If you want to see how I spent part of my Friday morning instead of what I was supposed to be doing, read here.
My Facebook Friends have already seen the visuals, but if you haven’t, click here if you dare.
No comments on It’s all in (or on) my head
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The YG Network reported one week ago:
President Obama [Thursday] kicks off a three-day campaign-style tour, during which he’s expected to claim victory on the central issue of his presidency: the economy. If this type of fly-about sounds familiar, that’s because, as the Associated Press notes, it “has long been the Obama White House’s go-to strategy” during “tough stretches of his presidency.”
But if you think it’s just conservatives who are taking note of the president’s unearned “victory lap,” think again. As Karen Tumulty reports today in the Washington Post, “[a]t a moment when President Obama is seeking to convince Americans that the economy is finally back on track,” even some of his most liberal supporters — in this case left-wing Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — are undermining his claims, publicly acknowledging that middle-class families are getting a raw deal.
As Warren put it today, “America’s middle class is in deep trouble,” a statement “the timing (of which) turned out to be awkward,” Tumulty writes, given President Obama’s high-profile attempts this week to convince Americans otherwise.
But while Warren and other Washington liberals stubbornly want to double down on the same big-government ideology that has failed working families under Obama, conservative reformers are offering a new way forward — one that addresses head-on the urgent challenges of stagnant earnings and skyrocketing price tags for top household priorities like healthcare and higher education.
Rather than trying desperately to convince working Americans that the economy is “back on track,” President Obama and his liberal allies should come to the table and work with the new, conservative-led Congress to implement this forward-looking vision for a thriving middle class.
The only thing that is better for the middle class right now is gas prices, the low level of which Obama hates and has done nothing to make happen. Obama and his environmentalist toadies favor high energy prices (remember “Electricity prices will necessarily skyrocket”?) in order to force us plebeians into his approved lifestyle choices.
So it takes some nerve for the Democratic National Committee to compile this list of Republican statements about the Government Motors bailout …
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Rand Paul said he thought the country would “absolutely” be better off if car companies had been allowed to fail.
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Marco Rubio stated “the jobs will be gone and we’ll still owe the money. Washington should just get out of the way,” while Ted Cruz attacked the rescue package.
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Scott Walker said “we wasted a lot of money” on rescuing the auto industry and Mike Pence suggested “we’ve got to put the interest of taxpayers first and automotive workers second”.
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Rick Perry not only criticized Republicans for voting in favor of the auto rescue, but he also suggested that it was a step “…in a very dangerous direction.”
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Jeb Bush opposed the auto rescue and sided with Mitt Romney saying we should have let General Motors go bankrupt.
… because these are all correct statements. Carol Roth explains why:
Those that try to tout the bailouts’ success usually begin with a declaration along the lines of “If the government didn’t step in … then GM and Chrysler would have ‘gone bankrupt.’”
First, going into bankruptcy does not equate to going out of business. American Airlines went into bankruptcy and still kept planes flying in the sky, emerging Monday with even former shareholders getting some shares in the post-bankruptcy entity. So, going through a bankruptcy process would not mean that GM or Chrysler would have had to cease operations.
Second, a common refrain is that there were no private-equity or other firms that expressed interest in taking a stake in either company before the government had to step in. Well, that’s because the bankruptcy process wasn’t allowed to play out. The auto companies had out-of-whack balance sheets that included unreasonable liabilities, including union liabilities. No private-equity firm was going to let the UAW have any type of preferred status (although the government ultimately did, see below). However, by not going directly into a bankruptcy proceeding where these liabilities could be renegotiated, there was never a true process to solicit and evaluate interest from financial or strategic partners. That’s what the bankruptcy process was designed to do, but it never had the chance.
The reality is that GM and Chrysler had significantly valuable brands and other intellectual property, manufacturing equipment, a loyal customer base, a skilled workforce and more. There was substantial demand for their products. These were financial mismanagement bankruptcies stemming from noncompetitive labor costs and liabilities, not ones brought on by a lack of interest in the core businesses. To think that no financial or strategic buyer would ultimately have had an interest in these acquiring the assets of these companies is preposterous. Even if you could make that unreasonable and highly unlikely argument, consumer demand for automobiles would still be in place, which means that other manufacturers, like Ford, would have benefited and grown to absorb that demand, and of course a good portion of the related workforce and ecosystem.
