Month: May 2002

Here’s what The American Prospect is trying to tell us about their traffic in yet another snide post. In the last month, the online magazine had 450,000 unique visitors. In the same period, the most popular part of that site, TAPPED, the blog, got 70,000 hits. “Hits” are not the same as visitors (you could have twenty little gidgets on one page and one visit would give you 20 hits) and a good rule of thumb is to divide the number of hits by 10 to get the visitors. So let’s say TAPPED got 7,000 unique visitors in May. Does it make sense to you that the rest of the site would get 64 times as much traffic as the blog? I’m just confused, guys. So is Jonah. Maybe one of the numbers is right and the other isn’t. But both numbers together make no sense, if you believe, as I do, that TAPPED is obviously more interesting than the rest of the unreadable magazine. Hey, guys, that’s a compliment! Why get all snarky instead of running a simple correction or explain the weird discrepancy? This is the web, guys. No-one will get upset if you made an honest and easy mistake.

Energizing piece in the New York Times today about a new lay Catholic group called Voice of the Faithful. It’s an attempt by faithful Catholics to channel their frustration at a hierarchy seemingly immune to reform or responsibility. If it leads to more lay control of the Church, more lay oversight of administrative and financial matters, all to the good. But what it must do is persuade the hierarchy to open a real debate – not a phony one – about whether the decline of the Church in the last thirty years is in part a function of the current doctrines on priestly celibacy and sexual morality. I profoundly believe that this sex abuse scandal is not the real crisis. It’s a symptom of the deeper one of a Church without leadership in America, without confidence in its own doctrines, and credibility among its own people. Until that changes, nothing will stop the slide. But this is a sign that this time, we, the people of God, the real living, breathing Church, will demand that change occurs. If Erasmus is not listened to, Luther may be around the corner. For more information, check out the website, www.voiceofthefaithful.org

A BOWDLERIZED JIHAD: The Harvard senior whose class day address was entitled “American Jihad,” has finally decided to remove the word “Jihad” from the title of his talk. The text will remain unchanged. How depressing. If that is the right summary of his talk, why shouldn’t he have the cojones to use the word in the title? I wasn’t sympathetic to those wanting to silence this young man, let alone to those thugs who threatened his life. And not knowing the text, it was impossible to make a judgment about the talk. It’s probably multi-cultural uplift of the sort that now passes for wisdom at universities. (Hey, but at least he’s not Tony Kushner.) But if he’s going to talk, let him talk boldly, in the language he wants, to make the statement he desires. This urge for sensitivity – at the expense of bruising and difficult dialogue – is a sickly sign of our times. No surprise harvard has catered to it again. But sad nonetheless.

SEXUAL ABUSE AND SPORTS: A harrowing story from ESPN magazine about an isolated 15 year old child prodigy being sexually used by a college football team while police and college administrators looked the other way. It’s not just priests.

TAP DANCING: The partisan Democratic site, TAPPED, puts out some good, if to my mind shrill, stuff. But they have had an odd response to inquiries about their web stats. The Columbia Journalism Review numbers – touted by Alterman – show the American Prospect Online to have a staggering 450,000 unique visitors in May. When pressed to substantiate that, TAPPED says its own site – the only part of the American Prospect anyone seems to read – has gotten 70,000 “hits” so far this month. What do they mean by “hits”? No one really uses that terminology any more. If that means 70,000 unique visitors, it follows that the main snooze-fest TAP website gets three times as many visitors as the hot blog attached and twice as much as web-king, Instapundit (and please don’t start calling me the web-queen. I’ll cry). I guess I find that somewhat unlikely. If by hits, they mean 70,000 unique visits, then the discrepancy is even larger and weirder. I’m not saying they’re fibbing. They may be flubbing. But I don’t believe it. My burly beer-buddy Jonah has some suspicions about Slate’s endowment as well.

