shopping list of reforms. They call for: a two-state solution to the Middle East crisis; greater separation of US foreign policy from Israel for both nations’ sake; and campaign finance reform to reduce the power of pro-Israeli groups.
Nothing outlandish, or even controversial, there. Coming at the end of such a bumpy ride of claim and counter-claim, the conclusion feels almost disappointingly gentle. That in itself bears eloquent witness to the state of affairs in America today, where thoughts considered unremarkable elsewhere are deemed beyond the pale.
I haven’t read Walt and Mearsheimer’s London Review of Books article or their book, and I’m not going to endorse either sight unseen. I’m just saying I know a mob when I see it.
Although one never knows what’s in another person’s heart, I would take people like Donohue and Malkin more seriously if I saw an occasional spark of genuine piety or devotion in them. I believe that for them and for many allegedly “religious” Americans, religion is merely a matter of tribal loyalty. And I don’t care if you’re Christian, Muslim, Jew, or Buddhist; when religion is merely part of your tribal identity, it’s a piss-poor excuse for religion.
Also at The Guardian, Andrew Brown writes,
The point about theological disagreement is that it is almost entirely arbitrary. Perhaps, among philosophers trained in the discipline, there are rules of argument. But it is not philosophers we have to fear; and theological disputes certainly become entirely arbitrary at those unhappy times when they become really popular, which is to say divisive. The more arcane a theological point can be, the better it will serve as a tribal rallying point.
This isn’t because theology is wicked, but because people are.
If we see politics as essentially a matter of conflict between shifting coalitions, one of the functions of religious argument is to strengthen and enlarge your own coalition in a way that pure politics, with their suggestion of grubby self-interest and compromise, just won’t do. Appeals to theology function to make your position inflexible when it needs be, because they are by definition appealing to a supreme value; but they can also have the opposite effect, when surrender becomes inevitable, they have the further advantage over merely political claims that the sacred text can be reinterpreted without losing any of its immemorial authority. Look at the role that Christianity played first in justifying apartheid, and then in proving the need to demolish it.
All these are good reasons, perhaps, for liberal democracies to be suspicious of political movements animated by theology. But they are absolutely not reasons to suppose that religious belief will shrivel, or that it is irrational. If it is true that appeals to the sacred are among the most effective political technologies mankind has ever stumbled on, no Darwinian should expect them to be replaced by less effective pieties.
This takes us back to my original point about the misuse of scripture. People who are desperate to defend whatever conceptual boxes they live in will grab at anything for support. Religion can be the ideal crutch, because it is both infinitely malleable and infinitely authoritative. I believe most of the world’s Malkins, Donohues, etc. would lose all interest in religion if it stopped reinforcing their bigotries. And if that ever happened, they’d find another crutch.
Spotlight
— Next Page »
Why You Have To Be Brave To Live Here
Stephanie Strom writes for the New York Times:
In the genteel world of bridge, disputes are usually handled quietly and rarely involve issues of national policy. But in a fight reminiscent of the brouhaha over an anti-Bush statement by Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks in 2003, a team of women who represented the United States at the world bridge championships in Shanghai last month is facing sanctions, including a yearlong ban from competition, for a spur-of-the-moment protest.
At issue is a crudely lettered sign, scribbled on the back of a menu, that was held up at an awards dinner and read, “We did not vote for Bush.”
By e-mail, angry bridge players have accused the women of “treason” and “sedition.”
Judging by Memeorandum, this is the hottest news item on the blogosphere right now. The wingnuts are spewing about Bush Derangement Syndrome. “Shut up and play cards” is a common suggestion.
The players have been stunned by the reaction to what they saw as a spontaneous gesture, “a moment of levity,” said Gail Greenberg, the team’s nonplaying captain and winner of 11 world championships.
“What we were trying to say, not to Americans but to our friends from other countries, was that we understand that they are questioning and critical of what our country is doing these days, and we want you to know that we, too, are critical,” Ms. Greenberg said, stressing that she was speaking for herself and not her six teammates.
The controversy has gone global, with the French team offering support for its American counterparts.
“By trying to address these issues in a nonviolent, nonthreatening and lighthearted manner,” the French team wrote in by e-mail to the federation’s board and others, “you were doing only what women of the world have always tried to do when opposing the folly of men who have lost their perspective of reality.”
Jimmie at the Sundries Shack disagrees.
What these ladies should have done is reminded the Bush-haters that they were at a bridge tournament and not a political convention and that good manners prohibit the discussion of politics at a table where it is not welcome. I’m fairly sure that reminding your fellow bridge players of their manners would have solved the problem.
Then you beat the stuffing out of them and taunt them relentlessly from the winners’ podium. Maybe you even stack the losers up in a pyramid and have one of your team point at them and laugh while you take pictures.
I assume that last bit was another attempt at levity. But what this tells me is that wingnuts don’t get out much. These days, for Americans, to go abroad is to be treated with, at the very least, caution. We may look normal on the surface, but at the least provocation we may grow tusks and root up the shrubberies.
But these ladies appear to have run into some outright hostility, and they were trying to diffuse the situation. Any emotionally mature person might have done the same thing, which is why wingnuts don’t understand it.
Did they not notice they were playing cards in Communist China?
China- The same country that harvests prisoner’s body organs- The same country that jails Christians and people of faith- The same country that murdered 30-40 million of its own citizens less than 50 years ago.
