Years ago, when the drive for “hate crime” legislation first started taking off, I noticed the rising confluence of speech codes, radical “diversity”-mongering and nascent hate-speech codes, and said “one of the logical consequences of this could be classifying Christianity – or at least the “wrong” kind of Christianity – as a hate crime”. 

The audience – mostly liberals, mostly smug about it – scoffed.  “Poor white WASP, complaining about oppression”, responded the middle-class white anglo-saxons of indeterminate religious interest.

As George Will points out, I was, of course, right:

Marriage is the foundation of the natural family and sustains family values. That sentence is inflammatory, perhaps even a hate crime.

At least it is in Oakland, Calif. That city’s government says those words, italicized here, constitute something akin to hate speech and can be proscribed from the government’s open e-mail system and employee bulletin board.

 It’s within government, of course:

Some African American Christian women working for Oakland’s government organized the Good News Employee Association (GNEA), which they announced with a flier describing their group as “a forum for people of Faith to express their views on the contemporary issues of the day. With respect for the Natural Family, Marriage and Family Values.”

The flier was distributed after other employees’ groups, including those advocating gay rights, had advertised their political views and activities on the city’s e-mail system and bulletin board. When the GNEA asked for equal opportunity to communicate by that system and that board, it was denied. Furthermore, the flier they posted was taken down and destroyed by city officials, who declared it “homophobic” and disruptive.

The city government said the flier was “determined” to promote harassment based on sexual orientation. The city warned that the flier and communications like it could result in disciplinary action “up to and including termination.”

Effectively, the city has proscribed any speech that even one person might say questioned the gay rights agenda and therefore created what that person felt was a “hostile” environment. 

This, even though gay rights advocates used the city’s communication system to advertise “Happy Coming Out Day.” Yet the terms “natural family,” “marriage” and “family values” are considered intolerably inflammatory.

In other words, “protected classes” are official protected from any sort of offense at all.

The flier supposedly violated the city regulation prohibiting “discrimination and/or harassment based on sexual orientation.” The only cited disruption was one lesbian’s complaint that the flier made her feel “targeted” and “excluded.” So anyone has the power to be a censor just by saying someone’s speech has hurt his or her feelings.

Unless the speech is “progressive.”

The GNEA should look at the bright side; pretty soon, they’ll be able to drown their sorrows in a moslem foot bath. 

Gary Miller has the best introduction to Bogus Doug’s evisceration of Brian Lambert’s call for media censorship of the global warming debate:

Doug Williams demonstrates why he is duty-bound to never again take 6 months off from blogging by offering this extraordinary post on Brian Lambert’s global warming pronouncements.

In the span of just a few paragraphs, Doug demonstrates Lambert’s unfamiliarity with the scientific method. 

But don’t take Gary’s word for it.  Read Doug’s post.

A highlight:

Brian Lambert has written a screed a bit wordier, but no sillier about conservatives. But we shouldn’t mock. He’s in his terribly serious mode, you see. He’s trying to explain that he – failed media critic Brian Lambert – has figured out the high holy scientific truths journalists ought to respect.

The ethical challenge for journalists and journalism (as opposed to infotainment personalities in “the media”) is stark. It means accepting what the best available science has now concluded is fact about global warming — that it’s happening and human activity is an aggravating if not principal cause — and pulling the plug on spurious “debate” engendered by conservative ideologues, much like what credible news organizations have done with Holocaust-deniers and creationists.

Of course to anyone with a degree studying science as opposed to journalism it’s a grand load of hooey on it’s face. What exactly is a phrase like “accepting what the best available science has now concluded is fact about global warming” supposed to mean? Real science hasn’t “concluded” that any future predictions – about global warming or anything else – are “fact,” because that’s not how science works. And “pulling the plug on spurious ‘debate'” is about as blatant a rejection of the scientific method as one could propose.

Doug shows in tall block letters the scientific illiteracy which is so comical when coming from a cartoon like Lambert – but so dangerous from actual reporters:

It’s child’s play to find leading experts in climate science dissenting from the IPCC report. Yet that’s not something Lambert even finds relevant. Because “for journalists the debate phase has ended.” Science goes in story phases, don’t you know. It’s not really about the search for truth, it’s about framing the narrative. I don’t think he intended to be nearly so honest, but wow is that ever telling.

The other telling thing here is how Lambert has drifted into the position that journalists should trust the scientific pronouncements of political scientific bodies. I know he thinks this is a special and singular scientific issue unlike any other before or likely to come after. But that just illustrates his naivety. Especially in the modern age, scientific funding is driven to a large extent by crisis-mongering. If Lambert is suggesting – and it seems he is – that in the case of a crisis journalists must abandon their skepticism, he’s calling for journalists to become little more than government propagandists. And what could possibly go wrong there?

Read the whole thing.

And Gary was right, Doug; I hope you’re good and rested.  We’re gonna need you.

You can never keep everyone happy.  And when you do talk radio – even as an amateur weekend warrior – it’s usually best not to try to.

On the NARN, we don’t get a lot of chances to interview people with whom we disagree.  Partly because we just don’t do a lot of guests; partly because a lot of liberals don’t bother returning interview request calls from conservative talkers, much less actually appear on the shows.  There’s good reason for that, of course; the fact is, talk radio can be a rough room to work. 

One of the things people miss – especially people whose primary interest is news or politics – is that talk radio is an entertainment medium first, an informational/news medium second.  And throwing plates – picking fights with guests, generating heat and eschewing light – can be mighty entertaining (when it’s not completely tiresome).  The masters of the talk radio attack interview genre – the late Morton Downey Jr, Bob Grant, Tom Leykis and dozens of others – have mastered pushing guests’ buttons as well as those of the audience in the same way that Michael Savage has conquered pushing them in monologue.  It pays the bills.

It’s not how I’m wired.

Part of it is that I got my start as an actual reporter, at one point.  Another part is that I actually have a lot more fun talking with people than throwing plates at them. 

And finally – most important of all – people give you much better material when they’re not on the defensive.

In the past few months, I’ve taken a certain amount of flak for a couple of interviews with Ed and I on the NARN Volume II show – last October’s go-around with the Strib’s Rochelle Olson, and the June 16 chat with former Strib/current Minnesota Monitor reporter Eric Black.   One commenter on another blog called the Black interview a “love fest”, apparently hoping that I’d carry out a Daniel Pearl-style beheading live on the air. 

And what’d be the point of that?  Everyone knows we disagree on a lot of things – do people need to see how very very much I disagree for it to matter?  And frankly, I think you get a lot more interesting material out of people by talking to them, and letting them respond; the Olson interview in particular, if you were listening, exposed some ghastly breakdowns in the way media handles news.  I’m not sure any of that would have come out if I’d have yelled at Ms. Olson, and she’d have hung up and walked away.

In this country, we face a dual challenge: disagree, sometimes vehemently, while still living together under the same governmental roof.   It’s a challenge at which most of the world fails really, really dismally.  And to me, it’s a lot more interesting when conversations are actually two-way things. 

Wanna hear people throwing plates at each other?  Fair enough.  A lot of talk shows will do that for you.  Or start your own, if you’d like. 

Go for it.

…that red-staters have blue-state icons to teach them cultural literacy and sensitivity to the greater world around us:

Actress Cameron Diaz appears to have committed a major fashion crime in Peru.

The voice of Princess Fiona in the animated Shrek films may have inadvertently offended Peruvians.

They suffered decades of violence from a Maoist guerrilla insurgency by touring there on Friday with a bag emblazoned with one of Mao Zedong’s favourite political slogans.

While she explored the Inca city of Machu Picchu high in Peru’s Andes, Diaz wore over her shoulder an olive green messenger bag emblazoned with a red star and the words ‘Serve the People’ printed in Chinese on the flap, perhaps Chinese Communist leader Mao’s most famous political slogan.

While the bags are marketed as trendy fashion accessories in some world capitals, the phrase has particular resonance in Peru.

