In a victory for freedom of expression, Nonie Darwish has been reinvited to speak at Brown:
Any Arab who speaks differently from the status quo is immediately just branded as traitor, and they want to shut us up. We left the Middle East thinking we
Encouragement
Jon Goff is unaccountably questioning the value of his blogging. I haven’t been linking to him as much as I should, but he has been putting up a lot of well-thought-out and thought -provoking posts on potential space architectures that would be far superior to NASA’s current plans. Head over there and tell him to keep it up.
I do second the recommendation to get off Blogspot, though. If nothing else, it would allow him to post his URL in comments here.
Off The Rails
Jonah Goldberg thinks that Battlestar Galactica’s writers have fallen into the “why do they hate us” trap, in a completely absurd way (and one that continues to mislead the public about the nature of our real-life enemy):
Adama concludes it’s all his fault because he led the mission that proved the human race really were “war mongers” in the eyes of the Cylons.
I don’t want to use a lot of philosophical or literary lingo here, but this is really stooooooopid. Let’s say I’ve been feuding with my neighbor a lot. We’ve called a draw and built a tall fence to avoid each other. But I don’t trust him and I think he may be up to something. So, I peek over the fence. Maybe I even climb over it and look around his back yard for a minute. When my neighbor sees this his immediate response is to get a hatchet and slaughters my entire family, including my relatives in other homes far away. Clearly: It’s all my fault!
What is so depressing about this is that Ronald Moore and the other creators of BSG seem to think that “instigating” a conflict in any way assigns the moral responsibility to the instigator. If I step on a psychopath’s toe, it’s my fault when he buries a ballpoint pen in my forehead. Or, to be fair, they think this is a reasonable, morally serious view. And since they believe it’s their job to illuminate the issues in the war on terror, it cannot be denied that they think this is a serious position in the debate over that conflict.
Again: This is really stooooooopid. The idea that the human race had it coming from the Cylons is moral flapdoodle (and flatly unbelievable; the creators seem to think decent humans would be deeply conflicted about declaring total war on a bunch of artificial lifeforms who slaughtered 99% of humanity).
Step Backwards
Clark Lindsey notes that the FAA-AST web site has been revamped, by folding it into the general FAA web site. While the improvements he notes are worthwhile (though the changing of permalinks definitely is not), I’m unthrilled with the concept of entwining AST even more deeply with the FAA. AST was originally the Office of Commercial Space Transportation, reporting directly to the Secretary of Transportation. The Clinton administration demoted it, and folded it into FAA in the early nineties.
This had two deleterious effects. First, it gave it less clout within the department, since the AA for it now had to report to the SecTran up through the FAA administrator. Second, it placed it in an agency that, after the Valujet crash, had its responsibility declared solely for public safety, with none to promote the aviation industry (one of its charters in the early days).
But the infant space transportation industry needs a different balance between safety and promotion than a mature aviation industry, and there is a potential clash of regulatory cultures as long as AST remains within FAA. Its current bureaucratic abode makes it much easier to justify nannyism that could strangle it in the cradle. I think that there should be a push on by the space activist community to restore it to its original position as a separate administration within DOT, and I’m not happy whenever I see its status as a subset of FAA further entrenched.
The News They Don’t Want You To Know
Violence has been dropping in Iraq.
C’mon, guys. You can tell us. The election’s over. You and the Jihadis won! You can even take credit for it now, just as you can for the economy.
The News They Don’t Want You To Know
Violence has been dropping in Iraq.
C’mon, guys. You can tell us. The election’s over. You and the Jihadis won! You can even take credit for it now, just as you can for the economy.
The News They Don’t Want You To Know
Violence has been dropping in Iraq.
C’mon, guys. You can tell us. The election’s over. You and the Jihadis won! You can even take credit for it now, just as you can for the economy.
Free Speech For Me, But Not For Thee
Judith Weiss has some questions for Brown University, after it rescinded an invitation to a former Muslim speaker that is critical of Islam:
1) Does the Brown Muslim student group have the same compunctions about bringing in a Jewish speaker who criticizes Judaism?
2) If they planned to bring one in and the Jewish students protested, would the Muslim students defer to them?
3) Has a Jew ever been silenced on a college campus for misrepresenting or denigrating Judaism?
4) Is the problem just that Darwish criticizes Islam, or that she compares it unfavorably to Judaism? For example, this appreciation of the self-reflection demanded during the High Holidays, contrasted with the shame/honor imperative of the Islam she grew up with. Is it that Darwish criticizes the Arab Middle East, or that she defends Israel?
5) Is it an acceptable stance at a university supposedly committed to the free flow of ideas for either group to have veto power over the others’ invited speakers? Whatever happened to reasoned disagreement? If Darwish is saying things that aren’t true or are unfair, let the Muslim students attend her speech and respectfully ask her tough questions.
The double standards and hypocrisy here are astounding, considering the kind of enthusiastic audiences that colleges can get for Palestinians and their sympathizers who criticize Israel and Jews.
Democrat Nannies
Right after the election, I pointed out one of the less-obvious consequences of it–Jim Oberstar’s potential strangling of an infant industry in the cradle. Taylor Dinerman expands on the thought today.
In spite of some weasel wording, the hard legal requirements of Oberstar
Maybe We Need To Be Louder
Clark Lindsey isn’t impressed by Scott Horowitz’ ability to ignore “outside noise:”
I guess this is an improvement over the deaf/mute NASA that produced the Space Shuttle, the ISS, X-33, X-34, SLI, OSP, etc. NASA leaders were then completely oblivious to the existence of any outside voices on space hardware development and never felt it necessary to address complaints from know-nothings (i.e. anyone not working at NASA). At least now they go to the window and before closing it they yell at the peons outside to shut up and stop making a racket.