To say that the government was the only white knight here ignores basic market principles. Does anyone really believe that the entire auto industry would have gone away or have any precedent for that happening?
Additionally, both GM and Chrysler did go bankrupt. Yes, the government took both companies through the process, using taxpayer money to sustain the companies while they moved the interests of the major union above that of the other creditors (including those that manage the retirement plans of many Americans) and only once this chicanery had been completed then went through the same process that the companies should have been in to begin with.
However, the outcome was pricey in multiple ways, even beyond the creditors losing preference to the UAW and its various interests.
On Chrysler, the taxpayers lost more than $1 billion and the company ended up in majority control of a non-US company (Fiat, an Italian company) and minority controlled by a trust for the benefit of retired auto workers. An IPO for Chrysler is planned for 2014, but the taxpayers still will record a loss and America also records the loss of ownership of an iconic brand.
On GM, the taxpayers lost more than $10 billion and now have no participation in future upside of that company.
Ultimately, we spent more than six figures per job to “save” them from a mythical end and end up with billions won’t be recouped.
What about the small businesses? Many argue that the bailout was about saving the small suppliers. But if this was about helping small business, there are many ways that they could have been helped directly. Perhaps the banks that were also bailed out by taxpayers could have been asked to extend credit to the small suppliers in the automotive ecosystem.
I have had enough with the bailouts. Our government shouldn’t be picking winners and losers and deciding what companies should receive taxpayer assistance and which shouldn’t. Moreover, they shouldn’t be prioritizing certain groups’ interests over others and shouldn’t be touting successes that aren’t real.
Let’s not pretend that this bailout is more than what it was: A mere wealth transfer that helped the unions at the expense of all taxpayers. When that type of cronyism happens, America loses.
That doesn’t include Yossi Gestetner‘s measures:
- GM sold fewer vehicles in the U.S. in 2014 than in 2008.
- GM had about 17.6% of the U.S. market in 2014, down from about 21.9% in 2008.
- GM bailout had a net loss of $10.4 billion (bank bailouts a net gain of $24.3 billion).
- GM’s 2013 profit was $3.8 billion; Ford, without a bailout, $7.2 billion.
The economy is now 8% larger than late 2007, right before the recession started, but total U.S. auto sales in 2014 were only 1.5% higher than 2007.
The only thing needed to be “saved” in late 2008 was GM (and Chrysler), whose finances had been run into the ground due to union contracts, not the weak economy. The auto industry at large had a rough ride just like everyone else, but the industry came out from the crisis depths without being bailed out. But auto sales growth is still lagging the rest of the economy, and GM is actually a drag on those numbers. Basically, the part of the industry that Obama did not “save” is actually doing better than the part he “saved.”
As for Chrysler … it was sold to an Italian company by the same president who complained in 2012 that Romney’s Bain is betting against America.
Gestetner’s numbers are low. This country lost at least $11.2 billion from the GM bailout. And for what? Thanks to our still crappy economy, millions of Americans will never be able to buy a new car. Ever.
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Today in 1967 was not a good day for fans of artistic freedom or the First Amendment. Before their appearance on CBS-TV’s Ed Sullivan Shew, the Rolling Stones were compelled to change “Let’s Spend the Night Together …”
… to “Let’s Spend Some Time Together”:
The number one British album today in 1977 was ABBA’s “Arrival” …
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We know, because they often say so, that those who think catastrophic global warming is probable and perhaps imminent are exemplary empiricists. They say those who disagree with them are “climate change deniers” disrespectful of science.
Actually, however, something about which everyone can agree is that of course the climate is changing — it always is. And if climate Cassandras are as conscientious as they claim to be about weighing evidence, how do they accommodate historical evidence of enormously consequential episodes of climate change not produced by human activity? Before wagering vast wealth and curtailments of liberty on correcting the climate, two recent books should be considered.
In The Third Horseman: Climate Change and the Great Famine of the 14th Century, William Rosen explains how Europe’s “most widespread and destructive famine” was the result of “an almost incomprehensibly complicated mixture of climate, commerce, and conflict, four centuries in gestation.” Early in that century, 10 percent of the population from the Atlantic to the Urals died, partly because of the effect of climate change on “the incredible amalgam of molecules that comprises a few inches of soil that produces the world’s food.”