The Maoist Shining Path insurgency took Peru to the edge of chaos in the 1980s and early 1990s with a campaign of massacres, assassinations and bombings.

Nearly 70,000 people were killed during the insurgency.

Ouch.

As we on the right have been predicting for quite some time, the left – unable to match conservative talk radio in either the marketplace of ideas or the marketplace, wants to bring in Big Brother to do what their own feeble talent and intellect can’t.

A report by the “Center for American Progress” – of which more later – writes:

As this report will document in detail, conservative talk radio undeniably dominates the format.

Our analysis in the spring of 2007 of the 257 news/talk stations owned by the top five commercial station owners reveals that 91 percent of the total weekday talk radio programming is conservative, and 9 percent is progressive.

Each weekday, 2,570 hours and 15 minutes of conservative talk are broadcast on these stations compared to 254 hours of progressive talk—10 times as much conservative talk as progressive talk

A separate analysis of all of the news/talk stations in the top 10 radio markets reveals that 76 percent of the programming in these markets is conservative and 24 percent is progressive, although programming is more balanced in markets such as New York and Chicago.

This dynamic is repeated over and over again no matter how the data is analyzed, whether one looks at the number of stations, number of hours, power of stations, or the number of programs. While progressive talk is making inroads on commercial stations, conservative talk continues to be pushed out over the airwaves in greater multiples.

These empirical findings may not be surprising given general impressions about the format, but they are stark and raise serious questions about whether the companies licensed to broadcast over the public airwaves are serving the listening needs of all Americans.

Radio isn’t supposed to “serve the needs of all Americans” (barring, say, local, regional or national emergencies). It’s supposed to provide stuff that listeners want to tune in to – something that the progressives liberals Fabian Statists have proven themselves dismal at (even in liberal strongholds like New York and Chicago, where the 3-1 disparity in programming hours is generous; the listening audience is even more lopsidedly conservative.

The CAP claim that almost a quarter of talk radio’s audience is identified as liberal – and that, therefore, the market should be coerced to provide liberal programming to “serve their needs” – ignoring, of course, that MPR (of which more in a moment) and the rest of the entire mainstream media establishment already provide this 24/7.

The CAP’s report (WARNING! PDF FILE!  GIVE UP ALL HOPE OF REASONABLE PERFORMANCE OR USABILITY!) lists several recommendations (which I’ll summarize, since copying and pasting from PDF is such a pain):

1. Restore caps on ownership of commercial radio stations.
2. Expand “local accountability” in radio licensing
3. Extort money from station owners who “fail to abide”, give it to “Public Broadcasting”.

By the way, the CAP’s report (look starting around page 12 in the report) has some interesting data – or, to be more precise, makes you wonder precisely what “data” the CAP was using to figure out its ratios, and exposes the weakness of these kinds of surveys, where “conservative” and “progressive” mean precisely what the surveyors want them to mean – if you dig into it a bit.

For example, they credit KTLK-FM with 16 hours of “conservative” talk a day – but the only overtly political shows are Limbaugh, Hannity and Jason Lewis, which rack up nine hours a day among them (John Hines isn’t especially conservative, and Dan Conry is aggressively down-the-middle).   By the way, for all the CAP’s carping about centralization of radio station ownership, most of the “progressive” radio that is actually broadcast is on Clear Channel stations; CBS has a higher listed percentage of “progressive” talk programming, but they’re a much smaller network.  Smaller networks like Cumulus and Citadel broadcast virtually no “progressive” radio (Salem, I’m proud to say, actively squelches it at a corporate level).

Speaking of CBS – they list WCCO-AM in Minneapolis as having no political talk on either side.  WCCO broadcasts Eleanor Mondale, former (alleged) Clinton paramour, daughter of Jimmy Carter’s vice president and sister of paleoliberal Ted Mondale, as well as Jack Rice, Don Shelby and Dark Star; while none of these shows are explicitly political, their tone and topic selection and, when the chips are down, core beliefs do pretty well come blaring through.  They may not be “Air America” material, but they are, if not “progressive”, at least exceedingly friendly to the traditional Minnesota paleoliberal status quo.  The CAP study doesn’t account for this in the Twin Cities (or presumably any other market)…

…but they do call John Hines and Dan Conry “conservative”.

Food for thought.

Oh, by the way, the “Center for American Progress” – just a bunch of concerned citizens, right?

Not quite.  Michelle Malkin:

What is the Center for American Progress and why are they proposing this Government Talk Radio Grab? It’s a left-wing think tank headed by Clintonite John Podesta. It manages a radio studio used daily by left-winger Bill Press’s syndicated radio show. The syndicator is the nutroots Jones Radio Networks. CAP officials appeared frequently on Al Franken’s show and Air America’s airwaves. Seed money for the think tank came from–where else–George Soros, among others, according to the Washington Post.

JB Doubtless writes about Bob Costas:

Bob Costas Is A Pompous, Effete, East Coast WASP

Goes without saying right?

Well, maybe and maybe not.

I mean, I’m not sure that a sportscaster’s Christian denomination has been much of an issue at least since 1971, when Pete “The Papist” Pike – unsuccessful play-by-play announcer for the ABA’s Pittsburgh Condors on KDKA Radio – was accused of getting his color commentary directly from Rome.

“WASP?”  I don’t think I’ve seen someone described as a “WASP” outside of a MAD magazine or some neurotic Jewish comic or another’s routine since the 1970’s.

But for what it’s worth, Costas was raised Catholic, the child of Greek-Irish parents.

So I guess he’d be a “Pompous Effete East Coast WIGC”?

The Times covers the ongoing immigration flap, in which the administration and several senior, superannuated senators are pushing a bill that the grassroots of both parties find clearly intolerable.

Comments by Republican senators on Thursday suggested that they were feeling the heat from conservative critics of the bill, who object to provisions offering legal status. The Republican whip, Trent Lott of Mississippi, who supports the bill, said: “Talk radio is running America. We have to deal with that problem.”

At some point, Mr. Lott said, Senate Republican leaders may try to rein in “younger guys who are huffing and puffing against the bill.”

Senator Lott:  before talk radio, conservatives were perennial also-rans in this nation’s ongoing political discussion.  Barring the occasional miracle-worker like Ronald Reagan, conservatism didn’t become a credible mass movement until talk radio gave people like, er, you the ability to bypass the mainstream media. 

So it’s high time talk radio turned against you, Senator Lott.

Citizens of Mississippi – can we work on trading Lott in for a newer model?  Someone who’s gone a little less DC-native?

Thanks.

I had wondered about fisking the new Nick Coleman column – in which he accuses Republicans of being behind a sinister cabal to gut public school sex ed, and if we really cared for kids we’d let the same public school teachers who can’t teach them math, reading or history turn around and show them how not to get pregnant when doing the wang bang diddly. 

He stated his case with his usual diplomatic tact…

 A new Gallup poll shows nearly half the country doesn’t believe in evolution (including two-thirds of Republicans), proving that the rapid stupefaction of America continues unabated.

If you don’t believe me, I have a new Minnesota sex-education law to show you. Or, rather, not to show you.

…but Wog over at Wog’s Blog noticed something else:

In reading a column in Section B of the Incredible Shrinking Star Tribune, I as struck by it’s resemblance to the screeds if Laura Billings, the best fire the Pioneer Press ever made. Well, they bribed her to quit anyway, and the readers rejoiced.

It’s some self righteous blather about troglodyte Republicans plotting to get sex education out of the schools.

The subject, the hysteria, the condescending wise ass tone, the mediocre writing and the utter boringness of the piece had Billings all over it.

The only thing Un-Billings about it was the byline, husband NickBoy.

Hmmmm.  Can we do a DNA test on a column?

Oh, and when you go to Wog’s blog (and please do – he’s sounding depressed about his traffic, and he does write a blog that deserves a helluvva lot more), wish him luck; it looks like he’s slowly edging closer to a needed liver transplant.

How’s that for a hard sell?

UPDATE:  Kouba also shreds Coleman.

