Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

Islam And Free Speech In America

2 Comments

This is a very troubling case. I don’t think that the judge has thought through the logical consequences of his action. In fact, he unwittingly points out the danger without apparently recognizing it:

Judge Martin did not, of course, invoke sharia law as a basis for his ruling; nor did he suggest that Elbayomy would have been justified in assaulting Perce because his religion commanded it. But he did seem to suggest that insults to the Muslim faith are especially bad because of how impermissible blasphemy is in many Muslim countries and because of the role religion plays in Muslims’ lives. Indeed, he specifically drew a distinction between “how Americans practice Christianity” and how Muslims practice Islam: “Islam is not just a religion, it’s their culture … it’s their very essence, their very being.”

Of course, there are many different ways in which Americans practice Christianity and Muslims practice Islam. Some American Christians respond to perceived slights to their faith in ugly ways (such as threats of violence against productions of Terence McNally’s play, Corpus Christi, featuring a gay Jesus). But American religious practice, overall, is strongly tied to a hard-won tradition of freedom of religion—and irreligion. Judge Martin’s comments seem to suggest that Muslims are far less capable than Christians of dealing sensibly with insults or challenges to their faith. That does a serious disservice both to American democracy and to American Muslims.

Yes, as is often the case, the judge trivializes and minimizes the moral agency of American Muslims, implicitly excusing them for their un-American behavior, and thus enabling it. He missed an opportunity to educate the man who believed that he lived under Sharia law and was entitled to assault someone who offended him. Any judge should understand that one of the purposes of the First Amendment is to allow offensive speech, even against Muslims, because obviously, there would be no need to protect inoffensive speech.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Be Breitbart

9 Comments

Be Breitbart

And some thoughts from his (and my) friend, Bill Whittle.

[Update a while later]

Repeat after me: The Shirley Sherrod tape was not misleading.

Yes, the only defense that the lying Left has against those who expose the truth is to tell more lies. Breitbart’s point wasn’t about Sherrod at all, but about the NAACP crowd’s racist reaction to her.

[Update later afternoon]

What would Breitbart do?

One thing we must learn from Andrew’s life: If Breitbart could do it, anyone could do it. We no longer have any excuse. America’s bloggers and citizen-journalists and new-media mavens need to get off our collective asses and make news happen.

Every day, you need to ask yourself: What Would Breitbart Do?

And then do it.

Too many bloggers and pundits are responding to Breitbart’s passing with an air of resignation and deflation. Instead, we should look to him as an inspiration, a model of how we all should act. That’s what Andrew would want.

Imagine not one Andrew Breitbart smashing the status quo on a daily basis, but a million Andrew Breitbarts. (Heck, I’d be satisfied with a hundred, but following my own blandishments, I’m reaching for the stars.) The oppressive, smothering narrative chokehold of the entrenched media-political-academic monopoly would be decisively broken once and for all.

If we could get a dozen Breitbarts we’d be ahead of the game.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

CAGW

3 Comments

Why the science is not “settled”:

The sad thing about the Great Climate Debate is that so far, there hasn’t really been a debate. The result is presented, but no one ever takes questions from the podium and is capable of defending their answers against a knowledgeable and skeptical questioner.

I can do that for all of my beliefs in physics — or at least, most of them — explain particular experiments that seem to verify my beliefs (as I do above). I’m quite capable of demonstrating their consistency both theoretically (with other physical laws and beliefs) and with experiment. I’m up front about where those beliefs fail, where they break down, where we do not know how things really work. Good science admits its limits, and never claims to be “settled” even as it does lead to defensible practice and engineering where it seems to work — for now.

Good science accepts limits on experimental precision. Hell, in physics we have to accept a completely non-classical limitation on experimental precision, one so profound that it sounds like a violation of simple logic to the uninitiated when they first try to understand it. But quite aside from Heisenberg, all experimental apparatus and all measurements are of limited precision, and the most honest answer for many things we might try to measure is “damfino” (damned if I know).

The Great Climate Debate, however, is predicated from the beginning on one things. We know what the global average temperature has been like for the past N years, where N is nearly anything you like. A century. A thousand years. A hundred thousand years. A hundred million years. Four billion years.

We don’t, of course. Not even close. Thermometers have only been around in even moderately reliable form for a bit over 300 years — 250 would be a fairer number — and records of global temperatures measured with even the first, highly inaccurate devices are sparse indeed until maybe 200 years ago. Most of the records from over sixty or seventy years ago are accurate to no more than a degree or two F (a degree C), and some of them are far less accurate than that. As Anthony has explicitly demonstrated, one can confound even a digital electronic automatic recording weather station thermometer capable of at least 0.01 degree resolution by the simple act of setting it up in a stupid place, such as the southwest side of a house right above a concrete driveway where the afternoon sun turns its location into a large reflector oven. Or in the case of early sea temperatures, by virtue of measuring pails of water pulled up from over the side with crude instruments in a driving wind cooling the still wet bulb pulled out of the pail.

Hubris.

[Late-morning update]

The Virginia Supreme Court says that the University of Virginia is not a “person,” and therefore doesn’t have to respond to a FOIA.