Do these pampered loons have any perspective of history?
Standard wingnut moral relativism — whatever we do is OK, because China is worse. But in the real world, people who claim a higher standard had better live up to it or face the snarking.
The bridge lady might have written this on her menu instead:
It is not fair for bridge players to criticize GWB. He exemplifies something essential to playing every hand of bridge.
The dummy.
But what does it say about a nation that allows a dummy to be its head of state for eight years?
November 6, 2007
MSNBC: Going Our Way?
Jacques Steinberg (great name!) writes in today’s New York Times that MSNBC wants to create a nightime lineup that liberals can love. I’m not sure they’ve figured out how to do this, however.
Riding a ratings wave from “Countdown With Keith Olbermann,” a program that takes strong issue with the Bush administration, MSNBC is increasingly seeking to showcase its nighttime lineup as a welcome haven for viewers of a similar mind.
Lest there be any doubt that the cable channel believes there is ratings gold in shows that criticize the administration with the same vigor with which Fox News’s hosts often champion it, two NBC executives acknowledged yesterday that they were talking to Rosie O’Donnell about a prime-time show on MSNBC.
Um, Rosie O’Donnell? She raised viewership while she was on “The View,” Steinberg says. Yeah, but that was daytime. I agree with Jeralyn that Rosie would be a huge mistake. One of Jeralyn’s commenters suggested either David Schuster or Rachel Maddow. My only objection is that if David Schuster becomes a regular program host he’ll have less time for reporting.
But even without Ms. O’Donnell, MSNBC already presents a three-hour block of nighttime talk — Chris Matthews’s “Hardball” at 7, Mr. Olbermann at 8, and “Live With Dan Abrams” at 9 — in which the White House takes a regular beating. The one early-evening program on MSNBC that is often most sympathetic to the administration, “Tucker” with Tucker Carlson at 6 p.m., is in real danger of being canceled, said one NBC executive, who, like those who spoke of Ms. O’Donnell, would do so only on condition of anonymity.
Well, OK, Carlson is a complete waste of time. That’s the one time slot O’Donnell might improve.
Having a prime-time lineup that tilts ever more demonstrably to the left could be risky for General Electric, MSNBC’s parent company, which is subject to legislation and regulation far afield of the cable landscape. Officials at MSNBC emphasize that they never set out to create a liberal version of Fox News.
Note that Faux News, which is nothing but the propaganda arm of the GOP, doesn’t have to worry about legislation and regulation.
The NBC executive in charge of MSNBC, Phil Griffin, says that the cable channel didn’t set out to favor any political position. He implies the apparent move to the left is being driven by ratings. I suspect that’s true. For years they tried to compete with Faux News by being Faux News Lite. Olbermann has showed them the real way to compete is offering viewers something they can’t see on Faux News. Like, you know, truth and facts and stuff.
MSNBC’s other evening stars, Chris “Tweety” Matthews and Dan Abrams, are hardly fellow travelers of Noam Chomsky, and both still give plenty of time to right-wing mouthpieces. I find Abrams less annoying than Matthews, however. Those of you who miss Joe Scarborough (anybody?) probably already know he moved to mornings awhile back.
Meanwhile, at the Los Angeles Times Jonah Goldberg laments that “fake news,” a la Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, is becoming the new standard in news reporting.
Indeed, while the network news broadcasts are sustained by the consumers of denture cream, adult diapers and pharmacological marital aides, it’s “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” that have a grip on the hip, iPhone crowd. And plenty of those younger viewers seem to believe that they can deduce what’s going on in the real world from jokes on a fake newscast. It’s no longer funny because it’s true. It’s true because it’s funny.
He had it right the first time — it’s funny because it’s true. Great satire functions by cutting through sugar-coatings and qualifiers to find the absurdities inherent in unvarnished truth. Satirists don’t make up jokes. They reveal The Joke.
For example, in the next paragraph, Jonah blames the problems of modern journalism on the old TV sitcom “Murphy Brown.”
When Brown had a baby out of wedlock, Vice President Dan Quayle criticized the writers of the show. Liberals then reacted as though Quayle had insulted a real person. Ever since, journalists and politicians have been playing themselves in movies and TV series, perhaps trying to disprove the cliche that Washington is Hollywood for ugly people.
He’s serious, mind you, and there’s The Joke. You can’t make this shit up. I couldn’t, anyway.
Spotlight
October 27, 2007
Saturday Funnies
Bill Maher’s “New Rules”:
Sad that the best political commentary is from comedians, on cable, and not the free airwaves. One quick barb:
On the flap by conservatives over Dumbledore’s sexual orientation: “If I had the slightest interest in homosexuals with powers, I’d BE a Republican!”
But it’s even better than that - Enjoy.
Spotlight
October 15, 2007
Malkin Quits O’Reilly Factor
Giraldo Rivera was mean to her. Poor baby. See also Tbogg and Gavin.
There is speculation that the Powers That Be of the Right see her as a liability, particularly after her unhinged performance over the Frost family (which goes on, unabated, on her blog), and she was encouraged to resign. Unless there’s a new twist I don’t know about — it’s not like I actually watch Faux Snooze — the Rivera flap happened over a month ago. Why quit now?
Update: I hope somebody posts a video of what Olbermann said. Hysterical.