In the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), from the end of the ninth century to the beginning of the 14th, the Northern Hemisphere was warmer than at any time in the past 8,000 years — for reasons concerning which there is no consensus. Warming increased the amount of arable land — there were vineyards in northern England — leading, Rosen says, to Europe’s “first sustained population increase since the fall of the Roman Empire.” The need for land on which to grow cereals drove deforestation. The MWP population explosion gave rise to towns, textile manufacturing and new wealthy classes.
Then, near the end of the MWP, came the severe winters of 1309-1312, when polar bears could walk from Greenland to Iceland on pack ice. In 1315 there was rain for perhaps 155 consecutive days, washing away topsoil. Upwards of half the arable land in much of Europe was gone; cannibalism arrived as parents ate children. Corpses hanging from gallows were devoured.
Human behavior did not cause this climate change. Instead, climate warming caused behavioral change (10 million mouths to feed became 30 million). Then climate cooling caused social changes (rebelliousness and bellicosity) that amplified the consequences of climate, a pattern repeated four centuries later.
In Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, Geoffrey Parker, a history professor at Ohio State University, explains how a “fatal synergy” between climatological and political factors produced turmoil from Europe to China. What he calls “the placenta of the crisis” of that century included the Little Ice Age (LIA), between the 1640s and the 1690s. Unusual weather, protracted enough to qualify as a change in climate, correlated so strongly with political upheavals as to constitute causation.
Whatever caused the LIA — decreased sunspot activity and increased seismic activity were important factors — it caused, among other horrific things, “stunting” that, Parker says, “reduced the average height of those born in 1675, the ‘year without a summer,’ or during the years of cold and famine in the early 1690s, to only 63 inches: the lowest ever recorded.”
In northerly latitudes, Parker says, each decline of 0.5 degrees Celsius in the mean summer temperature “decreases the number of days on which crops ripen by 10 percent, doubles the risk of a single harvest failure, and increases the risk of a double failure sixfold,” For those farming at least 1,000 feet above sea level, this temperature decline “increases the chance of two consecutive failures a hundredfold.”
The flight from abandoned farms to cities produced the “urban graveyard effect,” crises of disease, nutrition, water, sanitation, housing, fire, crime, abortion, infanticide, marriages forgone and suicide. Given the ubiquity of desperation, it is not surprising that more wars took place during the 17th-century crisis “than in any other era before the Second World War.”
By documenting the appalling consequences of two climate changes, Rosen and Parker validate wariness about behaviors that might cause changes. The last 12 of Parker’s 712 pages of text deliver a scalding exhortation to be alarmed about what he considers preventable global warming. Neither book, however, supports those who believe human behavior is the sovereign or even primary disrupter of climate normality, whatever that might be. With the hands that today’s climate Cassandras are not using to pat themselves on the back for their virtuous empiricism, they should pick up such books.
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The number one British single today in 1960:
The number one single today in 1978:
The number one British single today in 1995 came from a Swedish group that did a wacky country-ish song:
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I think most observers would agree that over the past 20 years or so, we’ve been witnessing a paradox when it comes to free speech. On the one hand, it’s easier than ever before to express oneself, especially in a public way (thank you, internet). On the other hand there is a huge attack on all sorts of speech that can in any way, shape, or form be deemed offensive. From trigger warnings to microaggressions and everything in between, all speech is suspect these days.
In popular culture, there are outliers such as South Park, Family Guy, and Tosh.O, where the envelope of taste and propriety is not so much pushed as shredded completely. Just in terms of comedy, does anyone think Inside Amy Schumer or Curb Your Enthusiasm‘s “Beloved Aunt” episode would have seen the light of day when Janet Reno, the Clinton administration, and all of Congress was voting overwhelmingly for the Communications Decency Act?
That terrible law would have regulated the emergent web like a broadcast network in the name of protecting kids from sexual material. It only was gutted after the Supreme Court struck it down in 1997. Christ, back in the 1990s, Bill Bennett and Joe Lieberman were giving our “Silver Sewer Awards” to Rupert Murdoch and the Fox Network for airing Married…With Children and The Simpsons, and The Weekly Standard was making “The Case for Censorship“!
And yet for all our expressive freedom, there’s a huge pushback against speaking freely, especially on college campuses and in many news platforms. Chris Rock doesn’t play colleges anymore because audiences are buzzkills:
I stopped playing colleges, and the reason is because they’re way too conservative…. Not in their political views — not like they’re voting Republican — but in their social views and their willingness not to offend anybody. Kids raised on a culture of “We’re not going to keep score in the game because we don’t want anybody to lose.” Or just ignoring race to a fault. You can’t say “the black kid over there.” No, it’s “the guy with the red shoes.” You can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.