THE BBC’S ISRAEL PROBLEM: You have to go to Britain to really appreciate it. But the sheer viciousness and slant of the BBC’s coverage of the Israel-Palestinian dispute permeate every item of news. The London editor of the Jerusalem Post finally decided to stop being interviewed by the BBC. He’s a journalist; he’s not uncritical of many Israeli policies and actions. But he knows anti-Semitism when he sees it:

Since September 11, I have refused all invitations to appear on BBC radio or television. The reason is not that I wish to avoid a debate, but rather that I believe that the BBC has crossed a dangerous threshold. In my judgement, the volume and intensity of this unchallenged diatribe has now transcended mere criticism of Israel. Hatred is in the air. Wittingly or not, I am convinced that the BBC has become the principal agent for reinfecting British society with the virus of anti-Semitism. And that is a game I am not willing to play.

Good for him. What he fails to understand is that the BBC, from its very inception, has never been about open journalistic inquiry. It began as a smothering, paternalistic effort to uphold social morals, to inculcate the right national spirit, to protect the establishment of its day. That’s still its mission. Except the current establishment is no longer the fusty, puritan condescension of Lord Reith, but the fusty, trendy condescension of the Blair generation, the former student radicals whose anti-Americanism is as ingrained as their addiction to pop-cultural ephemera. I’ve long believed that the media in Britain will only regain real vibrancy once the BBC is abolished. Like the National Health Service, it is an idea whose time is past.

ARE THE POLES MELTING? Not according to this interesting anlaysis. Climate change is definitely occurring – but much of it for the colder; and some melting ice-flows might have nothing to do with global warming. I’m no expert on this but having read Bjorn Lomborg, this stuff seems reasonable to me.

Another fantastic column from Hitchens. Is there a consensus building that we cannot win the war on terror until we have secured regime change in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan? Not before Iraq, but surely after.

BLOGGER-TIME: I’m sorry about the screwy dates on my posts. It’s a Blogger problem. No clue when it’ll get fixed.

Will Saletan tries to argue that Bush’s tacking on Iraq is actually a brilliant strategy to get what he wants: a real war. Man, I hope Will is right (and he often is). Then again Will declared in the last election campaign that Bush was toast. What’s interesting to me is that this liberal mag, edited by my friend, Jake Weisberg, who also published “Bushisms”, is publishing pieces that make Bush seem like a master chess player. I have a feeling that the truth is somewhere in between.

PRIVACY CONTINUED: Eugene Volokh has an excellent legal follow-up to the story of pro-life activists taking photos of women seeking abortions. It looks like it’s constitutional – as most invasions of privacy already are.

THE NEW AFGHANISTAN?: Islamo-fascist strikes against soft Western targets; a safe harbor for al Qaeda refugees; nuclear brinksmanship with India. It seems to me Pakistan is slowly moving toward the axis of evil. And we’re neutral between them and the Indians? Safire usefully helps you figure it all out today. I think he’s too soft on Musharraf.

THAT BRITISH GIFT: Great dinner tonight with old Oxford pals – now all Economist machers. But the highlight was a classic understatement from a fellow Brit diner. “What I want to know,” she asked, “is whether anyone had ever heard or written about Pim Fortuyn before his recent difficulties.” Ah yes. Getting shot in the head can be frightfully awkward at times.

DANCING QUEEN: Okay, so I couldn’t resist. I won’t say who forwarded this to me. But you’d be surprised.

POSEUR ALERT: “And anyway I am a very old-fashioned kind of homosexual, or rather sexual minoritarian, I am the kind of homosexual sexual minoritarian who believes that sexual minoritarian liberation is inextricable from the grand project of advancing Federally protected civil rights, and cannot be separated from the liberation struggles of other oppressed populations, cannot be achieved isolated from the global struggle for the abolition of the legacy of colonialism, cannot be achieved isolated from the global resistance movement against militarism and imperialism and racism and fundamentalisms of all sorts, the global movement for the furtherance of social and economic justice, the global multiculturalist, anti-tribalist identity-based movement for pluralist democracy, I am the kind of homosexual who believes that all liberation has an inexpungeable aspect that is collective, communitarian, and also millenarian, utopian, which is to say rooted in principle, theory, dream, imagination, in the absolute non-existence of the Absolute and in the eternal existence of the Alternative, of the Other, in the insistently unceasingly mutable character of our character, I am an old-fashioned sort of homosexual/sexual minoritarian and I think if you wanted a gay commencement speaker in this dark day and age you might have chosen one of those newfangled neo-con gay people with their own website and no day job.” – socialist playwright Tony Kushner, Vassar Commencement address. Ouch.