Spotlight
September 15, 2007
Tribal Loyalty and Free Expression
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about the role of scripture in either causing or justifying armed conflicts around the planet. The “hook” for the post was an article by a Turkish Muslim who argued that Muslim extremists don’t learn to hate from reading the Koran. They hate, and then they cherry pick words out of the Koran to justify their hatred. I took his word on this, because I’m unfamiliar with the Koran.
I’ve seen the same phenomenon elsewhere. Propagandists on “our” side like to cherry-pick verses from the Koran to argue that Islam teaches hatred. Muslim propagandists have have cranked out similar hate material about Jews. People hostile to Christianity cherry-pick verses from the New Testament to argue that Jesus was some sort of bloodthirsty rabble rouser. Interestingly, fundies use these same verses to justify their bigotry toward everyone who isn’t Them, homosexuals in particular.
I also once got an email from an atheist who had pulled a verse from the murky depths of early Sanskrit Buddhist texts — possibly a bad translation — to inform me that Buddhism teaches that women cannot enter Nirvana. My understanding is that no individual of whatever gender can “enter” Nirvana, however, so I’m not worried about gender bias in the dharmakaya. (See, for example, the Diamond Sutra, section III.)
Anyway, one commenter to the scripture post concluded I was either taking sides with or making excuses for Muslims. In fact, the only “side” I was taking is that people around the planet misuse scripture to justify their hatred and bigotry. Essentially, this individual mistook objectivity for “taking sides.” That’s fairly common with bigots. If you aren’t avowedly with them, they assume you’re “for” the other side. And attempting to understand what motivates The Enemy is tantamount to making excuses.
A couple of days ago Glenn Greenwald wrote a post called “Selective defenders of free expression,” pointing out that wingnuts promote anti-Muslim expression but try to suppress anti-Christian expression. A comment by Kathy Griffith Griffin — “suck it, Jesus” — has been cut from a pre-taped telecast of the Emmy Awards show after Catholic crusader Bill Donohue threw a fit about it. Donohue still wants Griffith Griffin to apologize to Christians. We can only hope he holds his breath until she does.
Anyway, Kathryn Jean Lopez at the Corner celebrated the “victory over Kathy Griffin’s mouth.” Meanwhile, Lulu and other righties are still flogging the Mohammad cartoon controversy, demanding that mostly crude and hateful depictions of Mohammad not be surpressed.
I’m not surprised by, and not really critical of, Fox’s decision to cut Kathy Griffin’s comment from the show. Commercial publishers and entertainment outlets often cut material they think might offend consumers or advertisers. By the same token, however, Michelle Malkin has no right to demand a newspaper publish anything it judges not to be fit for publishing.
About a year ago Little Lulu was up in arms because the Berlin Opera had canceled a production of Mozart’s Idomeneo that was disrespectful of Mohammad and might have given offense to Muslims. “Jihadists hate Western art and music,” she said. But last March she crusaded against a sculpture that she decided — purely a matter of opinion — was disrespectful of Jesus. Lulu doesn’t think much of Western art either, I guess.
This nation is being jerked around by brute mob hysteria wrapped in sanctimony, and I’m damn sick of it. Ed Pilkington writes in today’s Guardian:
Given the reception John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt received for their London Review of Books essay last year on what they called the Israel Lobby, it would have been understandable had they crawled away to a dark corner of their respective academic institutions to lick their wounds. Their argument that US foreign policy has been distorted by the stultifying power of pro-Israeli groups and individuals was met with a firestorm of protest that has smouldered ever since.
The authors were assailed with headlines such as the Washington Post’s: “Yes, it’s anti-semitic.” The neocon pundit William Kristol accused them in the Wall Street Journal of “anti-Judaism” while the New York Sun linked them with the white supremacist David Duke.
The row became a focal point of a much wider debate about the limits of permitted criticism of the state of Israel and its American-based supporters that has ensnared several academics and writers, including a former president. Jimmy Carter was castigated earlier this year when he published a plea for a renewed engagement in the Middle-East peace process under the admittedly provocative title, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. He was labelled an anti-semitic “Jew hater” and even a Nazi sympathiser. Meanwhile, a British-born historian at New York University, Tony Judt, has been warned off or disinvited from four academic events in the past year. On one occasion, he was asked to promise not to mention Israel in a speech on the Holocaust. He refused.
Naturally, much of the backlash targeted Mearsheimer and Walt personally and ignored what they actually said.
Mearsheimer and Walt have now come out with a book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, making the same argument.
As night follows day, the dispute has started anew. The New York Sun has dedicated a section of its website to the controversy; Dershowitz has revved up again, calling the book “a bigoted attack on the American Jewish community”; and Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, has gone to the trouble of writing his own book in riposte - and it’s in the bookshops a week before The Israel Lobby appears. …
…But the authors have brought into the open aspects of American intellectual life that needed airing. They cast light on the overweening activities of specific pro-Israeli groups, most importantly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Aipac is a self-avowed lobby (it calls itself America’s pro-Israel lobby) and has been ranked the second most powerful such body in the US. With a staff of more than 150 and a budget of $60m, it wields extensive influence among Congressmen, working to ensure criticism of Israel is rarely aired on Capitol Hill. The Guardian invited it to comment, but it declined.