As unimpeachable a progressive satirist as Stephen Colbert was targeted with a #CancelColbert campaign while mocking Redskins owner Dan Snyder’s devotion to his team’s nickname and mascot image. Lefty comic and actor Patton Oswalt no longer reads Salon because
…they write articles “Did The Onion Go Too Far?” or “ Is Patton Oswalt Supporting Rape? ” They already know the answer, but they know by feigning ignorance they can create all this debate about it. It upsets me because I used to really, and still do sometimes, love the articles Salon writes. They used to have Heather Havrilesky and Glenn Greenwald, and now they have become Fox News with all this look-y look-y shit. It hurts progressives. It’s very personal but the fact is that that they want comedians to think twice, three times, four times about any kind of comedy.
A YouGov poll taken just last fall found that equal amounts of Americans support and oppose “hate speech laws,” defined as laws that would “make it a crime for people to make comments that advocate genocide or hatred against an identifiable group based on such things as their race, gender, religion, ethnic origin, or sexual orientation.” Thirty-six percent said sure and 38 percent said no way. That’s disturbing enough on its own, but here’s something even more unsettling: Fully 51 percent of self-identified Democrats supported hate-speech laws.
That’s not good.
I will not be surprised if the Charlie Hebdo massacre has the effect of increasing support for hate-speech laws in the United States (as Jacob Sullum has noted, hate-speech laws are already in place in France and most if not all European countries). Many Americans who don’t particularly care about freedom of speech may look on the carnage and conclude it makes sense to avoid such scenes by stifling expression. Social Justice Warrior types will take another long look at Jeremy Waldron’s 2012 book, The Harm in Hate Speech, and gussy up their interest in controlling thought and social interactions with philosophical language and social-scientific “rigor.” Conservatives, sniffing out a possible way to screw liberals and libertarians, may rediscover The Weekly Standard’s case for censorship and decide, hell, it makes a lot of sense. Aren’t Christians the folks who are picked on in America and treated unfairly by the media and intellectuals? It’s always “Piss Christ” and never “Piss Mohammed,” right?
Which makes it more important not simply to show solidarity with the dead and wounded in France but to rehearse the arguments for unfettered trade in ideas and speech. A good place to start is the reissue of Jonathan Rauch’s more-important-than-ever book Kindly Inquisitors. Originally released in 1994, the Cato Institute republished as 20th anniversary edition and Reason.com published a new foreword by Rauch.
The case for hate-speech prohibitions mistakes the cart for the horse, imagining that anti-hate laws are a cause of toleration when they are almost always a consequence. In democracies, minorities do not get fair, enforceable legal protections until after majorities have come around to supporting them. By the time a community is ready to punish intolerance legally, it will already be punishing intolerance culturally. At that point, turning haters into courtroom martyrs is unnecessary and often counterproductive.
In any case, we can be quite certain that hate-speech laws did not change America’s attitude toward its gay and lesbian minority, because there were no hate-speech laws. Today, firm majorities accept the morality of homosexuality, know and esteem gay people, and endorse gay unions and families. What happened to turn the world upside-down?
Rauch tells the story of Franklin Kameny, a government astronomer who lost his job for being gay. How Kameny won it back is an epic story of slow-moving but ultimately triumphant justice. More important, Kameny and others like him never supported laws that would limit speech. Instead, writes Rauch, “They had arguments, and they had the right to make them.”
Read the whole piece by Rauch if you care about the future of free expression, which is integral not just to identity politics but progress in science, religion, culture, economics, and every area of human flourishing. It will help remind you—and everyone you speak with—that threats to free speech do not always come from someone holding a gun and shouting Allahu Akbar. Indeed, they are more likely in America to come from people you know and respect.
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The number one single today in 1960 topped the charts for the second time:
The number one album today in 1973 was Carly Simon’s “No Secrets”:
Today in 1973, Eric Clapton performed in concert for the first time in several years at the Rainbow Theatre in London:
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I’m still not sure how the Packers managed to beat Dallas 26–21 in their NFC Divisional playoff game Sunday.
