Quote for the Day II

"I never imagined I would live to see the day when the United States and its satellites would use precisely the same arguments that the apartheid government used for detention without trial. It is disgraceful … One cannot find strong enough words to condemn what Britain and the United States and some of their allies have accepted," – bishop Desmond Tutu. Me neither.

Bloglash

The blogosphere doom-mongers and critics are gaining traction. Dan Gross predicts meltdown here. I enjoyed this Financial Times essay a great deal, although I strongly disagree that Orwell’s prolixity was somehow detrimental to his work. (I love his essays on English cooking, the ideal pub, and the perfect cup of tea: all classic blog-fodder) The FT essay also fails to grasp how readers contribute to the process and act as a collective, corrective brain unavailable to the MSM. Still, the evanescence of bloggery is undeniable:

"And that, in the end, is the dismal fate of blogging: it renders the word even more evanescent than journalism; yoked, as bloggers are, to the unending cycle of news and the need to post four or five times a day, five days a week, 50 weeks of the year, blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence. No Modern Library edition of the great polemicists of the blogosphere to yellow on the shelf; nothing but a virtual tomb for a billion posts – a choric song of the word-weary bloggers, forlorn mariners forever posting on the slumberless seas of news."

Unlike, say, the Washington Post? The point of journalism of all kinds is its evanescence. I’m writing a book now; and it’s an utterly different exercize from bloggery. I cannot write it off the cuff; I think and re-think it every day. I revise and scrub and re-write and finesse and edit – before I publish. It would be great if the timing is perfect (October this year), but the point of a book is not necessarily to hit the perfect moment, but to make a longer-lasting statement. I.e. it’s not journalism. I had one memorable flash of revelation about journalism, over a decade ago. I’d written my latest column for the Sunday Times. Saturday night, I had a panic that I’d gotten something wrong, called the paper up and got the over-night sub-editors. The subs, as they are known in Fleet Street, are the real editors. They get to slice and dice your copy if an ad comes in too large. I huffed and puffed for a few minutes about my possible error, only to get the memorable reply (in broad Cockney):

"Aw, I wouldn’t worry about that, mate. It’s fish and chips soon, mate. Fish and chips."

For the uninitiated, the correct receptacle for fish and chips, Brit-style, is to have them wrapped in newspaper. Sooner rather than later, my imperfect prose would be warming a piece of battered cod. Google seems almost dignified in comparison.

“Hateful”

I’m afraid that my reference to Hugh Hewitt might have been misinterpreted. I mentioned him purely to say he doesn’t engage in the hateful rhetoric of some on the far left, not to say he is in any way "hateful" himself. Poor wording, I guess. He’s a very far-right guy, but I’ve never experienced any personal invective from him. That was my point. I’m sorry if I expressed it artlessly. Meanwhile, the lefty bloggers appear to have taken profound offense. Here’s one with an argument. Another reader concurs with me:

"To see this, look how the right has treated you and compare that to the way the left has treated, say, Christopher Hitchens. To be fair to the left, Hitchens is meaner than you."

Funnier too.

Spending Watch

Brian Riedl has some salient data out today. Money quote:

"More broadly, the accusation that poor families are shouldering more of the tax burden while receiving less of the spending is empirically false. From 1979 through 2003, the total federal tax burden on the highest-earning quintile (one-fifth or 20 percent) of Americans — who earn 52 percent of all income — rose from 56 percent to 66 percent of all taxes. Their share of individual income taxes jumped from 65 percent to 85 percent. On the spending side, antipoverty spending has leaped from 9.1 percent of all federal spending in 1990 to a record 16.3 percent in 2004."

Bush has been shoveling other people’s money to the poor like the big government liberal he is. More here.

How Muslim Blackmail Works

Moscow has now canceled its Gay Pride parade. It was canceled after the chief Muslim leader in Russia warned that marchers would be "bashed" if they dared to walk the streets. Money quote:

"Earlier this week Chief Mufti Talgat Tadzhuddin warned that Russia’s Muslims would stage violent protests if the march went ahead. "If they come out on to the streets anyway they should be flogged. Any normal person would do that – Muslims and Orthodox Christians alike … [The protests] might be even more intense than protests abroad against those controversial cartoons." The cleric said the Koran taught that homosexuals should be killed because their lifestyle spells the extinction of the human race and said that gays had no human rights."

Notice this is not al Qaeda. It is the official mainstream Muslim leadership. Bob Wright today makes the case for self-censorship to avoid offense to religious groups and others. In principle, this makes sense. Gratuitous, arbitrary offense of someone else’s faith is not a laudable exercize of free speech. It’s an abuse of such freedom. But context is vital.  Bob cites an example of portraying Jesus with a crown of thorns made up of dynamite sticks, after an abortion clinic bombing. I’d say that’s a perfectly legitimate comment after an act of violence performed in the name of a religious figure who preached non-violence. Many Christians would share the sentiments of the cartoonist. It’s ironic, as the Muhammad cartoon was. And if it’s defensible in that case, it is exponentially more so in the case of Islam in 2006.

The world has been terrorized for decades now by murderers who specifically cite Muhammad as their inspiration. It is completely legitimate speech to point that out. Not to point it out – to remain silent in the face of it – is an act of denial.The reason that so many Muslims are offended is not just because any depiction of Muhammad is taboo; but because the conflation of Islam and murder is now firmly fixed in the global consciousness. I can understand why the repetition of that fact should upset many peace-loving Muslims. But that is not the fault of cartoonists. It’s the fault of the Muslim terrorists, and the failure of mainstream Muslims to condemn them sufficiently, ostracize them completely, and prevent them effectively from further mayhem. At this point, in my judgment, further appeasement of these religious terrorists is counter-productive – and actually enables the extremists in their simultaneous intimidation of moderate Muslims.

To take another example: Would Bob urge the gay marchers in Moscow not to parade, because it offends so many religious people, Orthodox and Muslim? Should gay people censor themselves to avoid offending others? Should women who object to the brutal subjugation of half the human race in many Islamic societies silence themselves? Maybe Bob would indeed argue for self-censorship in these cases. Maybe he wouldn’t. After all, Islam is very clear about the fate of homosexuals and the role of women. But self-censorship is a slippery slope. Practising it after acts of mass murder runs a real risk of inviting more of them. As ACT-UP used to say, "Silence = Death." Which is why the Islamists want as much silence as possible.