Though Foxman insists the furore is proof that debate is alive and kicking, Walt and Mearsheimer have also put their finger on the limits of acceptable discourse in the US. It is notable that none of the candidates standing for president in 2008 have a word of criticism for Israeli state behaviour; this week Barack Obama pulled an advert for his campaign from the Amazon page selling The Israel Lobby, denouncing the book as “just wrong”.
So what happened to America’s commitment to free speech, the First Amendment? “We knew from De Tocqueville this country is driven by conformity,” Judt says. “The law can’t make people speak out - it can only prevent people from stopping free speech. What’s happened is not censorship, but self-censorship.” Judt believes that a few well-organised groups including Aipac have succeeded in proscribing debate. He recalls a prominent Democratic senator confiding to him that he would never criticise Israel in public. “He told me that if he did so, for the rest of his career he would never be able to get a majority for what he cared about. He would be cut off at the knees.”
In the final chapter of the book, Walt and Mearsheimer make a shopping list of reforms. They call for: a two-state solution to the Middle East crisis; greater separation of US foreign policy from Israel for both nations’ sake; and campaign finance reform to reduce the power of pro-Israeli groups.
Nothing outlandish, or even controversial, there. Coming at the end of such a bumpy ride of claim and counter-claim, the conclusion feels almost disappointingly gentle. That in itself bears eloquent witness to the state of affairs in America today, where thoughts considered unremarkable elsewhere are deemed beyond the pale.
I haven’t read Walt and Mearsheimer’s London Review of Books article or their book, and I’m not going to endorse either sight unseen. I’m just saying I know a mob when I see it.
Although one never knows what’s in another person’s heart, I would take people like Donohue and Malkin more seriously if I saw an occasional spark of genuine piety or devotion in them. I believe that for them and for many allegedly “religious” Americans, religion is merely a matter of tribal loyalty. And I don’t care if you’re Christian, Muslim, Jew, or Buddhist; when religion is merely part of your tribal identity, it’s a piss-poor excuse for religion.
Also at The Guardian, Andrew Brown writes,
The point about theological disagreement is that it is almost entirely arbitrary. Perhaps, among philosophers trained in the discipline, there are rules of argument. But it is not philosophers we have to fear; and theological disputes certainly become entirely arbitrary at those unhappy times when they become really popular, which is to say divisive. The more arcane a theological point can be, the better it will serve as a tribal rallying point.
This isn’t because theology is wicked, but because people are.
If we see politics as essentially a matter of conflict between shifting coalitions, one of the functions of religious argument is to strengthen and enlarge your own coalition in a way that pure politics, with their suggestion of grubby self-interest and compromise, just won’t do. Appeals to theology function to make your position inflexible when it needs be, because they are by definition appealing to a supreme value; but they can also have the opposite effect, when surrender becomes inevitable, they have the further advantage over merely political claims that the sacred text can be reinterpreted without losing any of its immemorial authority. Look at the role that Christianity played first in justifying apartheid, and then in proving the need to demolish it.
All these are good reasons, perhaps, for liberal democracies to be suspicious of political movements animated by theology. But they are absolutely not reasons to suppose that religious belief will shrivel, or that it is irrational. If it is true that appeals to the sacred are among the most effective political technologies mankind has ever stumbled on, no Darwinian should expect them to be replaced by less effective pieties.
This takes us back to my original point about the misuse of scripture. People who are desperate to defend whatever conceptual boxes they live in will grab at anything for support. Religion can be the ideal crutch, because it is both infinitely malleable and infinitely authoritative. I believe most of the world’s Malkins, Donohues, etc. would lose all interest in religion if it stopped reinforcing their bigotries. And if that ever happened, they’d find another crutch.
Spotlight
— Next Page »
MSNBC: Going Our Way?
Jacques Steinberg (great name!) writes in today’s New York Times that MSNBC wants to create a nightime lineup that liberals can love. I’m not sure they’ve figured out how to do this, however.
Riding a ratings wave from “Countdown With Keith Olbermann,” a program that takes strong issue with the Bush administration, MSNBC is increasingly seeking to showcase its nighttime lineup as a welcome haven for viewers of a similar mind.
Lest there be any doubt that the cable channel believes there is ratings gold in shows that criticize the administration with the same vigor with which Fox News’s hosts often champion it, two NBC executives acknowledged yesterday that they were talking to Rosie O’Donnell about a prime-time show on MSNBC.
Um, Rosie O’Donnell? She raised viewership while she was on “The View,” Steinberg says. Yeah, but that was daytime. I agree with Jeralyn that Rosie would be a huge mistake. One of Jeralyn’s commenters suggested either David Schuster or Rachel Maddow. My only objection is that if David Schuster becomes a regular program host he’ll have less time for reporting.
But even without Ms. O’Donnell, MSNBC already presents a three-hour block of nighttime talk — Chris Matthews’s “Hardball” at 7, Mr. Olbermann at 8, and “Live With Dan Abrams” at 9 — in which the White House takes a regular beating. The one early-evening program on MSNBC that is often most sympathetic to the administration, “Tucker” with Tucker Carlson at 6 p.m., is in real danger of being canceled, said one NBC executive, who, like those who spoke of Ms. O’Donnell, would do so only on condition of anonymity.
Well, OK, Carlson is a complete waste of time. That’s the one time slot O’Donnell might improve.
Having a prime-time lineup that tilts ever more demonstrably to the left could be risky for General Electric, MSNBC’s parent company, which is subject to legislation and regulation far afield of the cable landscape. Officials at MSNBC emphasize that they never set out to create a liberal version of Fox News.
