While we have said many times that Nazi comparisons are offensive and inappropriate when used for political attacks, in my view it is wrongheaded to single out only Fox News on this issue, when both liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, can share equal guilt in making trivializing comparisons to the Holocaust.
Furthermore, the open letter signed by hundreds of rabbis is a trivialization in itself—bizarrely timed for release on United Nations’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. At a time when Holocaust denial is rampant in much of the Arab world, where anti-Semitism remains a serious concern, and where the Iranian leader has openly declared his desire to “wipe Israel off the map,” surely there are greater enemies and threats to the Jewish people than the pro-Israel stalwarts Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes and Glenn Beck.
It’s not about anti-semitism — it’s about shutting down the opposition and anyone who would out and criticize the left, and George Soros, a truly malevolent player on the world stage.
It’s a longer-term project, but definitely doable. And it would be a great victory for freedom, with the biggest rollback of the state in almost a century, since The New Deal.
I should add that I used to be a great fan of Robert Wright. I thought that The Moral Animal and Non-Zero were truly great books. So I am quite disappointed to see that he seems to suffer from Beck derangement.
[Update a few minutes later]
As someone notes in comments over at Ann’s site, this is a perfect example of why leftists aren’t entitled to the label “liberal.”
Thoughts from Neil Stephenson on how we got stuck with our current space transportation schemes. It’s unclear, though, what he means when he says “rockets,” or what different directions wold be fruitful. If he means “expendable launchers,” then yes, we need to break out, and start building space transports. But those are still “rockets.”
[Update a while later]
Thoughts on the development of reusable vehicles from Clark Lindsey.
This is a frightening commentary, not just on Internet literacy specifically, but the complete failure of our educational system to teach critical thinking. Because thinking is hard.
It is odd that the soft firms, which market themselves to clients as being super-smart repositories of brainpower (of course this is largely a fiction; see point 3 above), would rely so heavily on university admissions committees. They effectively outsource a big chunk of due diligence on their most important investment (human capital) to a group of people whose judgement they somehow trust, but perhaps without detailed understanding. When I was on the faculty at Yale I knew people in admissions and it’s not clear to me that they were the best able to spot potential in 18 year olds. In studies of expert performance admissions people are less good at predicting UG GPA than a simple algorithm. (The “algorithm” is simply a weighted sum of SAT and HS GPA!)
I’m a lot less impressed by Ivy degrees than I’m supposed to be. And I think that the current occupant of the White House is a great example of why.
If you put together Obama’s resistance to just about any serious changes in entitlement spending with his antique vision of technological progress, what you see is an America where the public sector permanently consumes a larger part of the economy than in the past and squanders the proceeds on white elephants like faux high-speed rail lines and political payoffs to the teacher and other public-sector unions. Private-sector innovation gets squeezed out by regulations like the Obama FCC’s net neutrality rules. It’s a plan for a static rather than dynamic economy.
Leftists only like change when they are in control of it.
[Update a few minutes later]
Sorry, link is fixed now.
[Update a while later]
This seems related somehow: Network news anchors struggle to understand the Internet in 1994.
I had been using email for over ten years prior to this.
I wish that this story was unbelievable. But sadly, it’s not. The unjustified arrogance of these people is astounding, and we’re stuck with them for at least another two years. At least he behaved like the officer and gentleman that he likely is.
Politico is targeting Iowahawk. But don’t hold your breath waiting for the usual suspects to whine about this incivility. And if some deranged maniac attacks his double wide, we’ll know who to blame.
and