I guess the Packers won because, despite the Cowboys’ seeming dominance of the game, the Packers were opportunistic. A missed field goal led to a Packers field goal to cut the halftime deficit to 14–10. A fumble by running back DeMarco Murray led to another field goal to cut the lead to 21–16. The Packers got the game-winning score late in the fourth quarter when they unveiled their no-running-back offense and drove 80 yards through the previously stiff Cowboys defense.
After that, well …
https://vine.co/v/ODZIgmhUxr1/embed/simple
https://vine.co/v/ODZTV7z2UZ2/embed/simple
… here’s the Dallas Morning News’ Tim Cowlishaw:
It looked like a catch. That was true for innocent bystanders and neutral observers and it was painfully true for Dallas fans.
But the Cowboys are the team without a leg to stand on when it comes to sympathy for overturned officials’ calls. And yet it appeared Dez Bryant had gotten one, two, maybe three legs down to put Dallas in position to knock off the Packers right here in Lambeau Field, the site of the Cowboys’ most painful playoff defeat.
Then it was ripped away and, before you knew it, Green Bay was celebrating a 26-21 victory and a date with Seattle.
“I did think it was a catch,” Head Coach Jason Garrett said. “He had three feet down and made a move common to the game. But let me make it really clear. This game wasn’t about officiating. We had 60 minutes…and we didn’t do the things necessary to win the game.”
A week ago Lions fans and Cowboys haters couldn’t believe their eyes and ears when a pass interference flag was picked up, helping to fuel Dallas’ 24-20 rally past Detroit.
This time it was a catch Bryant made inside the one-yard line, a deep throw on fourth-and-two from the Green Bay 32, another roll of the dice from the Cowboys’ ramblin’ gamblin’ head coach. Less than five minutes to play, Packers leading 26-21, it looked like the Cowboys’ playmaking receiver had put Dallas in position to regain the lead it held for most of a cold but windless afternoon here.
In fact, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said he was unaware the Packers had even challenged the call.
“I thought they were trying to decide where to mark the ball,” Jones said. “It hadn’t even occurred to me we wouldn’t have possession within a yard of the goal line.”
But, like Garrett, he stopped far short of blaming officials for the end of the Cowboys’ best season in five years.
“We’ve all agreed to go with the judgment of the officials in this league,” he said. “I don’t mean to be cavalier about it, but this isn’t a catch in the annals of NFL history. Just like it would have been a catch had it not been overturned, just like it wasn’t interference on 59 (Anthony Hitchens) last week, just like (Ndamukong) Suh played and wasn’t suspended.
“That’s real, and we’ve all said we would live with it.”
The rule might seem contradictory to other rules (the ground cannot cause a fumble, but the ground can cause an incomplete pass?), but that is the rule until the NFL changes the rule. As the previously best known victim of this rule, Lions wide receiver Calvin Johnson, can attest:
Difference between me and Dez? You’d never see me pout like a little baby
Packers 26, Cowboys 21: “A bad rule, ruled correctly.”
That’s how one longtime NFL operative referred to the call that changed the course of the season for Green Bay and Dallas at Lambeau Field. And when the play was adjudicated by referee Gene Steratore under the hood in Green Bay, connected to NFL vice president for officiating Dean Blandino in the officiating command center in New York, they made the call by the exact interpretation of the rule book. With just over four minutes left and Dallas trailing by five, the Cowboys made a strange call on fourth-and-two with the game on the line: a deep ball down the left sideline. Dez Bryant made a leaping catch over Packers cornerback Sam Shields. But as Bryant landed, the ball became momentarily dislodged. The initial ruling was a completed catch, gain of 31, ball down at the Packer one. Green Bay coach Mike McCarthy challenged the ruling on the field. After a long review, Steratore emerged from the hood and said the call was reversed; Bryant hadn’t completed the act of the catch. Bryant put his hands to his head and, wide-eyed, looked to be saying, “WHAT?! WHAT!”America said the same thing. It looked like a catch. By my Twitter feed, a good 80 percent of the fans who opined considered it a catch.
For Steratore, this had to be an agonizing case of déjà vu. He’s the referee who ruled on a similar replay in 2010, overturning a potential winning touchdown catch by Calvin Johnson in Chicago. On that play, Johnson rolled over in the end zone, using the ball to try to spring up, and the ball skittered away. Steratore ruled that Johnson didn’t complete the process of the catch, and the league backed him on it.