Note that Faux News, which is nothing but the propaganda arm of the GOP, doesn’t have to worry about legislation and regulation.
The NBC executive in charge of MSNBC, Phil Griffin, says that the cable channel didn’t set out to favor any political position. He implies the apparent move to the left is being driven by ratings. I suspect that’s true. For years they tried to compete with Faux News by being Faux News Lite. Olbermann has showed them the real way to compete is offering viewers something they can’t see on Faux News. Like, you know, truth and facts and stuff.
MSNBC’s other evening stars, Chris “Tweety” Matthews and Dan Abrams, are hardly fellow travelers of Noam Chomsky, and both still give plenty of time to right-wing mouthpieces. I find Abrams less annoying than Matthews, however. Those of you who miss Joe Scarborough (anybody?) probably already know he moved to mornings awhile back.
Meanwhile, at the Los Angeles Times Jonah Goldberg laments that “fake news,” a la Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, is becoming the new standard in news reporting.
Indeed, while the network news broadcasts are sustained by the consumers of denture cream, adult diapers and pharmacological marital aides, it’s “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” that have a grip on the hip, iPhone crowd. And plenty of those younger viewers seem to believe that they can deduce what’s going on in the real world from jokes on a fake newscast. It’s no longer funny because it’s true. It’s true because it’s funny.
He had it right the first time — it’s funny because it’s true. Great satire functions by cutting through sugar-coatings and qualifiers to find the absurdities inherent in unvarnished truth. Satirists don’t make up jokes. They reveal The Joke.
For example, in the next paragraph, Jonah blames the problems of modern journalism on the old TV sitcom “Murphy Brown.”
When Brown had a baby out of wedlock, Vice President Dan Quayle criticized the writers of the show. Liberals then reacted as though Quayle had insulted a real person. Ever since, journalists and politicians have been playing themselves in movies and TV series, perhaps trying to disprove the cliche that Washington is Hollywood for ugly people.
He’s serious, mind you, and there’s The Joke. You can’t make this shit up. I couldn’t, anyway.
Saturday Funnies
Bill Maher’s “New Rules”:
Sad that the best political commentary is from comedians, on cable, and not the free airwaves. One quick barb:
On the flap by conservatives over Dumbledore’s sexual orientation: “If I had the slightest interest in homosexuals with powers, I’d BE a Republican!”
But it’s even better than that - Enjoy.
October 15, 2007
Malkin Quits O’Reilly Factor
Giraldo Rivera was mean to her. Poor baby. See also Tbogg and Gavin.
There is speculation that the Powers That Be of the Right see her as a liability, particularly after her unhinged performance over the Frost family (which goes on, unabated, on her blog), and she was encouraged to resign. Unless there’s a new twist I don’t know about — it’s not like I actually watch Faux Snooze — the Rivera flap happened over a month ago. Why quit now?
Update: I hope somebody posts a video of what Olbermann said. Hysterical.
Spotlight
September 15, 2007
Tribal Loyalty and Free Expression
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about the role of scripture in either causing or justifying armed conflicts around the planet. The “hook” for the post was an article by a Turkish Muslim who argued that Muslim extremists don’t learn to hate from reading the Koran. They hate, and then they cherry pick words out of the Koran to justify their hatred. I took his word on this, because I’m unfamiliar with the Koran.
I’ve seen the same phenomenon elsewhere. Propagandists on “our” side like to cherry-pick verses from the Koran to argue that Islam teaches hatred. Muslim propagandists have have cranked out similar hate material about Jews. People hostile to Christianity cherry-pick verses from the New Testament to argue that Jesus was some sort of bloodthirsty rabble rouser. Interestingly, fundies use these same verses to justify their bigotry toward everyone who isn’t Them, homosexuals in particular.
I also once got an email from an atheist who had pulled a verse from the murky depths of early Sanskrit Buddhist texts — possibly a bad translation — to inform me that Buddhism teaches that women cannot enter Nirvana. My understanding is that no individual of whatever gender can “enter” Nirvana, however, so I’m not worried about gender bias in the dharmakaya. (See, for example, the Diamond Sutra, section III.)
Anyway, one commenter to the scripture post concluded I was either taking sides with or making excuses for Muslims. In fact, the only “side” I was taking is that people around the planet misuse scripture to justify their hatred and bigotry. Essentially, this individual mistook objectivity for “taking sides.” That’s fairly common with bigots. If you aren’t avowedly with them, they assume you’re “for” the other side. And attempting to understand what motivates The Enemy is tantamount to making excuses.
A couple of days ago Glenn Greenwald wrote a post called “Selective defenders of free expression,” pointing out that wingnuts promote anti-Muslim expression but try to suppress anti-Christian expression. A comment by Kathy Griffith Griffin — “suck it, Jesus” — has been cut from a pre-taped telecast of the Emmy Awards show after Catholic crusader Bill Donohue threw a fit about it. Donohue still wants Griffith Griffin to apologize to Christians. We can only hope he holds his breath until she does.
Anyway, Kathryn Jean Lopez at the Corner celebrated the “victory over Kathy Griffin’s mouth.” Meanwhile, Lulu and other righties are still flogging the Mohammad cartoon controversy, demanding that mostly crude and hateful depictions of Mohammad not be surpressed.