A celeb-watch site notes:

Paris Hilton has not eaten or slept since arriving at ..a Los Angeles jail and is being given psychotropic drugs…

In other words, life in jail is pretty much like life outside.

(more…)

Mexico is upset about the open border:

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Friday that Washington is taking steps to address Mexican concerns the U.S. is not doing enough to stop illegal weapons from being smuggled across the border and into the hands of brutal drug gangs.

A meeting here of attorneys general from the U.S., Mexico and six other Latin American countries focused on Mexican complaints weapons from the United States are fueling a wave of cartel-related executions and violent crime that is battering the nation.

“We are concerned about the number of weapons coming into Mexico and Central America illegally from the United States,” Gonzales said. “There is more that we can do, and we are looking to do, to try and stem the flow of illegal weapons into Mexico.”

Maybe they should build a fence.

It may have been the greatest piece of arts criticism ever written – on the topic of “Gates”, by Christo, one of history’s great works of art, which draped Central Park in orange banners. 

The critique cuts relentlessly and yet obliquely to the core, and yet hovers uncertainly yet fiercely (or perhaps neo-fiercely) at the most trivial yet profound surface:

The dialectic of Christo’s “Gates” is a reflection of the post-9/11 zeitgeist, absent the schadenfreude qua nervousness that has gripped the American populace in this world of “now-more-than-ever.” The semiotics of the saffron (en)robes serves an ontological function in re-animating and re-introducing the humanity of New New York to their perceptions of the orange joy of being – the being you felt as a child, vis a vis a pinata. The Gestalt bespeaks a Foucauldian Weltschmerz, a sumptuous feast of post-Derridian brio-cum-angst. It’s in this context that “The Gates” covers, even metastasizes, over Central Park like a vast dollop of neo-maternalistic, neo-Marxian mayonnaise.

The panels, a touchstone of familiarity to the bourgeoisie (nursing at the paps of American Idol), emanate as immense labia beckoning, even taunting the onlooker to become, to be the phallus penetrating into Mother Nature – the maternal yin imprisoned in the mechanistic yang of the city and yet floating above the concept of restraint – the “Gates” welcome yet repel; they silently ululate like a shtetl of schmatte-clad yentas and yet remain silent with the deafening-yet-voiceless torment of the ur-mensch; metaphysical yet material (or rather neo-material), smug in its tangibility yet internally, silently, futilely screaming in horror at its immateriality. The “Gates” are, in short, of a piece with and yet utterly discontiguous from the fundamental leitmotifs of our age.

Oh, I’m lying – it was Sheila and a group of her friends, spoofing modern art criticism so well it reads like a catalogue at the Walker.

What brings it to mind is, of course, that it’s dead-on – as related by  Roger Kimball in  a spectacular piece in New Criterion, “Why the Art World is a Disaster”.

He excerpts a catalogue piece that reads, on its surface, more like parody than Sheila’s piece:

…its assault on the English language is something you can find in scores, no, hundreds of art publications today: “For Valie Export, the female Body is covered with the stigmata of codes that shape and hamper it.” Well, bully for her. “As usual with Gober, the installation is a broken allegory that both elicits and resists our interpretation; that materially nothing is quite as it seems adds to our anxious curiosity.” As usual, indeed, though whether such pathetic verbiage adds to or smothers our curiosity is another matter altogether.

But that’s a tangent from Kimball’s larger point – why Art (visual art in this case) sucks so badly these days:

Why is the art world a disaster? The prevalence of exhibitions like “Wrestle,” of collectors like Marieluise Hessel, of institutions like the Hessel Museum and Bard College help us begin to answer that question. Their very ordinariness enhances their value as symptoms. In part, the art world is a disaster because of that ordinariness: because of the popularization and institutionalization of the antics and attitudes of Dada. As W. S. Gilbert knew, when everybody’s somebody, nobody’s anybody. When the outré attitudes of a tiny elite go mainstream, only the rhetoric, not the substance, of the drama survives.

Put another way, when everything is designed to shock middle-class bourgeouis sensibilities, nothing does. 

That’s part of the answer: the domestication of deviance, and its subsequent elevation as an object of aesthetic—well, not delectation, exactly: perhaps veneration would be closer to the truth. But that is only part of the puzzle. There are at least three other elements at work. One is the unholy alliance between the more rebarbative and hermetic precincts of academic activity and the practice of art.

Which is, to step out of the world of visual art for a moment, what makes so much post-Ellington jazz music so utterly unbearable, and what made most serious “classical” music of the 20th century positively unlistenable. 

 As even a glance at the preposterous catalogue accompanying “Wrestle”—accompanying almost any trendy exhibition these days—demonstrates, art is increasingly the creature of its explication [which is fun for satirists! – Ed]. It’s not quite what Tom Wolfe predicted in The Painted Word, where in the gallery-of-the-future a postcard-sized photograph of a painting would be used to illustrate a passage of criticism blown up to the size of its inflated sense of self-worth. The difference is that the new verbiage doesn’t even pretend to be art criticism. It occupies a curious no man’s land between criticism, political activism, and pseudo-philosophical speculation: less an intellectual than a linguistic phenomenon, speaking more to the failure or decay of ideas than to their elaboration. Increasingly, the “art” is indistinguishable from the verbal noise that accompanies it,

How true is this?

What is the easiest way to satirize art these days – to actually attempt satiric art, or to caricature the manner of an “artist” or “critic” describing things? 

A second element that helps to explain why the art world is a disaster is money—not just the staggering prices routinely fetched by celebrity artists today, but the bucket-loads of cash that seem to surround almost any enterprise that can manage to get itself recognized as having to do with “the arts.” The presence of money means the presence of “society,” which goes a long way toward explaining why yesterday’s philistine is today’s champion of anything and everything that presents itself as art, no matter how repulsive it may be…The vast infusion of money into the art world in recent decades has done an immense amount to facilitate what my colleague Hilton Kramer aptly called “the revenge of the philistines.”

Take a meander around Loring Park or Lowertown or Uni-Raymond sometime; start talking with “artists” about how much of their time they spend chasing grants to pursue their “art”.   

A third additional element in this sorry story has to do with the decoupling of art-world practice from the practice of art. Look at the objects on view in “Wrestle”: almost none has anything to do with art as traditionally understood: mastery of a craft in order to make objects that gratify and ennoble those who see them. On the contrary, the art world has wholeheartedly embraced art as an exercise in political sermonizing and anti-humanistic persiflage, which has assured the increasing trivialization of the practice of art. For those who cherish art as an ally to civilization, the disaster that is today’s art world is nothing less than a tragedy.

It was always an abstraction to me, of course – I have little background in visual art; I inherited the family’s music and writing genes.  But it smacked me in the head one day in 1987, when my sister and I were at the Walker Gallery, at a “minimalism” exhibit.  I was looking at some “minimal” piece of work, and stepped over what looked like some construction material – a diagonal swatch of tartan sponge (think wrestling mat material) lying against the wall on the floor. 

A guard  hurried over. “Sir, don’t step on the art!”

I looked around, confused.

“Sir, you’re standing on the art”.

No.  I was standing on a piece of tartan foam that had earned somebody with an MFA a whole bunch of money – but it was “art” in the sense that Alban Berg was “music”. 

But there is, one wants to believe, hope: 

But this, too, will pass. Sooner or later, even the Leon Botsteins and Marieluise Hessels of the world will realize that the character in Bruce Nauman’s “Good Boy, Bad Boy” was right: “this is boring.”

And it really, really is.