Wonderfully clarifying piece by Michael Barone.

LORDY LORDY: The Brits can still churn out whack-job peers. Here’s a priceless obit from the Telegraph of an English lord who just couldn’t stop drinking and fornicating. (Thanks to Andrew Stuttaford for noticing it). Five wives, and hundreds of lovers, and yet he couldn’t help but remark that “Queers have been the downfall of all the great empires.” Stanley Kurtz, eat your heart out.

FIXED! The permalinks are working again. I’m sorry they were screwed up. My thanks to Eric Olsen et al for alerting me.

It comes from the New York Review of Books interview I linked to yesterday. It resonated with several readers and is still resonating with me. It’s about negotiating with the Palestinian leadership:

They are products of a culture in which to tell a lie…creates no dissonance. They don’t suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture. Truth is seen as an irrelevant category. There is only that which serves your purpose and that which doesn’t. They see themselves as emissaries of a national movement for whom everything is permissible. There is no such thing as ‘the truth’.

The tantalizing question is whether he’s referring to the PLO or the literature departments of most Ivy League colleges.

WHEN WILL I DISS BUSH? Some of you think I’m a toady; a gay man says the Church scandal is about homosexuality; and why ‘innocent before proved guilty’ is a principle that should be kept in the courtroom, not public discourse. All on the Letters Page.

A CONSERVATIVE CATHOLIC’S SKEPTICISM: If you log on to National Review’s excellent website, you’ll occasionally notice an hysterical pop-up ad, blaring that “liberals and homosexuals” are conspiring to corrupt Catholicism. It’s plugging a book by one Michael Rose, a very traditional Catholic. No, I haven’t read the book, despite Rod Dreher’s plugs. The hysterical tone of its advocates put me off. But I was intrigued to see it criticized by another conservative catholic, Amy Wellborn, on her fine blog. Here’s her analysis:

Goodbye! Good Men may contain lots of stories, and most of those stories may be true, but the fact is, this book is not a comprehensive look at all seminary education in the United States and shouldn’t be read as such. In order to really prove his thesis that there has a been a church-wide conspiracy against the orthodox and the straight, Rose would have to get data from many dioceses, seminaries and religious orders about how many candidates have applied, how many of those have been turned away, and what the reasons for dismissal were. He might even have had to personally visit some of the seminaries which he critiques and do on-site reporting, rather that relying on the testimony of only the dissatisfied. As it is, all we have in Goodbye! Good Men is the story of what happened to a self-selected group of men who attended particular seminaries. It’s their stories, more often than not anonymously related. It’s their side of their stories.

If that’s true, it sounds like a case-study in fish-in-barrel journalism. Caveat lector.

MGM AND HIV: An interesting story about male genital mutilation (aka circumcision) and HIV. A new study suggests that the inside foreskin is particularly susceptible to infection with HIV. But what are the odds of men contracting HIV in this way from women? Or even from another man? Cases of HIV infection from female to male or from bottom to top are rare indeed. This seems like a stretch to me. A far likelier cause of HIV infection from women to men is other STDs, sores and lesions – many of which are exacerbated by sex with mutilated penises. What I want to know is why there hasn’t been mounds of research to create HIV-resistant lubricants for hereos and homos. That could help protect the inner foreskin as well. But it would counter the notion that the only real solution is abstinence (true but highly unrealistic). Anyway here’s the story. Keep reading andrewsullivan.com for all those indispensable circumcision debate developments.