The vital and controversial part of this rule is that as a player falls to the ground in the continuation of the act of trying to make a catch, he has to maintain control of the ball when he hits the ground.
Here, Bryant leaped high in the air, had the ball in his control, took a couple quick steps and fell to the ground. Bryant said later he was attempting to stretch the ball across the goal line as he fell. That is a questionable claim. I’ve looked at the replay from different angles at least 25 times, and there’s no clear evidence Bryant was trying to reach across the goal line.
Bryant failed to maintain possession of the ball when he hit the ground. The ball popped from his grasp when his body hit the turf, and it momentarily left his grip. He caught it while on the ground without the ball hitting the ground. But by rule, that’s not important. Bryant would have had to possess the ball without it leaving his grasp when he hit the ground.
Crucial point two: If Steratore and Blandino had ruled that Bryant fumbled the ball while making a football act “common to the game,” they could have ruled the catch good and the ball down at the one. For instance, if they ruled that he caught the ball and then extended both arms “while making a football act common to the game”—that is, while trying to extend the ball across the goal line, and with the ball never being lost from his grasp—it would have been a catch. By a very close interpretation, Steratore and Blandino ruled that Bryant lost control, and not while making a football act common to the game.
Talking to a pool reporter after the game, Steratore said: “Although the receiver is possessing the football, he must maintain possession of that football throughout the entire process of the catch. In our judgment, he maintained possession but continued to fall and never had another act common to the game. We deemed that by our judgment to be the full process of the catch, and at the time he lands and the ball hits the ground, it comes loose as it hits the ground, which would make that incomplete; although he re-possesses it, it does contact the ground when he reaches, so the repossession is irrelevant because it was ruled an incomplete pass when we had the ball hit the ground.”
To me, this is a classic case of: Hate the rule, don’t hate the ref. I agree that it looked like a catch, but by rule, it wasn’t. “That’s an incomplete pass by rule,” said FOX rules analyst Mike Pereira, who used to have Blandino’s job. “The rule is very specific. In the process of going to the ground, you must maintain possession. That’s what happened here. The ball hit the ground and popped out immediately.” Two other former officials—Mike Carey on CBS and Jim Daopolous on ESPN—were similarly decisive.
“I want to know why it wasn’t a catch,” Bryant asked one wave of reporters. And then another: “Why? Explain why that wasn’t a catch.”
I just did, but Bryant may get some satisfaction this offseason because the rule is going to be debated. Again. For years, I’ve gone to league meetings and listened to debates about the rule. (Actually, the debates are fierce in the 24 or 48 hours after egregious plays; by the time the March meetings roll around, there are often long discussions but little passion about it. That could change this year, with the intensity of interest around this call.) One league source told me Sunday night that the Competition Committee will certainly look at the rule this offseason, beginning (likely) at the group‘s first meeting in February.
Maybe there will be enough momentum for a revolutionary change—for a catch to be catch as soon as a receiver gets two feet down and possesses the ball clearly. The problem with that in the past, as another source said Sunday, is “the cheap fumble.” Think of what happens when a pass, a catch by a receiver, a thudding hit by a defender and a fumble all occur at lightning speed. Did the receiver actually have possession before getting whacked and losing control of the ball? I can recall Jeff Fisher and Rich McKay, the Competition Committee co-chairs, explaining the debate over the rule at one recent meeting and saying, basically, We all agree we don’t love this current rule. We just don’t have a better one. It’s not an easy problem to solve.
With the anger over this call, expect debate to center on either two feet down and possession constituting a catch (with the requisite likely rise in the “cheap fumble”), or a proposal that a receiver doesn’t have to maintain control when going to the ground after taking two steps.
This being a schadenfreude column, we must include memes:
Not only is it ironic that the Cowboys benefited from an official’s call one week and then didn’t the next, the Packers are now going to Seattle, home of the infamous Interceptouchdown.
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“All the unsuspecting Ramada Inn guests, opening their freebie USA Today [Friday] morning to the illiterate ravings of a British jihadist,” quipped the Daily Beast’s Michael Moynihan last night on Twitter. He was referring to an op-ed by Anjem Choudary, whose author shirttail describes him as “a radical Muslim cleric in London and a lecturer in sharia“ in response to yesterday’s massacre at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris.