(Via Jeff Kouba at TvM)

I got this email from a local “Peace” activist on Wednesday.  I may have to give this a shot after the show on Saturday:

The event to organize protests to  the Republican agenda during the
September 2008 convention is still taking place this Saturday, but the
location has changed from St Paul Trades to the Student Center of the U of
M St Paul campus.  The full announcement is listed as follows:

Sat. 6/9 @ 2-5pm, NEW LOCATION (sorry for confusion) @ U of M – St.
Paul Student Center, 2017 Buford Ave, St. Paul, MN (Directions and parking
info: http://www.spsc.umn.edu/about/directions.php)

The Republican National Convention (RNC) is coming to our backyard. 
Feeling angry?  Want to do something? You and your organization are
invited to join us for a gathering of those who have already started
organizing to resist the RNC in 2008 and those looking for a place to start. 
This will be a space for people to come together and share ideas and
energy. The afternoon will be broken into 3 parts.  We’ll start with a
“clearinghouse” where organizations can table and have an opportunity to
chat with attendees one-on-one.  This will be followed by a facilitated
“open mic” discussion period.  Discussion will start with explanations
about what is already underway, and continue with attendees sharing
their hopes, dreams, and visions with each other.  The day will conclude
with “break out” sessions where participants gather around specific
topics of interest and
decide on “next steps.” Let’s meet each other, get to know each other,
and start to work together! Child Care and Snacks Provided. Co-hosted
by: Protest RNC 2008 and the RNC “Welcoming” Committee.

To increase your participation level please contact Karen R at:
[redacted]. Increased participation could include: having
an information table, presenting your “already underway” plans, and/or
volunteering to help with the event.

It’ll be interesting seeing what respect for “democracy” is brewing in these meetings.

I thought about writing about The Today Show’s puffy hagiography of life in modern Cuba…

…but I figured nobody could talk Cuba like Val Prieto.

If you are a Cuban living in Cuba, you have no voice. The Cuban government sees to that.

When you are a Cuban living in exile here in the states – regardless of whence you came – you, like every other American living in freedom, have a voice. But, no one listens. The Media sees to that.

So regardless of how sane your argument is, regardless of how reasonable you are, how verifiable your facts are or how absolutely right you are, the MSM – and by default those that get their news from same – dont really care about what you have to say or what you have experienced. The minute any Cuban crosses the Gulfstream, that voice that has been supressed for so many years becomes like that proverbial tree in the forest that falls. It make a sound, but there’s no one around to listen.

Prieto and his co-bloggers gut NBC’s myopic, oh-so-convenient “coverage” point-by-point, ethical blind spot by ethical blind spot, butt-smooch by butt-smooch, one context-free claim after another, to a devastating conclusion.

The concern is that with the death of fidel castro, so comes the death of his revolution. And the only way to keep that revolution alive, in a post-castro world, is to lionize the bearded tyrant. Barrage the world with the “greatness” of Cuba’s healthcare. Shove the “100% literacy rate” down the world’s throat. Express solidarity with anti-Americanism by making fidel castro, clearly the poster boy of said anti-Americanism, into a David that beat the Goliath to his North.

fidel castro once said that history would absolve him. Yet the only way to do that, given the thousands upon thousands of deaths he’s responsible for, given Cuba’s dismal human rights record, given the revolution’s ruination of a nation, a culture and a people, is to rewrite history. To make the world forget the paredon. To make the world forget crowded Cuban gulags. To make the world forget all the deaths at sea of those whose only hope was to live in freedom.

What we are seeing lately, as the Cuban government manipulates truth, as the world media sheepishly give in to the whims and demands of said government, as the world ignores the inhumanity of the Cuban regime, is the creation of a fictional absolution, fidel castro’s absolution, from thin air.

Read the whole thing, and ask yourself – “why did NBC go there now?”

Smart:

 [James Lileks and Hugh Hewitt] also discussed the immigration bill. I tire of the preludes one has to make in these situations, all the protestations of anti-nativism. It’s not enough to say you’re in favor of immigration, and lots of it; anything short of dropping thousands of blank American birth certificates on the other side of the Rio Grande is construed as Nativist Hysteria. All I want is a fence, but even that desire makes people jump up and shout at the house HEY! what gives you the right / to put a fence to keep people out and keep your antiquated concept of privileged-status Northern European culture in? If God was here to tell it to your face, man, you’re some kind of sinner! (I swear I’ve done that riff before. Gah: well, I think you’re allowed to quote the Five Man Electrical Band twice in your life before you’re slapped with a wet copy of “Ramparts” magazine.) What really irks me more than the Administration’s mulishness is their tone-deaf replies to the bill’s opponents, and it really is Le Straw Finale.  Add to the list of lesser mistakes to which any administration composed of human-type people is prone, add the ham-fistery evident in their handling of those events, add the attenuated death of the Bush doctrine, interred quietly in the first bilateral talks with Iran since the war began almost three decades ago, and add the nagging, itchy suspicion that Iranian involvement in the Iraq conflict might have been turned away at an earlier opportunity with a judicious, gravity-assisted MOAB in a crucial industrial facility, and you have a general Throwing Up of The Hands on the right. Self-inflicted wounds, every one of them.

Stupid:

I’ve no doubt that the xenophobic right is upset about Bush’s immigration proposal… 

Take your pick.

Senator Norm Coleman defends last week’s attempt in the Senate to shut down the preening arrogance of the “sanctuary cities” movement – a group of cities who’ve ordered their police to stop cooperating with immigration authorities.  The “movement” includes Minneapolis and Richfield, and might expand to Saint Paul before too long. 

These “sanctuary cities,” which currently include Minneapolis, offer the perfect setting for people determined to hurt us by offering them protection from immigration-related questions. In several cities local law enforcement are forbidden from asking during their routine police work whether a person is in the United States lawfully, thereby evading their legal responsibility to report their suspicions to the federal government. Essentially, the philosophy is “don’t ask, don’t tell” — don’t ask suspects about their immigration status, so you then don’t have to tell the federal authorities about them.

Scores of law enforcement officers have chafed at the gag order. Many say they routinely come into contact with dangerous persons they know have been deported already — yet their local sanctuary policies prevent them from being able to do anything about it. A few chilling examples include Mohammed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, who was stopped and ticketed for driving without a license in Broward County, Florida, in early 2001. His visa had expired. Nobody asked, so nobody told.

These cities – universally led by left-of-center extremists – believe that their issues with immigration enforcement (all of which generally trace back to “Democrat influence peddling” and “political correctness”) trump national security. 

Just this month we saw a terror plot unfold in Fort Dix that might have been prevented sooner, had the local officials who pulled the suspects over on numerous traffic violations been able to inquire about their immigration status. Make no mistake — this is a national security issue.

For this reason, I have put forth a proposal in the Senate to simply make it clear that a police officer has a right to ask immigration-related questions of a suspect, and to report his or her suspicions to federal authorities through already established channels. The amendment will lift the gag order on our local law enforcement and make these sanctuary policies illegal. I’m not asking local cops to conduct raids; I’m just asking that they be allowed to use their good judgment.

Here’s an idea, Norm; start spreading the rumor that anti-abortion activists, televangelists and NRA members are sneaking across the border. 

You’ll see Democrat calls for fences along both borders and the coastline and no-knock raids on illegal immigrants’ households faster than you can say “Algore”. 

You’re welcome.

…to hear that America’s sweetheart, Lindsay Lohan, is accused of drunk driving and hoovering up enoug Bolivian Marching Powder to kick-start John Belusi’s corpse:

We just wrapped up our live, online feed of the Beverly Hills Sheriff’s Department press conference regarding Lindsay Lohan’s DUI charges and here’s what we learned:

She had coke in the car! At the presser, it was announced that narcotics were found in the car by officers at the time the vehicle was towed and impounded. You can see in X17’s video, Lindsay’s bodyguard Jaz driving the wrecked car away from the scene of the accident just after it occurred (didn’t he think to take that white powdery substance outta the glove box?!).

As many in the media had been speculating (including us), Lindsay appears to have fallen off the wagon and had done so soon after she finished her rebah program at Wonderland a couple months back. X17 photogs witness Lindsay out on almost a nightly basis and she’s not a 2am kinda girl, she regularly gets home at 5 and 6 in the morning and my personal opinion is that you usually don’t make it that far without some gas in the tank, if you know what I mean …

All of my illusions are shattered.

Nobody tell Sisyphus.

