The "Tsesis thesis" deconstructed

One of the blogs I follow is Blazing Cat Fur, which does a great job of sleuthing stuff pertaining to the freedom of speech brouhaha going on in our northern neighbor, ignited by various Islamic groups' complaints to the Canadian federal, and various provincial, Human Rights Commissions.

A recent find was this article by Anuj C. Desai, which does a superb job of exposing the flawed reasoning of Alexander Tsesis, author of Destructive Messages: How Hate Speech Paves the Way for Harmful Social Movements, in advocating for hate speech legislation. So why should we care about an obscure book by an unknown law professor? Because Mr. Tsesis's work provides the underpinnings for legislative proposals by Ted Kennedy to criminalize "hate speech" right here in the U. S. of A. Ted is, of course, a supporter of one of Mr. Tsesis's fellow Chicagoans, one Barack Obama.

In other words, as Mr. Desai astutely pointed out, Tsesis's thesis is "... one that Americans will increasingly have to grapple with ..."

Hey, I like lattés too

Somehow or other liberalism (or liberal elitism, anyway) and lattés have become inextricably connected. Every critique of Obama nowadays is required to mention latté-sipping (and, increasingly, arugula, whatever that is).

I try not to be a snob, but darn it, I really like lattés! A venti honey latté, with whip, at 140° Fahrenheit, to be precise.

A Succinct Summation

This excerpt from an interview with author Howard Rotberg on FrontPage Magazine gives the history of the last 14 years of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in a nutshell:

My somewhat bizarre story started during the after-effects of the Oslo Process in the Middle East. Many observers with some sympathy to Israel's predicament as the only non-Muslim, liberal democracy in a sea of extremism, totalitarianism and backwardness, began to notice a sad fact. Israel's concessions to Yasser Arafat and his "Palestinian Authority", in terms of vesting a graduated sovereignty and even weapons to be used by its security apparatus, did not bring peace, but seemed to embolden the Palestinians, including militias reporting to Arafat, into ever more warlike and self-destructive behaviours, evidencing a fundamental rejection of a two-state solution. With uncritical and unconditional support from the United Nations, major NGOs, self-described "progressives" and "intellectuals", the Palestinians turned to a policy of encouraging their young people to become suicide bombers, with incitement through the controlled media and education system, to perfect a long-term policy to drive out what they saw as a Jewish "cancer" within lands believed to be wholly and rightfully Muslim.

I was concerned that terrorism, primarily, but not limited to, suicide bombings was having a very successful effect, one I would later conceptualize as a "Cultural Stockholm Syndrome". Rather than having the Western World recoil in horror at such barbarian behaviour, the suicide bombers were in fact increasing the support for the so-called "plight" of the Palestinians, in particular in the United Nations and on university campuses throughout the West.

At the same time, the West began to adopt a moral and cultural relativism, which meant we were encouraged (aided by the Critical Theorists in the universities) to critique every aspect of our own societies, but any critiques of other societies or cultures were damned as constituting "racism". The very concept of "racism" was re-defined so that it could only apply in the case of words or actions by more powerful groups against less powerful groups. The rise of "political correctness" meant that reasoned discourse was difficult in the face of a subversion of language and a "closing of the American mind". Any discourse on Israel was met with discussion-ending use of improper terms such as "cycle of violence", "occupation", "apartheid", and "peace process" (which of course was anything but).

To make matters worse, I began to note a serious failure to educate our young people about the nature of ideology as a series of viewpoints, values, and assumptions through which every society at every time must necessarily view the world. The Politically Correct, over-represented in the teaching profession, were taking the absurd position that they alone, being beacons of tolerance and pacifism, were ideologically neutral and free of ideology, and that only the Right Wing, Bush, the evangelicals, and supporters of Israel were ideological in their militarism, lack of tolerance and racism. Alarmingly, even a large portion of educated American Jews were agreeing with that position.

"There are more Nazis in the average Hogan's Heroes rerun than in all of Canada"

A couple of side-splittingly hilarious articles on the Canadian Human Rights Commission 's war on free speech:

Mark Steyn: That poor woman down the street

... in the entire history of the CHRC, not a single defendant charged with a federal Section 13 "hate messages" crime has ever been acquitted. The sole exception was the "Canadian Nazi Party," which got off scot-free on the technicality that it did not, in fact, exist. But, if you do have the misfortune to exist, Section 13 has a 100 per cent conviction rate that the justice systems of Kim Jong Il and the Burmese junta can only envy, ...