On one point Moynihan is unduly harsh: Choudary’s ravings were not illiterate, or if they were, his editors did a decent job of cleaning them up. The piece is readable and mostly coherent. It’s the substance that raised hackles.
Choudary opens with a frank rejection of a cherished Western ideal: “Contrary to popular misconception, Islam does not mean peace but rather means submission to the commands of Allah alone. Therefore, Muslims do not believe in the concept of freedom of expression.” He asks: “Why in this case did the French government allow the magazine Charlie Hebdo to continue to provoke Muslims, thereby placing the sanctity of its citizens at risk?” (One assumes he means “safety,” though it’s possible he has in mind the “sanctity” of French Muslims.)
Sonny Bunch of the Washington Free Beacon, guest-blogging at the Washington Post, defends USA Today’s decision to publish the op-ed against criticism on Twitter (including from your humble columnist). “If this were actually the opinion of the USA Today editors, people would be right to be outraged,” Bunch observes. “But it’s not; it’s rather explicitly couched as the “opposing view” to the newspaper’s editorial, which is rather stridently pro-free-speech.”
Fair enough, though all the tweets Bunch cites acknowledge that fact. Ours observed: “This ‘opposing view’ thing is a really bad idea.” We’ve thought so for a long time, irrespective of the substance of any particular opposing view.
According to the USA Today website, “most editorials are accompanied by an opposing view—a unique USA Today feature that allows readers to reach conclusions based on both sides of an argument rather than just the Editorial Board’s point of view.” It is unique, if it is, only in print journalism; before the Fairness Doctrine’s abolition, it was common practice in broadcast radio and TV to air editorials by the station manager and editorial replies by members of the community. In 1991 we contributed a reply to New York’s WCBS (AM) on the topic of federal aid to New York state and city.
Those broadcast commentaries—including ours—were usually a snooze, and we dare say the same is true of USA Today’s editorial debates (though we should acknowledge we don’t read the paper nearly as closely as we do some of its competitors). The practice also involves a moral hazard: The editorial board might choose weak opponents in order to make its own positions look strong by comparison.
We don’t think that’s what happened here. The propositions that free speech is valuable and terrorism is repugnant are uncontroversial enough that it’s hard to find someone to argue against them.
The paper could have found a non-Muslim to denounce Charlie Hebdo without endorsing the terror attack as Time’s Bruce Crumley did in 2011, after Charlie Hebdo’s offices were firebombed (“such Islamophobic antics . . . openly beg for the very violent responses from extremists their authors claim to proudly defy in the name of common good”) and the Catholic League’s Bill Donahue did yesterday (“Stephane Charbonnier, the paper’s publisher, was killed today in the slaughter. It is too bad that he didn’t understand the role he played in his tragic death”). Both included disclaimers to the effect that they opposed the violent attacks, though Crumley’s was especially grudging: “So, yeah, the violence inflicted upon Charlie Hebdo was outrageous, unacceptable, condemnable, and illegal. But apart from the ‘illegal’ bit, Charlie Hebdo’s current edition is all of the above, too.”
This was the approach USA Today took last month, when it editorialized against Sony Pictures’ decision to withdraw “The Interview” in the face of North Korean threats. “Sony Pictures did not respond to requests for an opposing view,” the paper noted after the bio of the guy who did: David Austin, who “served for five years as Mercy Corps’ program director in North Korea.”
Austin acknowledged that “the First Amendment gives people and institutions—Sony included—the right to make whatever movie they want.” But he insisted that “by dangerously teasing a nuclear state with artistic license, Sony doesn’t really honor our freedom of speech.” But his view was rather a narrow one:
When North Korea is provoked, there are consequences on real people, most of whom are already suffering terribly. I have been to North Korea nearly a dozen times, and life there for 95% of the people is brutally hard. Only a few U.S. humanitarian agencies have access into the country, where they treat tuberculosis patients, feed orphans, or provide medical equipment to helpless people.
No doubt it’s true that doing humanitarian work in North Korea necessitates some enormous moral compromises. But it is unreasonable to scapegoat Sony or Seth Rogen for the oppressive conditions the communist regime has imposed on North Korea’s people for nearly 70 years.
Compared with Austin’s opposing view, Choudary’s at least has the virtue of clarity. That’s the core of Sonny Bunch’s defense of its publication: “It’s important that USA Today published a terrorist-sympathizer like Choudary who believes that freedom of expression is not an absolute right. It’s important to make people understand that liberal democracy isn’t quite as secure as we’d like to think it is.”