About 11 years ago – half a decade before anyone had heard of blogs – I exorcised my inner pundit on a Minnesota Politics mailing list run by E-Democracy.  The forum was dominated by orthodox and fundamentalist DFLers – indeed, I was invited to join the forum by the chairman of the Libertarian Party of Minnesota, who wanted to get some actual ideological diversity onto E-Democracy.

As you might figure, the “discussion” kicked off like most online debates; a few civil points, and then desending into heated ire; the online environment strips away a lot of social inhibitions, and it showed.

So about a year later, the list threw a party.  We met at Crosby Park in Saint Paul, with a grill and a couple of cases of beer and pop…

…and talked.  Some of the talk was about politics; most wasn’t. 

And by the end of the evening, many of the people there had a revelation; the people they were writing to, and sometimes about, weren’t cartoons; they weren’t mere collections of partisan stereotypes.  The discourse on the forum got a lot more civil; there’d be flares of ire, and newbies sometimes brought more traditional online behavior to the forum (which often subsided when they, too, attended a later party). 

It was in the news – the LATimes via Ed Morrissey, specifically – after the death of Jerry Falwell, as people began talking about the seemingly bizarre friendship between Falwell and pr0n mogul Larry Flynt. 

My mother always told me that no matter how repugnant you find a person, when you meet them face to face you will always find something about them to like. The more I got to know Falwell, the more I began to see that his public portrayals were caricatures of himself. There was a dichotomy between the real Falwell and the one he showed the public.

One of the key tenets of training, for example, a soldier, is to dehumanize the enemy; to learn (or teach someone) to regard the “enemy” as a little less human than you and the people you’re defending are.  With some enemies, of course, it’s easy; those who saw off the heads of defenseless prisoners are not really very human in any moral sense.  But the examples are everywhere of people noticing it; stories abound from World War II of GIs who’d spent months in training learning to detest the enemy (and months more in combat internalizing it) finally coming face to face with German, and finally Japanese, civilians, and realizing that while they come from very different places and in many cases had very different beliefs, they’re basically people anyway.

It’s something I’ve noticed among local blogs, as well.  Now, I’ll allow up front that people tend to be much more forgiving of gaffes and ugliness that they’re closer to agreeing with than otherwise; if we accept that Mark Gisleson and Tom Swift are opposide sides of the same coin (and in many ways, they are; both pretty much say what they want, damn the consequences), I tend to give Swiftee the benefit of a doubt that I won’t extend to Gisleson – partly because Swiftee is vastly more often right than Gisleson (1), and partly because I’m a lot more able to see whatever merit may lurk even in Swiftee’s most outrageous statements, because I’m closer to him ideologically.  And before any of you leftybloggers start sputtering and fuming and jumping up and down like I’d just declared myself the best feminist in town (though that happens to be true), remember – you all do it too.  Every one of you.

But it’s a pretty ecumenical phenomenon.  People discount those they disagree with.  But because of the way online communication works – all images you have of someone are either hyper-ideal (which is why online dating is such a minefield) or hyper-base (which is why online flame wars are so easy), and almost never real. 

I usually welcome chances to meet liberals, DFLers, whatever.  Partly because occasionally discussions pop up and I always win, but largely because it’s interesting to meet people.  Occasionally your preconceptions get popped.  Rarely are they reinforced.  Now, I’m modestly well-equipped to do that – I grew up a liberal (and yes, in case you were about to ask, it does make me a better conservative) so it’s not like I can’t maintain a conversation with most of ’em.

It’s one of the reasons we in the Northern Alliance work so hard to try to invite leftybloggers to  our various MOB parties.  Of course, some of them just don’t want to get along and would rather sit in their miserable hovels and sputter, but for the most part we’ve always had a great time getting together.

And it’s interesting; generally, I find it’s not only easier to have a decent conversation with people I’ve met, but that the interchange online becomes a lot more civilized afterwards.  Not with everyone, of course; some of the leftybloggers I’ve met have been petulant, antisocial and just plain nasty. But as a general rule, meeting people pays dividends in civility.

Not necessarily in “agreement”, of course; may the “good old days” of Republicans acting like Democrats to go along and get along rest in “Bad Idea Hell” forever (take that, Lori Sturdevant).

But sometimes it can be interesting to get past ones’ own stereotypes.

One of the reasons I’m so dilatory and mercenary about following most professional sports (unless the Cubs, Twins or Bears are in the running) is that most pro and, indeed, college sports are just another commodity-based business these days.

Not that I ever really took after athletes as “role models”, although Dick Butkus taught a lot of key life lessons – but as I grew up, I realized that cynicism about sports was both amply justified and a two-way street.

So I was both surprised and gratified to read this: Joe Paterno is spanking his Penn State football team for having acted like a bunch of spoiled thugs, forcing the whole team to clean the 100,000+ seat stadium after each home game to punish about a dozen of their teammates for participating in a brawl:

We’re all going to do it, everybody,” Paterno told the Harrisburg Patriot-News after a banquet in suburban Philadelphia. “Not just the kids that were involved. ‘Cause we’re all in it together. This is a team embarrassment. I wouldn’t call it anything much other than that.”

This is easily the greatest punishment in recent collegiate history, an absolutely diabolical, telling, high-impact bit of discipline that should remind one and all that what Paterno has been doing out in State College, Pa., all these years is more than just win 363 football games, including 20 the past two seasons.

In a coaching business so full of phonies who talk character only to bend the rules, who consider the definition of discipline a player’s weight-room attendance, who wouldn’t dare pull something like this because it might hurt recruiting, here’s Joe Pa, four decades on the job and not giving a damn.

Except about what’s right.

And I loved this part:

It’s a job that usually goes to members of club sports on campus – say, rugby or crew – which do it to raise money so they can compete. Paterno said the clubs still will get the $5,000 for the job, but his guys, fresh off playing 60 minutes of major college football the day before, will do all the work starting Sunday morning.

It’s gratifiying to know that there’s one participant in the college sports industry that still has a sense of responsibility…:

“I don’t condone (the fight),” Paterno said. “Our kids were wrong.”

And across the nation college football coaches faint.

Most coaches have spent their offseason complaining about not being able to text butt-kissing messages to recruits. They no sooner would wear out their players on an off day with garbage picking than give up their country club memberships.

…and a little scary to realize you have to go to an 80-year-old throwback to an era a couple of generations back to find it.

I got a lot of feedback about my response to Swiftee’s cartoon last week. 

Much of it was negative; some said I should have condemned Swiftee’s use of Robin Marty’s ultrasound.  Simple fact:  I expressed my disapproval.  I don’t agree with using peoples’ children – even those of public figures (yes, Robin’s a public figure) – as material in this little online scrum of ours.  As I noted, I wish Swiftee would have taken a less-personal approach…

…because, other than getting so very, very personal and dragging someone else’s fetus baby into the argument, he’s right. 

 More on that later.

But at any rate, I’ve said I disapprove.  I’m not sure what kind of theatrical garment-rending people expect, but don’t hold your breath – it ain’t gonna happen.  People who’ve criticized my response (or, for that matter, assume a definitive response is incumbent on me) want me to pound the whole thing into a black and white square, when it’s very gray and has no shape.  I’m personally very pro-life, but think that medical exceptions might exist that could justify it, sometimes; I also believe that the issue should be reserved to the states, that Roe was a ludicrous decision that conjured nonexistent penumbrae from the ether, that government governs by the consent of the governed and that means “compromise”, even if we find some of the compromises loathsome (I have a hunch Tom Swift and Amanda Marcotte would both be repulsed by the German or French solutions to the abortion issue, permitting abortions into the first quarter of gestation and then banning it completely afterward), and that partial birth abortion is unjustifiable in every case I’m personally aware of, and could (and in the case of viable fetuses otherwise-normal babies, should) ethically be treated as murder.  I believe that Swiftee was wrong to pick on Robin’s baby, but that someone needs to point out the irony that the little darling that Robin and Smarty will no doubt love intensely and do a fabulous job of raising is not one iota different, physically or morally, than the millions just like him or her that are aborted every year, and that there’s a reason people like Swiftee and, also, me get so exercised that the pro-“choice” movement plugs its ears and goes “nya nya nya” to avoid addressing that reality. 