Huh?

So that means that UVA is immune from FOIAs in general? That it can’t enter into contracts? I think this will be appealed, all the way to SCOTUS, and they’ll lose.

But it raises the question: just what is it they’re hiding that they would fight this so tenaciously? And how is such a lack of transparency “scientific”?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture

Breitbart

23 Comments

I, like many, was shocked to wake up to the news (actually I’d already been up for a few minutes, but it wasn’t long) that Andrew Breitbart died last night. I only met him once, at a party up in Hollywood, but I’m only one degree removed from him, having several good friends who were friends. So I can’t say a lot about him from personal experience, but from watching him on television and the web, he was perhaps the greatest current champion, our Achilles for the cause of liberty, in terms of his effectiveness in taking the battle directly to the enemy (and I use that word freely, because anyone who has seen his hateful retweets knows that it is exactly how the Left views anyone who values individual liberty). Except apparently, rather than his heel, his weakness was what by all accounts was his great heart. No one has been as successful at displaying the hypocrisy and venality of the Left, which is why there is such hatred for him among them. It is a great loss for that cause, but as Josh Trevino says, we must take up the sword of the fallen.

Instapundit has a roundup of links, and Ed Driscoll (who ironically, and sadly now) was celebrating, but now is merely observing his decadal bloggiversary, has more, as does Christian Adams and Richard Fernandez (in which Davy Jones makes a cameo appearance). The National Reviewers have preliminarily weighed in as well, with thoughts from Jonah Goldberg (who was also caught with his immediate reaction, when he was clearly devastated, on Fox News this morning because he happened to be there for something else), Kathryn Lopez, John O’Sullivan, and Dan Foster.

I’m sure that there will be a lot more in the days to come.

[Friday morning update]

“You can give this day back to the Indians“:

One thing that he [Breitbart] and Bill [Buckley] shared was this basic contempt for the premise that the mainstream liberal elite institutions in the United States are in a position to judge and adjudicate the worth of conservatives. That they are in a position to judge our souls. That if we disagree with liberals, that proves that we are somehow wanting or lacking in compassion; lacking in humanity. That is a fundamental thing that enraged Andrew, this idea that if you disagreed about public policy, if you disagreed about how to organize society, that proved you were a racist. That proved you were a fascist. That proved you were a homophobe. It was the fundamental bad faith of the leading liberal institutions that controlled the commanding heights of this culture that infuriated him. And he refused, at the most basic level, to give them that authority over him or his ideas, and that is what fueled his Righteous Indignation, as his book title called it.

And more from Jonah:

…what made him a public figure is what drove him to leap into battle day after day. Andrew had profound contempt for those on the left who claimed a birthright to a monopoly on virtue and tolerance.

He rejected in the marrow of his bones the idea that conservatives needed to apologize for being conservative or that liberals had any special authority to pronounce on the political decency and honesty of others.

Indeed, when liberals called him (or his heroes) racist, Andrew paid them the compliment of taking them seriously. He truly felt that to call someone a racist was as profound an insult as could be leveled. To do so without evidence or logic was a sin.

He believed, rightly, that much of establishment liberalism hurls such charges as a way to bully opponents into silence, and he would not be bullied. That was why, for instance, he offered a reward of $100,000 (payable to the United Negro College Fund) to anybody who could prove tea partiers hurled racial epithets over and over at black congressmen walking past them to vote on Obamacare, as several alleged. No one got paid because the charge — recycled over and over by the media — was a lie.

The Internet was a boon to Andrew because it exposed liberalism’s undeserved monopoly on the “narrative” — one of his favorite words.

It not only exposed it, it has started to break it. We have to pick up where he left off, and finish the job.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Think Big, America.

[Update a few minutes later]

Who he was, how he was.

[Update a few minutes later]

Breitbart’s last laugh.

[Update a while later]

A seventeen-year-old woman (not girl) pays tribute to her inspirational hero.

[Update a few minutes later]

Ace versus the increasingly diminutive David Frum.

[Update a while later]

Apologize for WHAT?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Global Warming

9 Comments

…causes amnesia. Is there anything it can’t do?

[Update a few minutes later]

The unbearable Gleickness of being: a ClimateFake update.

[Update a while later]

Heh — from the link:

Second, it is beyond irony and parody to take in again the fixation with Heartland’s tiny $4.4 million budget last year next to the recent news that the Climate Works Foundation, one of the major climate campaign organizations, just got another $100 million fillip from the Hewlett Foundation. This brings the grand total of Hewlett grants to Climate Works to nearly $600 million. I believe this one grant history to just one organization rivals the total combined assets of all the main conservative foundations. And these folks get their knickers in a twist about Heartland and the Koch brothers? The paranoid climateers make the cliché Victorian woman standing on a chair afraid of a mouse look like a Spartan warrior by comparison. I repeat: what a bunch of losers.

Let’s hope they’re losers. So far the losers have been taxpayers and consumers.

[Update early evening]

A huge link roundup of breaking posts: the Gleick tragedy.

[Bumped]