We agree on the latter point: It’s important that citizens of America and other Western nations be aware of views like Choudary’s. Those views are certainly newsworthy; Reuters, for instance, had a dispatch yesterday titled “Islamic State Fighter Praises Attack on Paris Satirical Magazine.”
But giving someone like Choudary an op-ed platform and whatever legitimacy comes with it is necessary to raise awareness, perhaps it means news reporters aren’t doing enough.
By the way: Who is Choudary? Him:
In an op-ed in USA Today on Thursday, Choudary seemed to try to justify the attacks. “[T]he potential consequences of insulting the Messenger Muhammad are known to Muslims and non-Muslims alike,” Choudary said. “The strict punishment if found guilty of this crime under sharia (Islamic law) is capital punishment implementable by an Islamic State,” he continued.
Choudary, radical extremists, and anti-Islam polemicists alike often resort to quoting scripture out of context, or taking advantage of transliteration, as a way to distort the messages of Islam. Sharia law varies upon interpretations of scripture—and like any religion, some interpretations are more radical than others.While extremist governments like Iran and Saudi Arabia use the death penalty as a punishment for blasphemy, its justification isn’t found in Islam. The word “blasphemy” isn’t even mentioned in the Quran, or the stories of Mohammed and his companions that make up the hadiths, which form the basis for Islamic tradition. Prominent Islamic scholars like Pakistan’s Javed Ahmad Ghamidi have repeatedly said that “blasphemy laws have no justification in Islam.” Neither does the horrible attack that took place on Wednesday.
The Quran doesn’t explicitly ban depictions of Mohammed, and it certainly does not call for violence against those who display such images, even in a mocking or offensive way. The Hadith does ban images of Mohammed, the relatives of Mohammed, Allah, and all the major prophets. But, as Reza Aslan noted in Slate in 2006, such depictions have still existed in certain sects of the religion for years without causing mass violence:
[M]uch has been written about Islam’s prohibition against physical representations of the prophet of Islam. In fact, the Muslim world abounds with magnificent images of Mohammed. (In general, Shiites and Sufis tend to be more flexible on this point than Sunnis). In some, the prophet’s face is obscured by a pillar of fire that rises from beneath his chin in a veil of flames. In others, he is unveiled and glorious, a golden nimbus hovering over his head. While some Muslims object to these well-known and widely distributed depictions, there has never been any large-scale furor over them for the simple reason that although they depict the prophet, they do so in a positive light.
So what does Islam say about depictions that are not in a positive light? Islam’s most poignant instance of aniconism came when the Prophet Mohammed returned to the city of Mecca in 630 A.D. After years fleeing from persecution, Mohammed and his followers had marched back to Mecca to rid idol worshiping from the holy city. According to the critically acclaimed book Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources, upon entering the most sacred point in Islam’s most sacred mosque, Mohammed destroyed all the pagan idols and paintings that were sacrilegious to Islam. (He specifically guarded images of the Virgin Mary and Jesus.)
Mohammed didn’t seek out the creators of the images or sentence those responsible for the idols and sacrilegious depictions to death.
The Quran does call for condemnation of speech and actions that insult Allah, his prophets, and their relatives, but it also specifically warns against violence as a form of retaliation:Repel evil with whatever is better; there is chance that evil may bellow down, if you repel evil with evil, the conflict flares up and both sides will dig in their heels.
The Quran also specifically states that “there shall be no compulsion in the religion.” And there is a whole Quranic chapter calling for the tolerance of different faiths.
When tragedy takes place in the name of Islam and radical extremists profess that such violence is righteous, or that these atrocities “avenge” the Prophet, they only move further away from the principles of the religion.
The Quran warns Islam’s followers “do not raise your voices above the voice of the Prophet.” Radical extremists and clerics like Anjem Choudary are the ones, religiously speaking, who are committing blasphemy. In their distortion of Islam, they attempt to raise their voices above Mohammed and Allah. -
It figures after War and Peace-size Presty the DJ entries the past few days, today’s is relatively short.
The number one album today in 1974, a few months after the death of its singer, was “You Don’t Mess Around with Jim”:
The number one single today in 1974 introduced the world to the word “pompatus”:
Today in 1982, Bob Geldof was arrested after a disturbance aboard a 727 that had been grounded for five hours:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 