Make that black and white.  Get back to me when you’ve got it done.

You can quibble about my approach – whatever.  Or you can do what Mark Gisleson did (and does on so many issues):  create your own special world with its own logical, rhetorical and ethical rules all your very own, so that in your mind you win all the arguments and everyone else is all ickypoopy.  Gisleson quotes some unnamed wag who conjures up moral analogies with the lithe suppleness of a German funk band:

In response to Mitch:

Altruism is fighting for a right you do not necessarily wish to exercise yourself.

Thanks for noticing!  I do that all the time; I have fought (literally – like, with my fists) for the rights of gays to not get the shit beaten out of them, though I’m not gay; I fight for the abortion debate to be remanded to the states where it should be, even though I’ll never have one; I fight for freedom of speech (well, I do use that); as the Twin Cities’ foremost feminist, I fight tirelessly even as lesser, more patriarchal minds titter with misguided derision, even though I’m a guy.  A lifelong non-smoker and non-drug user, I fight against smoking bans and oppose the War on Drugs.  I’ve even chided Swiftee for what he did, even though I’m a pro-lifer and I’m not Rew or Smarty and Swiftee’s a friend of mine!

I am, indeed, as altruistic as it gets.

Assholism is fighting for war when you have absolutely no intention of ever laying your own ass on the line, or making even a teensy tiny sacrifice while others see their lives completely disrupted.

Fascinating (no, really), and utterly irrelevant.

Just because Bush answers questions by raising new topics doesn’t mean you get to.

(Side note:  What is the Latin term for non-sequitur, again?  That one keeps stumping me). 

The “new topic” is inseparable from the old topic.  And who died and appointed Mark Gisleson the supreme deity?  I can answer the question in any way that is germane. 

Which is exactly what I’ve done. 

 What Swiftee did is what Swiftee did, and it has nothing to do with chickenhawks or the right to privacy.

 Again – I disapprove of Swiftee making the argument personal.  But I think it’s funny that many of the same people who are gamboling about hollering for Swiftee’s head for getting too personal (but being on point!) tittered and chuckled when the less-talented likes of Ken Avidor and Jeff Fecke put out online cartoons that, for example, misrepresented my fellow conservative bloggers and I (the term is “lied”, actually). 

Silence!

And it amazes me that the local media tries to link to me when I clearly don’t want to be linked to (family friendly media have no business linking to me), but ignores Swiftee (aka Tom Swift, failed St. Paul schoolboard candidate) who, in post after post, drops his pants, waggles his wee-wee, and shits on everything and everyone to prove how loathsome liberals are.

 Well, duh.  Swiftee – firebrand that he is – gets 1-200 visitors a day.  Gisleson benefits from the lefty hive mentality and gets many, many more.  Traffic equals visibility (if you’re a leftyblog, anyway).

(And why is it that leftyblogs and every other DFLer in Saint Paul thinks calling Swiftee a “failed school board candidate” pejorates him in any way?  Shall we call Algore, John Kerry, Mike Hatch and Patty Wetterling “failed candidates?”)

And, since most of the Minnesota rightwing blogs still link to Swiftee, I have to assume that the party of Pawlenty is OK with mocking other people’s fetuses.

Again with the “own special little world” bit; by Gisleson’s insular logic, might we assume that the DFL is OK with Gisleson’s frequent invocations of violence, references to his self-proclaimed past as a labor goon, and references to revolution (which, even though many local conservative bloggers took them out of context, were still kind of dumb?)

Swiftee wasn’t mocking the fetus baby; he was mocking a contradiction he sees in the baby’s parents’ world view.  I think it was excessively personal, and I think Swiftee would have made a much better point if he had not done it.  But while we’re on the subject, how about we talk about that whole “contradiction” thing? 

We can leave the specific people out of it if you’d like.

At any rate; if you want to condemn someone’s actions, do it yourself; I’ve said all that I need to say.

I remember thinking at one point that the best way to discredit Algore and his well-heeled global warming panic machine is to expose people to it by force.

I guess I was right; school kids in Canada are seeing the movie over and over again, and finding it wanting. 

Some of the story reads like Scrappleface:

“One of the teachers at my kid’s school showed it and he even said ahead of time, ‘There is some propaganda in this,’ ” says Tim Patterson, a Carleton University earth sciences professor. “I said to him, ‘You even knew this was a propaganda film, and you still showed it in your classroom?’ ” The weirdest part: It was the gym teacher.”

But no.  It’s real.

First it was his world history class. Then he saw it in his economics class. And his world issues class. And his environment class. In total, 18-year-old McKenzie, a Northern Ontario high schooler, says he has had the film An Inconvenient Truth shown to him by four different teachers this year.

“I really don’t understand why they keep showing it,” says McKenzie (his parents asked that his last name not be used). “I’ve spoken to the principal about it, and he said that teachers are instructed to present it as a debate. But every time we’ve seen it, well, one teacher said this is basically a two-sided debate, but this movie really gives you the best idea of what’s going on.”

Maybe Chad the Elder has the wrong idea.  Maybe rather than fight his PC ‘burb’s showing of the movie, he should demand that people be hauled to the community center in trucks.

I got an email yesterday from a friend of mine:

At what point is the line officially crossed.

http://restraininorder.blogspot.com/2007/05/babys-best-friend.html

It would be nice to see those of reason on the right to publicly condemn this type of post.

The link is to Swiftee’s post over at Restraining Order about Robin “Rew” Marty and her husband Smarty’s impending arrival.

Now, don’t get me wrong; Robin’s OK; leave aside the fact that she’s the “editor” of the local Soros sock-puppet astroturf groupblog “Minnesota Monitor”, there’s hope; in fact, of all of the Twin Cities’ leftybloggers, I think she (and perhaps even hubby Smarty) stand a pretty decent chance of becoming conservatives when they grow up – and given that they’re expecting, that might even be happening sooner than we thought. Women without children tend to be Democrats; after they have kids, they tend (statistically) to migrate to the right. There’s hope for those crazy kids.

Swiftee reposted the ultrasound picture (from Robin’s blog, “Powerliberal”), and added:

Robin posted a picture of her fetus, but I noticed something awry right away. Given Robin’s obsession with partial birth abortion, I think that little bundle of cells needs some protection…

A fetus baby with a helmet. It’s kinda funny, if you don’t know the people involved. Still funny when you do, but it makes me a little uneasy.  I generally prefer to keep politics impersonal.  And yet it’s hard to look at, say, this (not safe for work or queasy stomachs; it’s the end-result of a “partial birth abortion”, and it’s horrific) and not want to make it very personal and not-abstract-at-all for those who support it.

So when is “the line” officially crossed? It depends on what you mean by “the line”.

The line of good taste? Swiftee doesn’t just cross that line routinely; he beats it with an axe. Seriously; I get a little queasy when people bring other peoples’ kids, unborn or not, into their humor. Would I rather that Swiftee not have done the cartoon? Sure.

The line of legitimate satire?  Plenty of thud-witted leftybloggers cavil and gambol about like poo-flinging monkeys when, for example, someone who didn’t serve in the military supports the war; while such bleating doesn’t really rise to the level of “satire” (more like “ignorant, illogical japing”), it’s the same thing – they’re inserting their politics into someone else’s personal situation.  I don’t like any of it, really.

Is Robin and Smarty’s baby “fair game” for satirists, given that

1. she put the ultrasound out on her public website, and
2. she and her colleagues from the “Minnesota Monitor” rentablog she “edits” have stumped for abortion on demand and partial birth abortion, and fumed and phumphered when the SCOTUS shot the procedure down?