MARRIAGE NOW: A striking new Zogby poll among gays and lesbians finds one important result. Marriage rights are now easily the most urgent priority for gay men and lesbians – or at least those identified by these survey-takers. Around half – 47 percent – placed equal marriage rights as the most important goal for the gay rights movement. The closest competitor was protection against discrimination in the workplace, with 16 percent. A full 83 percent put marriage as one of the top three goals for the movement. This may seem unsurprising to many. But if you take a look at the last decade or so in gay rights, you’ll see a phenomenal change. When some of us first broached the idea of equality in marriage, we were savaged by the gay establishment. Marriage – some leftist activists complained – was patriarchal, assimilationist, pseudo-religious, sexist, and on and on. Those of us who persisted in making the argument had to take on both the social right and the radical left to make our case. Some left-wing allies soon came around; but the mainstream gay groups were never comfortable with the idea. The Human Rights Campaign did everything it could to bury the issue and even now hates using the m-word for fear of upsetting their older, partisan donors. But the marriage issue is real; it matters; and the silent majority of gay men and women understand its centrality to the question of gay equality. That’s enormously encouraging. There were times in the last fifteen years of campaigning on the subject that I felt almost numb repeating the arguments, making the speeches, doing the talk-shows, attempting to get some pro-marriage voices in the gay press, supporting the real workers in this battle – the lawyers and activists and religious people and lesbian mothers, who saw better than many why this was so important. So forgive me a moment of celebration that more and more people “get it.” It’s especially encouraging to see the highest levels of support among the younger generations and among lesbians. I always believed that marriage would turn out to be a primarily lesbian issue. So much for claims of patriarchy. Now let’s hope the national gay rights organizations get the message, and keep at it until they catch up with the people they are supposed to represent.

The Onion has the scoop.

An emailer sent me the following despatch from Eurovision hell. Americans may not know that this silly song contest is broadcast live across almost every European country in prime time. It’s about as international a cultural event (sports excluded) that occurs in Europe:

For the fourth year in a row, we subjected ourselves to Eurovision Saturday night…. Had a feeling something like what you reported happened to Israel….their entry was by far the only really creative one, with the best lyrics, best arrangement….we were amazed at how few votes they got. 90% of the others (including the winner) were like rejects from a 1975 American Disco Show…I was waiting for lyrics about “Disco Canard”, frankly.

On another note, if anyone has found a single EU official, Chris Patten especially, who has said a single thing about the latest Arafat-sponsored suicide attacks in Israel, please let me know. Whenever these characters huff and puff about Israel’s self-defense, they always put in a disclaimer that of course, they find Palestinian terror appalling. But then, when it happens, they say … nothing. That’s more eloquent than any of their massaged press statements.

The Wall Street Journal has a chilling piece this morning on a relatively new phenomenon. Anti-abortion fanatics are increasingly staking out abortion clinics, taking photographs of those going in, getting some rudimentary details about them and posting them on the web. The objective is an ancient one: stigma. “Shame enough women into realizing that eternal damnation awaits them if they murder their baby and the abortionists won’t have any work to do,” explains one of the pro-life photographers. the women who have such abortions are in a public place when they are photographed and, under current law, probably have very little recourse. Privacy, in the sense that our parents and grand-parents understood it, is over. I’m working on a big essay on this subject, especially the way in which technology has transformed the context in which privacy can exist in a liberal society. This knows no ideological bent. The far left uses this tactic – in the smearing of journalists or politicians on the right. And the far right uses it – in reverse. Some truly enterprising smear artists – David Brock, anyone? – have managed to target both left and right in exactly the same privacy-trashing fashion. Even someone’s private medical records are under siege. All of these privacy-trashers are moralists of a sort – shaming sinners, outing alleged hypocrites, uncovering the seamy side of political enemies. But the web means that literally anyone can do this to anyone else. This is the age of the Scarlet Email. Just get the evidence on an ex-lover, bad boss, loathesome co-worker, etc. – a private letter, a digital photo, a stray email, a taped phone conversation – and post it pronto. If the evidence is true, libel laws are useless. And privacy laws are almost always trumped by the First Amendment. I don’t see any solution to this in a free society. But I do think this attack on privacy is essentially an attack on a freedom essential to the health of a liberal society. I hope to make the case more thoroughly some time this summer.

LAW OR TYSON: The PR trade journal, The Holmes Report, had an interesting poll today. When PR professionals were asked whom they’d least like to represent in the current climate, Mike Tyson came in first with 51.6 percent. But close behind came Cardinal Law, with 34.5 percent. He’s less redeemable than – wait for it – Kenneth Lay, who came in with a paltry 13.8 percent.

