Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Betraying Free Speech

2 Comments

…by standing up for it:

William Saletan, I am fairly confident, would be quite effusive in describing all the manifold ways in which the Christian mind is “closed” and “hidebound” and “haunted by superstition.” He would, I’m reasonably certain, be quite in favor of any artistic project which undermined the foundations of Christian thought.

And yet, when we turn to fundamentalist Islam, he becomes… a censor. He becomes not an agent of the Inquisition per se, but a bit of a fanboy of it.

And why? Why the anger directed towards someone who is doing what Saletan would almost certainly praise were it directed at any other religion?

I think I know. There is a line of magnificent wisdom in the film The Spanish Prisoner (by David Mamet). It is spot-on about human nature.

The circumstances of the quote are that a young financial wizard has created a “Process” which is worth, literally, trillions. However, it was created as work-for-hire. He created it, but the company owns it. And he’s wondering if the company will actually compensate him for it, as they have promised.

Steve Martin gives him the bad news (paraphrased): “I think if they have a moral obligation to you but not a legal one you will begin to find them behaving cruelly towards you. You will find them treating you poorly, isolating you, speaking badly about you when you are not present. Even as they decide to stiff you out of what they owe you, they will compound that with bad manners and worse intent. They will not be apologetic about it; they will become increasingly hateful towards you.”

The reason is this: When people know they have a moral obligation towards someone which they do not feel like honoring, for reasons of personal interest, or personal safety, or personal political agenda, they feel awfully bad about themselves for not honoring the moral obligation. They feel awfully bad that they are ignoring a moral obligation in favor of their own personal interests.

And people do not like feeling bad about themselves.

So what people do, is this: They begin demonizing the person to whom they have an inconvenient moral obligation, convincing themselves that he is in fact the Bad Guy because, hey, he makes them feel bad. So he must be the bad guy.

Put more simply, people like this are cowards. And the hypocrisy of these people who hate religion in all forms, other than Islam, is sickening.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Obama’s Touchdown Dance Over Osama

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…is over. And the emperor is publicly defrocked just in time for the election.

[Update a couple minutes later]

“Good thing we don’t have that dumb cowboy in charge….”

[Update a while later]

Obama’s great Islamist delusion comes home to roost.

[Update a couple minutes later]

The Germans are on to the fraud, too:

US President Barack Obama’s Middle East policy is in ruins. Like no president before him, he tried to win over the Arab world. After some initial hesitation, he came out clearly on the side of the democratic revolutions. … In this context, he must accept the fact that he has snubbed old close allies such as Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Egyptian military. And now parts of the freed societies are turning against the country which helped bring them into being. Anti-Americanism in the Arab world has even increased to levels greater than in the Bush era. It’s a bitter outcome for Obama.

Gee, some of us were saying that four years ago…

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

Lileks Weighs In

6 Comments

As would be expected:

She doesn’t hate Jews. How could she? Nobody hates Jews. She just wants their homeland dismantled and its residents scattered to – well, somewhere. Take it up with Germany, she notes. Fiddle-de-dee.

Read the comments, as the right-thinking folk of the West line up to applaud her. No doubt some of these people posted it as a Facebook update, leaned back from the keyboard, and felt that rush you get when you know you’ve finally shed some archaic inhibition that kept you from doing what you wanted to do.

It’s okay. You were fooled. You were misled. No one hates the Jews. As for the Yids, the Queers, the lower forms of life known as women – it’ll all sort itself out once the millstone of Oppression is lifted from the breast of the Oppressed.

So that’s what we’re supposed to believe: good will abounds in the world. It flows from the human heart in unstanchable quantities, but now and then things happen. Bad things. Someone makes a movie. Someone dances in public. Someone sits with his wife in a Pakistan McDonald’s. The adults have to step in and make things clear. Calls have to be made. Speech has to be ceased; videos have to be blocked. If you don’t jazz the rabble they’ll come around. Any day now.

Any day.

But yesterday was not that day, and when the mob came to the embassy, it seems there were no Marines to defend the place. Perhaps that’s for the best. In the blinkered, jingo-sodden mindset of Red America, the Marines might have thought weapons free, and mowed the lot of them down. Among the dead would have been a young man – not particularly political, really, caught up in the excitement, really, righteously offended by the existence of a contrapositive argument existing in ones and zeroes on a server in America. His grieving parents would tell the world he had no weapon, he was not a terrorist. Yet they shot him down. Within hours the story would have the Marines outside the gates firing on people who had assembled to list a legitimate grievance – nevermind the security camera footage; the Jews are devilishly good at faking that – and the story would morph in a trice from an act of dogma-sodden barbarism to a tale of conflicting stories that underlines the difficulties of reconciling two sides.

Because the existence of two sides proves the equivalence of two sides. In the larger meta-sense of it all.

As always, read all.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Romney Was Right About That Cairo Press Release

89 Comments

Says the administration.

Funny how some people who claim to be Republicans were so quick to attack him for it, though.

I have to say, though, that no one has talked about one of the most stupid aspects of it. What did they say again?

…continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.

Yes, that’s exactly right. Even assuming that this was a real documentary by a real person who had problems with Muslims, and not a propaganda ploy by Al Qaeda themselves to justify the attacks, which is coming to seem the most likely scenario, that was the purpose of such a flick — “to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.” Not to attempt to educate people about the nature of Islam or its founder, because they might present a danger to our own values and security. No. It had no purpose than to hurt other peoples’ feelings. And First Amendment or no, in these peoples’ America, no one’s feelings will ever be hurt on account of their religion.

Except Christians who think that we shouldn’t redefine the word “marriage,” and if they do think that, they’re hateful bigots. Or people whose religion requires them to wear sacred underthings. Those feelings deserve to be hurt, and hard.

These aren’t the words of a serious person. They’re the words of a bi-polar kindergarten teacher. And sadly, that seems to be representative of much of the federal government, including those at the Justice Department and in the military who still refuse to admit that the guy who shot up all the soldiers at Fort Hood did it in the name of Allah. We all know that there’s only one religion that can’t be criticized, and we all know why. It is because we are cowards, unwilling to stand up for the principles on which this nation was founded. And because that is a religion which is almost uniquely anti-western, and that also explains a lot about why the Left is in sympathy toward it, and its “feelings.”

Administrative, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Intermittent Blogging

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I’m at Space 2012 again today, which is frustrating, because there’s certainly a lot to blog about, with a keyboard hot from Hell. Just go over to PJMedia for a lot of great stuff. How long will the state-controlled press be able to maintain the narrative that Obama is “good on foreign policy“?

[Update a few minutes later]

“We came, we saw, he died.” Just for those who fantasize that Mrs. Clinton would be better on foreign policy than Obama. She is the Secretary of State, after all. This is her foreign policy.