Well, I’d say “I hope not” – but of course, in the world of internet “cartoonists” (and remember – Swiftee is the Twin Cities’ foremost internet cartoonist, if you leave out “Faithmouse” and “Wapsi Square” and pretty much everyone else but Ken Avidor), pretty much everything is fair game. If there’s an unflattering or embarassing pic of yourself out there somewhere online, it’s going to pop up sooner or later, intended to dink at some belief of yours or another.

So – did Swiftee “cross a line” with his cartoon? What line? Where? In the coarse thrum of the political blogging interchange, I’m not sure there’s a line left anymore; any line one person draws is someone else’s sport to cross, and ones’ best bet is to strictly separate the personal and the public (as, indeed, I do).  The one that civil people try to observe when dealing with one another…

…and, if you’re so inclined, draw your own line.

Which, for me, is this: Congratulations, Rew and Smarty. I’d have not posted an ultrasound pic if it were my kid, but I hope all goes well. For many of us, the morally-disconnected abstraction of the “right to abortion” became a lot more concrete when we had our own kids; abortion was kind of a non-issue for me 16 years ago, too.  But for what it’s worth, I wish Swiftee woulda kept things a lot more abstract – Baaaad Swiftee!  Bad boy! – just as I wish a lot of “pro-choicers” could see things a lot less abstractly.
I’d just as soon everyone leave each others’ kids out of it. They didn’t ask to be included in the discussion.

And that’s really all I have to say about it.

Like lots of Americans, including many Republicans, I was of many minds about Jerry Fallwell.

He was one of the boogeymen I held before me as I tried (and eventually failed) ton convince myself to remain a liberal Democrat in high school and college. His “Moral Majority” struck me as…well, basically right about most things, but the group’s name struck me as a bit immodest for my austere Scandinavian tastes.

But he certainly helped focus attention on issues that were and are vital to Christian conservatives. And the media, inflamed by the likes of Jim Bakker and the nearly-irredeemable Pat Robertson, bayed and cavilled about him like he was a pelt they wanted to collect. Many of his worst “gaffes” were taken in a context that was, to be honest, grossly mangled.

I was sitting in a coffee shop yesterday enjoying a rare day off when I heard the news. A painfully austere-looking woman next to me was reading the news on her laptop. “Jerry Falwell is dead!”, she said to me – exhuberantly, breaking into a happy little chuckle. Apparently she assumed that since we were in a liberal neighborhood, everyone she came into contact with would share her elation.
I sat quietly for just a moment, wondering – how do I answer this? That I don’t really giggle over much of anyone dying? That many of Falwell’s stances were reported grossly out of context (as is the norm for mainstream Christian fundamentalists)?

I figured “why not play the gaffe card?”

“Ayep”, I said. “And as a firebreathing Christian conservative Republican, I didn’t agree with everything he said, but he certainly was an interesting character”.

She shrivelled just a bit.

I left it at that.

Miss O’Hara took it a bit further:

As you know, Reverend Falwell passed away today. Like him or not, I am nothing short of appalled by the reactions we are seeing from some folks. I never really followed Falwell, so can’t say much about his doctrine, but there are way too many people spewing incredible buckets of hate toward this man. Yesterday I was unhappy that people actually care about Buttafuco/Fisher; tonight I just don’t understand how we’ve become so narcissistic that we can’t feel empathy for the family of someone who has died, or the deceased themselves. It isn’t as if he were, oh, shooting homosexuals point-blank like Che Guevara or actively planning to wipe another nation or two off the face of the earth like Ahdmadinejad. And even so, they are lost souls too.Nothing prepares me for the hate unleashed by people in our society, even when the object of that hate is suffering or dead or being abused. Certain pockets of our culture have marinated in hate and vulgarity so long they have no capacity to actually care for each other as human beings, no matter one’s creed. We’re no longer human, but just belief systems. Not exactly what God intended.

I look at some of the dimbulb leftybloggers who are erupting in joy today, and all I can feel is depressed.

I was having an email discussion the other day with a friend who took exception to my continued criticism of Strib columnist Syl Jones.

To be fair (to Jones and to me), unlike most conservative commentators I’ve actually found reason to agree with some of Jones’ work – but it’s been a rare thing.  For starters, I’m desperately sick of his whole “ice people” slur – the whole Melanistic conceit that people of color are inherently emotionally and mentally healthier than white people because their sun-drenched past made them more open and less repressed they’ve “got no soul”, in effect.  Leaving aside the simple fact that no white commentator could get away with doing the same thing in reverse for any reason (assuming they’d want to – and what, indeed, is the point of slandering an entire race’s “soul”, anyway?), it’s a stupid conceit; anyone who can say that a strand of ethnic groups (linked only by skin color, for crying out loud) that produced Bach, Michaelangelo, Beethoven, Turner, Shakespeare, Tolstoii, Byron, Chekhov, Mahler, Ibsen, Hemingway and Ramone “has no soul” is pretty clearly deluded.

But I come neither to bury nor praise Syl Jones.

One of the remarks in my email exchange that grabbed me was the idea that my criticism of Jones was “white-guy-apologist stuff”.  Which prompted me to think – calling someone “white male”, to a fair chunk of our society, is taken as a sort of rhetorical trump card.  The twin involuntary sins of being Caucasian and male are taken as an explanation for the whole gamut of offenses; colonialism, the oppression of women, war, the despoiling of the environment, the alienation of the Industrial Revolution, bad awkward dancing.  Throw in Protestant Christianity (the dreaded White WASP male), and you add emotional rigidness and frigidity, homophobia, unsatisfying sex and patriarchalism.

It’s an “argument” (and I say argument in scare quotes, since there really is no discussion; “you’re a white guy” is tossed out like a rhetorical stun grenade, intended to knock out everyone in the room, without much backup plan as to what happens if it doesn’t work.  One left-leaning woman, on meeting me a few weeks ago and learning I was a conservative, snarked “a white male who’s a conservative.  There’s a surprise!”.  I chalk it up to my inherent restraint that I didn’t respond “a white, upper-middle-class, never-married, childless fortysomething professional woman that’s a DFLer?  Ibid!”) that I’ve pretty much seceded from.  What, indeed, is the point?  Can someone criticize, say, Syl Jones for his many individual misapprehensions of fact (which have nothing to do with anyone’s skin color), as well as the generalized caustic ugliness of constantly referring to “ice people” in his columns – itself “racist” by any rational measure – without having one’s own race dragged into it?

Or does a white male need to subcontract his own critique out to, say, a Hispanic lesbian ghostwriter for it to be valid?

Whatever.  I’m not the one to untangle this society’s angst about race, which started three centuries before any of my anscestors came to this country. Still, if I must be seen to engage in “white guy apologetics”, I’ll just get it out of the way right now.  Every society on this planet that must interact with other societies, from tribes in the New Guinea highlands barely removed from the Stone Age (many of whom have waged constant war on each other for millenia) to tribal clans in Central Asia and the American steppes (whose inherent discrimination against other clans is reflected in the very language the culture uses; the term for “human” in many indigenous languages around the world becomes more derogatory the farther removed from the home clan the subject is), to large, multiethnic societies throughout history.  And of all the thousands and thousands of such societies, from extended family tribes to globe-spanning empires, which ones have been the ones to even attempt to combat systematic racism, to make the genders equal, and to build societies that transcend such bigoties and hatreds?

I’m just saying.

I can’t begin to untangle the issue of race in this society, much less worldwide – partly because a fair chunk of this society’s punditry considers my opinion invalid (I’m a white guy, remember?), and partly because whatever my skin color, I’m not smart enough.  Nobody really is.  It’s something that’ll resolve itself despite the demigoguery and the rhetorical short-cuts and all the other baggage, eventually.  I  hope.  Maybe the demographers are right – the whole race issue will diffuse itself in another fifty generations, as all the races interbreed and the whole planet comes out looking tan.

So maybe the whole “white” part of the “white male” conceit will die off on its own, eventually.  But the “male” part?  That’s where this gets interesting.

