I agree with Ron Rosenbaum:

I just don’t get the desperate need for so many commentators left and right to twist themselves into knots of such clueless sophistry to trivialize a fascist regime, to prove somehow that by failing to speak out against Iran’s Stasi like regime that tortures and murders dissidents and heretics, they are somehow being braver and more sophisticated than the “fearful” who actually did speak out.

I have to admit I’m still shocked by the failure of so many of the commentariat in the MSM and the blogosphere to have the moral clarity to express outrage, shocked by their impulse instead to find ways to deny or trivialize Hitlerism and the need to confront it—especially by those in the moral witness line of work. The self-congratulatory (I’m so fearless!) way they strained to find eight different ways to excuse and diminish what Ahmadinejad said is something they will have to explain to the Iranian student in the Observer story.

[Update late morning]

On a slightly lighter (or lower?) note, Iowahawk has another dialog with evil.

I am not shocked.

Post-modern thought negates meaningful distinctions, and attends only to the competition between narratives. Post-modern thought is the acidic life's blood that flows through the veins of academia (at least, outside the colleges in which the scientific method remains paramount).

The part that the academy seems to miss is that the competition between narratives can result in a dialectic. When that happens, the dialectic is resolved through:

a. Erecting barriers, so that the competition no longer occurs. The result is xenophobic cultural enclaves.

b. Violence, so that one narrative no longer can compete. The result is Orwell's 1984.

Nothing shocks me about so many of our "public" institutions.

I regret that I am at a loss on how the poison of post-modernity DOESN'T kill us.