I’m not surprised by, and not really critical of, Fox’s decision to cut Kathy Griffin’s comment from the show. Commercial publishers and entertainment outlets often cut material they think might offend consumers or advertisers. By the same token, however, Michelle Malkin has no right to demand a newspaper publish anything it judges not to be fit for publishing.
About a year ago Little Lulu was up in arms because the Berlin Opera had canceled a production of Mozart’s Idomeneo that was disrespectful of Mohammad and might have given offense to Muslims. “Jihadists hate Western art and music,” she said. But last March she crusaded against a sculpture that she decided — purely a matter of opinion — was disrespectful of Jesus. Lulu doesn’t think much of Western art either, I guess.
This nation is being jerked around by brute mob hysteria wrapped in sanctimony, and I’m damn sick of it. Ed Pilkington writes in today’s Guardian:
Given the reception John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt received for their London Review of Books essay last year on what they called the Israel Lobby, it would have been understandable had they crawled away to a dark corner of their respective academic institutions to lick their wounds. Their argument that US foreign policy has been distorted by the stultifying power of pro-Israeli groups and individuals was met with a firestorm of protest that has smouldered ever since.
The authors were assailed with headlines such as the Washington Post’s: “Yes, it’s anti-semitic.” The neocon pundit William Kristol accused them in the Wall Street Journal of “anti-Judaism” while the New York Sun linked them with the white supremacist David Duke.
The row became a focal point of a much wider debate about the limits of permitted criticism of the state of Israel and its American-based supporters that has ensnared several academics and writers, including a former president. Jimmy Carter was castigated earlier this year when he published a plea for a renewed engagement in the Middle-East peace process under the admittedly provocative title, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. He was labelled an anti-semitic “Jew hater” and even a Nazi sympathiser. Meanwhile, a British-born historian at New York University, Tony Judt, has been warned off or disinvited from four academic events in the past year. On one occasion, he was asked to promise not to mention Israel in a speech on the Holocaust. He refused.
Naturally, much of the backlash targeted Mearsheimer and Walt personally and ignored what they actually said.
Mearsheimer and Walt have now come out with a book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, making the same argument.
As night follows day, the dispute has started anew. The New York Sun has dedicated a section of its website to the controversy; Dershowitz has revved up again, calling the book “a bigoted attack on the American Jewish community”; and Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, has gone to the trouble of writing his own book in riposte - and it’s in the bookshops a week before The Israel Lobby appears. …
…But the authors have brought into the open aspects of American intellectual life that needed airing. They cast light on the overweening activities of specific pro-Israeli groups, most importantly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Aipac is a self-avowed lobby (it calls itself America’s pro-Israel lobby) and has been ranked the second most powerful such body in the US. With a staff of more than 150 and a budget of $60m, it wields extensive influence among Congressmen, working to ensure criticism of Israel is rarely aired on Capitol Hill. The Guardian invited it to comment, but it declined.
Though Foxman insists the furore is proof that debate is alive and kicking, Walt and Mearsheimer have also put their finger on the limits of acceptable discourse in the US. It is notable that none of the candidates standing for president in 2008 have a word of criticism for Israeli state behaviour; this week Barack Obama pulled an advert for his campaign from the Amazon page selling The Israel Lobby, denouncing the book as “just wrong”.
So what happened to America’s commitment to free speech, the First Amendment? “We knew from De Tocqueville this country is driven by conformity,” Judt says. “The law can’t make people speak out - it can only prevent people from stopping free speech. What’s happened is not censorship, but self-censorship.” Judt believes that a few well-organised groups including Aipac have succeeded in proscribing debate. He recalls a prominent Democratic senator confiding to him that he would never criticise Israel in public. “He told me that if he did so, for the rest of his career he would never be able to get a majority for what he cared about. He would be cut off at the knees.”
In the final chapter of the book, Walt and Mearsheimer make a shopping list of reforms. They call for: a two-state solution to the Middle East crisis; greater separation of US foreign policy from Israel for both nations’ sake; and campaign finance reform to reduce the power of pro-Israeli groups.
Nothing outlandish, or even controversial, there. Coming at the end of such a bumpy ride of claim and counter-claim, the conclusion feels almost disappointingly gentle. That in itself bears eloquent witness to the state of affairs in America today, where thoughts considered unremarkable elsewhere are deemed beyond the pale.
I haven’t read Walt and Mearsheimer’s London Review of Books article or their book, and I’m not going to endorse either sight unseen. I’m just saying I know a mob when I see it.
Although one never knows what’s in another person’s heart, I would take people like Donohue and Malkin more seriously if I saw an occasional spark of genuine piety or devotion in them. I believe that for them and for many allegedly “religious” Americans, religion is merely a matter of tribal loyalty. And I don’t care if you’re Christian, Muslim, Jew, or Buddhist; when religion is merely part of your tribal identity, it’s a piss-poor excuse for religion.
Also at The Guardian, Andrew Brown writes,
The point about theological disagreement is that it is almost entirely arbitrary. Perhaps, among philosophers trained in the discipline, there are rules of argument. But it is not philosophers we have to fear; and theological disputes certainly become entirely arbitrary at those unhappy times when they become really popular, which is to say divisive. The more arcane a theological point can be, the better it will serve as a tribal rallying point.
This isn’t because theology is wicked, but because people are.