Now, I am and remain the foremost feminist I know.  And it both troubles and amuses me to note that many of my fellow guys who call themselves “feminists” seem to feel that the only way for a guy to express “feminism” is to prostrate oneself before women and demand their forgiveness for the sins of ones forefathers, whatever they may have been and whenever they may have happened.

This, of course, is not only rubbish, it’s dangerous – to feminism.

I have a question.  Feel free to discuss it in the comment section.

Background:  This earth has tens of thousands of different societies and cultures.  Many of them – Islam being a key example – are intensely patriarchal (run by men).  However, many are very matriarchal, either behind the scenes (many Asian societies at the family and clan level) or quite overtly (many African cultures).

It’s a given (for most) that boys and girls are different, of course; in kindergarten, boys tend to be physical and spatial, while girls tend to be verbal and social.  Girls, stereotypically, play in groups and gossip about each other (and no, it’s neither a sexist stereotype nor a product of middle-class Western culture, so don’t go there); boys tend toward aggression (almost always stylized, although the feminization of the school system has arguably destroyed the socialization that taught boys to control that aggression, leading to ever-more real violence), physicality and a more-detailed conception of the physical world around them (recognized even in preschoolers as boys’ typically-greater conception of three-dimensional space compared to girls – which helps counterbalance girls’ greater verbal skills).

History’s great conquerors, of course, have all been males; Alexander, the Romans, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Ditka, the British (who were sometimes ruled by queens, but the queen ran a very patriarchal system) and so on.

Who have been the great rulers of matriarchal societies?   Who knows?

The theory I’ve heard – and I can’t remember when or from whom, sorry – is that matriarchal societies tend to be more inward-focused; it’s in matriarchal socities that it’s believed that “it takes a village to raise a child”; according to the theory, a matriarchal society behaves more or less like a group of girls will act; verbal, group-oriented, alternately supportive and undercutting.

Patriarchal societies, says the theory, act like boys; outward facing, rules-based, individualistic.

Most societies, of course, mix the two in some way or another, more or less.  And when two societies collide in conflict, it’s usually the patriarchal one that prevails (see:  the spread of intensely patriarchal Islam across heavily-matriarchal Africa).

Again – as I noted above, the only large, significant society in all of history that has seriously addressed the notion of equity among races, beliefs and genders is the patriarchal, Judeo-Christian western civilization.

Question:  If the Judeo-Christian West were a matriarchal society, would it have developed into small-l liberal democracies?  Or would they be recognizable to us today?  Would they be viable?

Discuss away.  Stupid comments (as judged by me and only me) will be excised.  Not mutilated; I want to stay on the subject, not on a bunch of tangents introduced by certain commenters’ peculiarities.

Oh, and anyone who replies “why does Mitch Berg hate women?” will earn a rhetorical wedgie.

In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings – which could possibly have been thwarted had VT not been a gun-free zone – people and institutions around the country responded.

In the case of my neighbor, Hamline University in Saint Paul, the response involved punishing students that spoke out for concealed carry reform on the “gun-free” campus:

In the aftermath, officials at Hamline University sought to comfort their 4,000 students. David Stern, the vice president for academic and student affairs, sent a campus-wide email offering extra counseling sessions for those who needed help coping.

Scheffler had a different opinion of how the university should react. Using the email handle “Tough Guy Scheffler,” Troy fired off his response: Counseling wouldn’t make students feel safer, he argued. They needed protection. And the best way to provide it would be for the university to lift its recently implemented prohibition against concealed weapons.

“Ironically, according to a few VA Tech forums, there are plenty of students complaining that this wouldn’t have happened if the school wouldn’t have banned their permits a few months ago,” Scheffler wrote. “I just don’t understand why leftists don’t understand that criminals don’t care about laws; that is why they’re criminals. Maybe this school will reconsider its repression of law-abiding citizens’ rights.”

Ironically, Concealed Carry Reform Now of Minnesota – the group that drove the Concealed Carry reform issue for a decade in Minnesota (not, as the media would have you believe, the NRA) – had most of its meetings at the Hamline University law school auditorium. 

But after the Virginia Tech massacre, school administrators across the country were ramping up security. Flip to any cable news channel and you’d hear experts talking about warning signs that had been missed. Cho had a history of threatening behavior and stalking. And a psychological evaluation had deemed him a threat to himself.

So Hamline officials took swift action. On April 23, Scheffler received a letter informing him he’d been placed on interim suspension. To be considered for readmittance, he’d have to pay for a psychological evaluation and undergo any treatment deemed necessary, then meet with the dean of students, who would ultimately decide whether Scheffler was fit to return to the university.

The consequences were severe. Scheffler wasn’t allowed to participate in a final group project in his course on Human Resources Management, which will have a big impact on his final grade. Even if he’s reinstated, the suspension will go on his permanent record, which could hurt the aspiring law student.

“‘Oh, he’s the crazy guy that they called the cops on.’ How am I supposed to explain that to the Bar Association?” Scheffler asks.

For exercising his right to speak freely, he’s branded as a nutcase by the school’s administration.

Sort of like the Soviets used to do.  

While Hamline doesn’t have the rep for relentless PC noodling of, say, Macalester or St. Thomas, it gives both a run for the title.

He has also suffered embarrassment. Scheffler obeyed the campus ban and didn’t go to class, but his classmate, Kenny Bucholz, told him a police officer was stationed outside the classroom. “He had a gun and everything,” Bucholz says…Now Scheffler is looking to hire a lawyer of his own. Even if Hamline lifts the suspension, he doubts he’ll return to campus, he says. “If they’re going to treat me that way before, how will they treat me after?”

Dunno, but I hope his suit draws blood. 

Note to any Hamline administration reading this space; your worthless frat trash’s “puke on Mitch’s property” privileges are permanently revoked. 

A family near Waseca wants – get this! – to use its own land the way it wants to, legally, to make some money and have some fun!

 How un-Minnesotan of them!

Tony Borglum has a thing for tanks. So much so that last fall, after he and his father traveled to England to buy one, they bought four more with the idea of opening a tank-riding business and obstacle course in their back yard.

“We were there a day and a half, and I got to thinking: ‘There’s nothing like this in the U.S.,’ ” said Borglum, 20, talking about the obstacle course in England where he bought the tanks and an armored personnel carrier. “I said, ‘I think people would be interested. So let’s bring some back and see what happens.’ ”

What happened has turned Waseca County into a battleground, pitting the Borglums and their plan against dozens of residents who are less than thrilled by the idea of seeing and hearing tanks and an armored personnel carrier rumbling across the land.

The great Minnesota plague – dozens of neighbors, terrified over…

…well, febrile emotions and untrammelled myths, really:

“There’s a lot of emotion in guns and tanks,” said Charlie Mathern, a hardware store owner and a member of the Planning Commission. “And it brings out a lot of fear in everybody.”

And like much fear – especially when it comes to guns – it’s wrong:

Safety is among the foremost concerns of critics, some of whom say they fear damage from stray bullets from the outdoor ranges.

Oh, for the love of…

…can anyone find any actual records of serious damage ever being done nearby outdoor ranges?

Still others are concerned about noise, vibration and pollution from the tanks, most of which were built in the 1950s and 1960s and used by the British government.

“Who is going to monitor all this?” asked Sue Stangler, who lives about a half-mile west of the proposed course.

Vickie Hill, who lives down the highway from the Borglums, worries that tank and gun noise could spook her horses.

“It just scares me to death,” Hill said. “We don’t know if we even dare pasture them if this gets approved.”

I can’t say which’d be worse; the occasional tank and gun noises, or the fumes and flies from all of Vickie Hill’s horses’ droppings.

“I guess you can say it’s controversial, but we don’t think it is,” Marie Borglum said. “We just wanted to have some fun.”

Others, however, don’t see the fun. “I don’t have anything against guns or tanks or anything like that,” Stinehart said. “I just don’t want it in my back yard.”

Or, as Stangler put it: “They’re good people. It’s just a bad idea.”

Mark my words; if this gets approved, I will be there.