Now that we’ve got the “Bush Knew” canard out of our collective system, the need for a thorough investigation of how the CIA and FBI missed important signals before 9/11 is clearer than ever. I found Safire’s column yesterday entirely persuasive, and Sy Hersh’s account in the current New Yorker more than hair-raising. The trouble, of course, is that even a perfectly-tuned intelligence operation could still fail to prevent one lucky – and horrendous – terrorist attack. This is the tricky psychology of warfare against terror. Success means a significant decline in terrorism. Such a decline leads people into complacency. Complacency obviously empowers more terrorism. There is no way out of this pattern in a democracy, I suppose, except an exceptionally tough leader who ignores public sentiment and presses on regardless, and who’s merciless with those beneath him who screw up. My fear with Bush is that he’s not merciless enough. Tenet and Mueller have now presided over what should clearly be resignable offenses. But Bush likes them. He can be an establishment figure even when the establishment is screwing up. He should stop opposing an independent investigation into what went wrong on his watch and Clinton’s; and get ready to fire a few of those responsible for serious lapses.

THE SURRENDER? I’ve been well lashed by readers for losing faith in this president. For the record: I haven’t. But I’m worried. I stuck with him through the muddle of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. But it seems to me incumbent on those of us who support him to let him know what the parameters of that support are. Allowing Iraq to build weapons of mass destruction which could easily be transferred to third parties to wreak terror on the West would be a gross abdication of his responsibility. I’m also worried by further news of his going soft. The Times of London has just published an account of the terrorist Club Med at Guantanamo Bay. (Non-Brits now have to pay a subscription for access to the Times’ sites, so I won’t link). Here’s the claim:

Overreacting to the initial outcry at the apparently tough conditions in the Camp X-Ray detention centre – with its images of cages, chains and kneeling prisoners, and rumours of truth drugs and sensory deprivation – the Pentagon has set up a kid-glove regime. Suspected terrorists are allowed to treat their captors with derision – lying, chanting the Koran in unison, mocking and threatening guards and throwing water at them. Americans are under orders not to react roughly. They even transport prisoners in golf carts. Guantanamo has been nicknamed “Eggshell City” by interrogators because of the political sensitivities of dealing with 384 captives from more than 30 countries, among them at least seven British citizens. Washington has become known as “Hand-Wringers’ Central” because the Pentagon worries constantly about international reactions. In the first breach of the military secrecy shrouding the interrogation process, William Tierney, an Arabic speaker who spent six weeks as an interpreter at Camp X-Ray, revealed the combination of inexperienced interrogators and stifling political correctness that has hampered efforts to extract intelligence about Al-Qaeda.

If we are being put in any danger because we are treating these detainees with the kind of concern only Guardian editorialists would muster, then we are simply not serious about this war.

BARAK’S DEBRIEFING: A fascinating essay in the New York Review of Books by revisionist historian Benny Morris. It’s essentially an elaborated interview with Ehud Barak about the failed attempt at a peace agreement at Camp David and Taba. Morris begins with comments made by former president Bill Clinton, after a classic New York Times pro-Palestinian “news analysis” by Deborah Sontag. Clinton apparently called Barak up and exploded about the Times’ reporter:

What the hell is this? Why is she turning the mistakes we [i.e., the US and Israel] made into the essence? The true story of Camp David was that for the first time in the history of the conflict the American president put on the table a proposal, based on UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, very close to the Palestinian demands, and Arafat refused even to accept it as a basis for negotiations, walked out of the room, and deliberately turned to terrorism. That’s the real story-all the rest is gossip.

This version of the story – deeply, deeply damning to Arafat – is now Clinton’s and Dennis Ross’s. The rest of Morris’ article persuades me – as if I needed to be persuaded – that negotiations with Arafat are useless substantively and of only marginal use if engaged in cynically (to keep the Arab dictators quiet for a while). To be fair, you should also check out the response in the New York Review by Robert Malley and Hussein Agha. I found their spinning of the Palestinian failure to negotiate seriously unconvincing. But make up your own mind.