If we see politics as essentially a matter of conflict between shifting coalitions, one of the functions of religious argument is to strengthen and enlarge your own coalition in a way that pure politics, with their suggestion of grubby self-interest and compromise, just won’t do. Appeals to theology function to make your position inflexible when it needs be, because they are by definition appealing to a supreme value; but they can also have the opposite effect, when surrender becomes inevitable, they have the further advantage over merely political claims that the sacred text can be reinterpreted without losing any of its immemorial authority. Look at the role that Christianity played first in justifying apartheid, and then in proving the need to demolish it.
All these are good reasons, perhaps, for liberal democracies to be suspicious of political movements animated by theology. But they are absolutely not reasons to suppose that religious belief will shrivel, or that it is irrational. If it is true that appeals to the sacred are among the most effective political technologies mankind has ever stumbled on, no Darwinian should expect them to be replaced by less effective pieties.
This takes us back to my original point about the misuse of scripture. People who are desperate to defend whatever conceptual boxes they live in will grab at anything for support. Religion can be the ideal crutch, because it is both infinitely malleable and infinitely authoritative. I believe most of the world’s Malkins, Donohues, etc. would lose all interest in religion if it stopped reinforcing their bigotries. And if that ever happened, they’d find another crutch.
Spotlight
— Next Page »
Malkin Quits O’Reilly Factor
Giraldo Rivera was mean to her. Poor baby. See also Tbogg and Gavin.
There is speculation that the Powers That Be of the Right see her as a liability, particularly after her unhinged performance over the Frost family (which goes on, unabated, on her blog), and she was encouraged to resign. Unless there’s a new twist I don’t know about — it’s not like I actually watch Faux Snooze — the Rivera flap happened over a month ago. Why quit now?
Update: I hope somebody posts a video of what Olbermann said. Hysterical.
Tribal Loyalty and Free Expression
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about the role of scripture in either causing or justifying armed conflicts around the planet. The “hook” for the post was an article by a Turkish Muslim who argued that Muslim extremists don’t learn to hate from reading the Koran. They hate, and then they cherry pick words out of the Koran to justify their hatred. I took his word on this, because I’m unfamiliar with the Koran.
I’ve seen the same phenomenon elsewhere. Propagandists on “our” side like to cherry-pick verses from the Koran to argue that Islam teaches hatred. Muslim propagandists have have cranked out similar hate material about Jews. People hostile to Christianity cherry-pick verses from the New Testament to argue that Jesus was some sort of bloodthirsty rabble rouser. Interestingly, fundies use these same verses to justify their bigotry toward everyone who isn’t Them, homosexuals in particular.
I also once got an email from an atheist who had pulled a verse from the murky depths of early Sanskrit Buddhist texts — possibly a bad translation — to inform me that Buddhism teaches that women cannot enter Nirvana. My understanding is that no individual of whatever gender can “enter” Nirvana, however, so I’m not worried about gender bias in the dharmakaya. (See, for example, the Diamond Sutra, section III.)
Anyway, one commenter to the scripture post concluded I was either taking sides with or making excuses for Muslims. In fact, the only “side” I was taking is that people around the planet misuse scripture to justify their hatred and bigotry. Essentially, this individual mistook objectivity for “taking sides.” That’s fairly common with bigots. If you aren’t avowedly with them, they assume you’re “for” the other side. And attempting to understand what motivates The Enemy is tantamount to making excuses.
A couple of days ago Glenn Greenwald wrote a post called “Selective defenders of free expression,” pointing out that wingnuts promote anti-Muslim expression but try to suppress anti-Christian expression. A comment by Kathy Griffith Griffin — “suck it, Jesus” — has been cut from a pre-taped telecast of the Emmy Awards show after Catholic crusader Bill Donohue threw a fit about it. Donohue still wants Griffith Griffin to apologize to Christians. We can only hope he holds his breath until she does.
Anyway, Kathryn Jean Lopez at the Corner celebrated the “victory over Kathy Griffin’s mouth.” Meanwhile, Lulu and other righties are still flogging the Mohammad cartoon controversy, demanding that mostly crude and hateful depictions of Mohammad not be surpressed.
I’m not surprised by, and not really critical of, Fox’s decision to cut Kathy Griffin’s comment from the show. Commercial publishers and entertainment outlets often cut material they think might offend consumers or advertisers. By the same token, however, Michelle Malkin has no right to demand a newspaper publish anything it judges not to be fit for publishing.
About a year ago Little Lulu was up in arms because the Berlin Opera had canceled a production of Mozart’s Idomeneo that was disrespectful of Mohammad and might have given offense to Muslims. “Jihadists hate Western art and music,” she said. But last March she crusaded against a sculpture that she decided — purely a matter of opinion — was disrespectful of Jesus. Lulu doesn’t think much of Western art either, I guess.
This nation is being jerked around by brute mob hysteria wrapped in sanctimony, and I’m damn sick of it. Ed Pilkington writes in today’s Guardian:
Given the reception John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt received for their London Review of Books essay last year on what they called the Israel Lobby, it would have been understandable had they crawled away to a dark corner of their respective academic institutions to lick their wounds. Their argument that US foreign policy has been distorted by the stultifying power of pro-Israeli groups and individuals was met with a firestorm of protest that has smouldered ever since.