Kathy Shaidle: Canada’s Human Rights Kangaroo Court

That there are more Nazis in the average Hogan’s Heroes rerun than in all of Canada didn’t deter the HRC from investigating Lemire, without warrants, and employing those other dubious “drive-by Wi-Fi” techniques... [CHRC investigators themselves posted on Lemire's site, using an innocent third party's unsecured wireless Internet hub to do so]

Both quotes highlight the miserable cravenness of the CHRC in chasing phantom menaces while ignoring the real threat to Jews (and to the whole concept of Western liberal democracy) -- namely, radical Islamism...

Common Sense

Found an article by Heather MacDonald that demolishes the myth that "1 in 4 women are raped in college".

She presents the following story as fairly typical:

What can I tell you about being raped? Very little. I remember drinking with some girlfriends and then heading to a party in the house that some seniors were throwing. I’m told that I walked in and within 5 minutes was making out with one of the guys who lived there, who I’d talked to some in the dining hall but never really hung out with. I may have initiated it. I don’t remember arriving at the party; I dimly remember waking up at some point in the early morning in this guy’s room. I remember him walking me back to my room. I couldn’t have made it alone; I still had too much alcohol in my system to even stand up straight. I made myself vulnerable and even now it’s hard to think that someone here who I have talked and laughed with could be cold-hearted enough to take advantage of that vulnerability. I’d rather, sometimes, take half the blame than believe that a profound evil can exist in mankind. But it’s easy for me to say, that, of the two of us, I’m the only one who still has nightmares, found myself panicking and detaching during sex for many months afterwards, and spent more time looking into the abyss than any one person should.
The inequalities of the consequences of the night, the actions taken unintentionally or not, have changed the course of only one of our lives, irrevocably and profoundly.

Remarks MacDonald, "Even if the Harvard victim’s drunkenness cancels any responsibility that she might share for the interaction’s finale, is she equally without responsibility for all of her behavior up to that point, including getting so drunk that she can’t remember anything? Campus rape ideology holds that inebriation strips women of responsibility for their actions but preserves male responsibility not only for their own actions but for their partners’ as well. Thus do men again become the guardians of female well-being.

As for the story’s maudlin melodrama, perhaps the narrator’s life really has been 'irrevocably' changed, for which one sympathizes. One can’t help observing, however, that the effect of this 'profound evil' on at least her sex life appears to have been minimal—she 'detached' during sex for 'many months afterwards,' but sex she most certainly had."

Click here to read the whole thing.

There's that "lightening rod" again

I've blogged before on my pet peeves with some of the common mistakes in professional writing.

Today, Jonathan Chait in The New Republic quotes a Clinton memo: "Democrats may have a nominee who will be a lightening rod of controversy."

Enough with the enlightenment! Here's another memo: "lightening" is reducing the weight of something. "Lightning", on the other hand, is a spontaneous discharge of built up static electricity in the atmosphere. The rod is meant to attract lightning, not reduce weight.

While we're at it, you "toe" the line, not "tow" it.

Obama's First 100 Days

Michael Gerson in the Washington Post proposes a "thought experiment": considering the foreign-policy "achievements" of Obama's first 100 days, based on his campaign promises.

First up is Obama's pledge to meet with America's enemies without any conditions. Gerson quotes Kissinger: "When talks become their own objective, they are at the mercy of the party most prepared to break them off." Gerson paints a picture of Obama's, and America's, Chamberlainesque humiliation at the hands of Ahmadinejad as the press "... notes another of Obama's historic firsts: the first American president to meet with a Holocaust denier."

Gerson continues in the same vein, detailing Obama's disastrous meeting with Raul Castro as Hugo Chavez crows about Obama's "public apology for generations of American imperialism and militarism." Mexico and Canada, meanwhile, are incensed at being pressured to renegotiate NAFTA: "Why is the new president courting his enemies ... while insulting his closest friends?"

In Gerson's vision, the US military is outraged and demoralized as he yanks troops out of Iraq, undoing years of hard fought gains on the verge of success. Iraq devolves into renewed sectarian violence as a reprieved al Qaeda celebrates its "unexpected victory."

The conclusion:

Obama's 100-day agenda would be designed, in part, to improve America's global image. But there is something worse than being unpopular in the world -- and that is being a pleading, panting joke. By simultaneously embracing appeasement, protectionism and retreat, President Obama would manage to make Jimmy Carter look like Teddy Roosevelt.