THE CASE AGAINST JOURNALISM: Why do I find myself sympathizing with Stanley Fish? The boyfriend just got tenure at his university, so I’m not sucking up. But this little essay rang true to me. Speaking of journalism, many of you find my professed skepticism about Gary Condit’s link to the murder of Chandra Levy to be puzzling. I’m not going over all that old ground, but I have yet to see hard evidence that he impeded the investigation in any serious way. I also tend to believe that although he might well be a “jerk,” it’s precisely for the sake of jerks that we have a principle called ‘innocent unti proved guilty.’ Hate him for adultery, sleaze, bad hair, whatever. But that’s no reason to publicly suspect someone of murder, and then find it “intensely disappointing’ if the evidence points in another direction.

EVEN THE SONGS MUST BE BOYCOTTED: Swedes and Belgians are told by television presenters in the “Eurovision Song Contest,” not to vote for Israel’s entry in the competition. I guess they’re consistent.

WHO KILLED CHANDRA? An emailer on DC’s cops:

As a daily Rock Creek Park runner I’ve had several experiences with crazy homeless men living near the trails. My girlfriend (also a runner, and a 25 year-old House staffer) was chased several times (once while the man was masturbating). She called the Park Police and DC cops twice, so did I. No response, even during last summer’s Chandramania. And the men kept menacing runners. I still run the trails, but she uses the treadmill.

THE GREENS FIGHT BACK:A late flurry of pro-enivronmentalism in the Book Club, along with what Pascal might have decided about global warming, and a sci-fi parallel from Mars. This is our last posting for this book. Bjorn will be responding to specific questions later this week. Next week … a new and distinctly summery alternative.

BOYZ 2 MEN: An interesting distinction made by Garry Wills in the New York Review. In his second article on sexual abuse in the priesthood, Wills takes on the notion
that ‘pedophilia’ and ‘ephebophilia’ are somehow distinct, and that the former is always far graver than the latter:

It is said that pedophilia is limited by some modern therapists to mean sex with prepubescents. That may be useful in sorting out different forms of treatment. But that is not the meaning of pedophilia in history nor in the broader culture … Admittedly, there is a difference between sex with young people before and after puberty. In the law, of course, they are both acts of sex with a minor. But the coercion is clearly greater with a child, and the adult is more clearly pathological. Nonetheless, the harm done is not of necessity always greater. Sex with a child, heinous though it is, may be for the child part of an inexplicable world not to be connected with other realities. Child psychologists point out that children can learn so much so rapidly because they are ruthlessly efficient in dismissing information not useful to them.[10] But Michel Dorais, in his close study of abused boys, argues that abuse of adolescents is especially disorienting because it occurs at a time of challenged identity, uncertain standards, and shadowy guilt. It is all too clearly connected with other realities, mysterious in themselves … Adolescent guilt and inhibition were especially powerful for Catholic boys raised in a culture of sexual ignorance and guilt. Nuns were reluctant to speak about sex except in vaguely threatening language. Priests were mechanically judgmental in the confessional. …What is shocking in the currently revealed cases is not the number of Catholic priests who have preyed on children-though that is dismaying enough-but the repeated loosing of these predators (whatever their number) for numerous repeated acts on such a vulnerable population as Catholic boys disarmed by benighted instruction or lack of instruction on sexuality. To say that this is not so bad since it is not “real pedophilia” is a further violation and abuse of the victims.

The use of the term ephebophilia has been insisted upon by some Church conservatives for several reasons, it seems to me. It can help make the scandal seem less appalling to the general public (so helping to exculpate the hierarchy); it can help shift the onus of responsibility away from the abusers and toward the victims (arguments like “those teenagers were complicit,” etc.); and it is a way to insist that this scandal is not about the abuse of minors or the abuse of power to cover such assaults up, but is in fact a function of the dreaded homosexuals, “conspiring” in the heated language of National Review’s pop-up book ads, to destroy the Church. I’m glad Wills has helped unveil some of that agenda. Victims of abuse are victims of abuse, whether they are 15 or 5. And no amount of linguistic inventiveness can hide that fact.