The authors were assailed with headlines such as the Washington Post’s: “Yes, it’s anti-semitic.” The neocon pundit William Kristol accused them in the Wall Street Journal of “anti-Judaism” while the New York Sun linked them with the white supremacist David Duke.
The row became a focal point of a much wider debate about the limits of permitted criticism of the state of Israel and its American-based supporters that has ensnared several academics and writers, including a former president. Jimmy Carter was castigated earlier this year when he published a plea for a renewed engagement in the Middle-East peace process under the admittedly provocative title, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. He was labelled an anti-semitic “Jew hater” and even a Nazi sympathiser. Meanwhile, a British-born historian at New York University, Tony Judt, has been warned off or disinvited from four academic events in the past year. On one occasion, he was asked to promise not to mention Israel in a speech on the Holocaust. He refused.
Naturally, much of the backlash targeted Mearsheimer and Walt personally and ignored what they actually said.
Mearsheimer and Walt have now come out with a book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, making the same argument.
As night follows day, the dispute has started anew. The New York Sun has dedicated a section of its website to the controversy; Dershowitz has revved up again, calling the book “a bigoted attack on the American Jewish community”; and Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, has gone to the trouble of writing his own book in riposte - and it’s in the bookshops a week before The Israel Lobby appears. …
…But the authors have brought into the open aspects of American intellectual life that needed airing. They cast light on the overweening activities of specific pro-Israeli groups, most importantly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Aipac is a self-avowed lobby (it calls itself America’s pro-Israel lobby) and has been ranked the second most powerful such body in the US. With a staff of more than 150 and a budget of $60m, it wields extensive influence among Congressmen, working to ensure criticism of Israel is rarely aired on Capitol Hill. The Guardian invited it to comment, but it declined.
Though Foxman insists the furore is proof that debate is alive and kicking, Walt and Mearsheimer have also put their finger on the limits of acceptable discourse in the US. It is notable that none of the candidates standing for president in 2008 have a word of criticism for Israeli state behaviour; this week Barack Obama pulled an advert for his campaign from the Amazon page selling The Israel Lobby, denouncing the book as “just wrong”.
So what happened to America’s commitment to free speech, the First Amendment? “We knew from De Tocqueville this country is driven by conformity,” Judt says. “The law can’t make people speak out - it can only prevent people from stopping free speech. What’s happened is not censorship, but self-censorship.” Judt believes that a few well-organised groups including Aipac have succeeded in proscribing debate. He recalls a prominent Democratic senator confiding to him that he would never criticise Israel in public. “He told me that if he did so, for the rest of his career he would never be able to get a majority for what he cared about. He would be cut off at the knees.”
In the final chapter of the book, Walt and Mearsheimer make a shopping list of reforms. They call for: a two-state solution to the Middle East crisis; greater separation of US foreign policy from Israel for both nations’ sake; and campaign finance reform to reduce the power of pro-Israeli groups.
Nothing outlandish, or even controversial, there. Coming at the end of such a bumpy ride of claim and counter-claim, the conclusion feels almost disappointingly gentle. That in itself bears eloquent witness to the state of affairs in America today, where thoughts considered unremarkable elsewhere are deemed beyond the pale.
I haven’t read Walt and Mearsheimer’s London Review of Books article or their book, and I’m not going to endorse either sight unseen. I’m just saying I know a mob when I see it.
Although one never knows what’s in another person’s heart, I would take people like Donohue and Malkin more seriously if I saw an occasional spark of genuine piety or devotion in them. I believe that for them and for many allegedly “religious” Americans, religion is merely a matter of tribal loyalty. And I don’t care if you’re Christian, Muslim, Jew, or Buddhist; when religion is merely part of your tribal identity, it’s a piss-poor excuse for religion.
Also at The Guardian, Andrew Brown writes,
The point about theological disagreement is that it is almost entirely arbitrary. Perhaps, among philosophers trained in the discipline, there are rules of argument. But it is not philosophers we have to fear; and theological disputes certainly become entirely arbitrary at those unhappy times when they become really popular, which is to say divisive. The more arcane a theological point can be, the better it will serve as a tribal rallying point.
This isn’t because theology is wicked, but because people are.
If we see politics as essentially a matter of conflict between shifting coalitions, one of the functions of religious argument is to strengthen and enlarge your own coalition in a way that pure politics, with their suggestion of grubby self-interest and compromise, just won’t do. Appeals to theology function to make your position inflexible when it needs be, because they are by definition appealing to a supreme value; but they can also have the opposite effect, when surrender becomes inevitable, they have the further advantage over merely political claims that the sacred text can be reinterpreted without losing any of its immemorial authority. Look at the role that Christianity played first in justifying apartheid, and then in proving the need to demolish it.
All these are good reasons, perhaps, for liberal democracies to be suspicious of political movements animated by theology. But they are absolutely not reasons to suppose that religious belief will shrivel, or that it is irrational. If it is true that appeals to the sacred are among the most effective political technologies mankind has ever stumbled on, no Darwinian should expect them to be replaced by less effective pieties.
This takes us back to my original point about the misuse of scripture. People who are desperate to defend whatever conceptual boxes they live in will grab at anything for support. Religion can be the ideal crutch, because it is both infinitely malleable and infinitely authoritative. I believe most of the world’s Malkins, Donohues, etc. would lose all interest in religion if it stopped reinforcing their bigotries. And if that ever happened, they’d find another crutch.
