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Friday, February 03, 2006It's official: Either Muslims are infants or we're condescending jerks.Marcus wrote recently to ask what I thought about no U.S. papers reprinting the cartoons of Muhammad that are causing a stir in Europe. Considering that I've seen, in media, pictures of a crucifix in urine, a fist up an anus and pornographic shots from a website that were ostensibly but not really of U.S. troops raping Iraqi women, I'm appalled by the press' dismal interest in my right to know. I think I should be able to judge for myself whether Muslims have a right to be angry about the cartoons, and how angry. Now the State Department has gotten in on the act. Instapundit notes that at a State Dept. briefing the U.S. all but agreed that Muslims have the right to have their precious eyes shielded. Would anybody ask the same of Christian groups? Of course not. Because Christianity is sufficiently grown up and, dare we say it, civilized, to acknowledge the existence of other views and seek merely a safe space for its adherents to practice their faith. Islam, one must conclude, however, is the province of backward xenophobes that, like growling dogs, are best treated as imbecilic but dangerous. "Nice Islam," we coo, while hoping it will bite someone else. Considering what Bush said in the SOTU about preserving liberty in the face of radicals using Islam as an excuse for totalitarianism, this is an embarrassment. And evidence that State doesn't just need a reformation of the culture, it needs a top-down cleaning out in which it is made clear that they serve the interests of America, not the sensibilities of everyone else. Islam's reaction to the cartoons is an embarrassment, suggesting Mohammed is too small to withstand caricature. The State Department's response is a disgrace, suggesting our freedom of expression is more trivial still. Update: The Mighty Tim Blair and Michelle Malkin, among others, have published all the cartoons on his site. The best one is below:  Lest anyone get the wrong idea, the TurkeyBlog is not anti-Islam. The Koran, he thinks, is about on par with most of the other religious texts out there. In the long run, when the Islamonutters die off and enough of the Muslim world joins the so-called developed nations, Islam will turn out not to have been vastly more destructive than Christianity was at its worst. But for now, we will see the like of the Catholic Christians' sack of Orthodox Constantinople on the way to raising hell in the Holy Land. In time, though, Islam will become a guide for sane and rational people to plot out meaningful and orderly lives - it already does in many cases. As a Christian, I get the occasional atheist railing against my faith as though my beliefs were intertwined with Saint Louis' rampage, the Inquisition, the Crusades and Louis XIV's divine right. One day, Muslims will blush a little and try to explain why the ugly Osama thing wasn't what their belief system was about. Assuming the Feiler Faster bit, we may be less than a hundred years from that time. 
posted by gbarto at 11:50 AM Thursday, February 02, 2006Hmm. So it seems that a big corporation thoughtlessly distributed customer credit card info with its product shipments, compromising the finances of 240,000 people.I'm waiting for the NYT and Boston Globe editorials on corporate irresponsibility, the Bush administration's failure to protect privacy and the need for AG investigations and Congressional hearings to get to the bottom of the mess. Of course, since it was the Boston Globe, a division of the New York Times, that did the distributing, I'm sure it was an honest mistake that, though regrettable, should bring about neither penalty nor discredit for the organizations involved.
posted by gbarto at 1:42 PM Reading this Lileks Screed on men, male, vegan, cruelty-free, etc, all I could think is that there's a really bad joke about a bisexual and his transsexual partner in there, but I'm far too sensitive to the differently-gendered to make it.
posted by gbarto at 1:33 PM Wednesday, February 01, 2006State of the UnionI didn't think it was a bad address, but I only read it. The rhetoric in the foreign policy section was appropriate, including being appropriately inflammatory in places - we want people in certain countries worried that if they don't shape up they'll be made into the rally-round-the-flag issue going into this fall's elections. Specifically, we'd like Syria and Iran wondering who's gonna get it now that the rhetoric justifying continued housecleaning in the Middle East has been put on the fullest public display. Some have suggested that the mention of Beslan indicates a rapprochement with Moscow in an effort to work a deal on Iran. Given the tone of the speech, though, I'm not sure it wasn't a simple reminder to Moscow that cooperating with Iran was an indirect way of funding its internal enemies. Were I Bush, in any case, I would have tossed in the same language less to build a bridge to Putin than to inform him that if he inadvertently let Iran get nukes and something really ugly subsequently happened in the Caucasus he'd have only himself to blame. As for the energy section, I think there's been a misread on it. I don't think Bush suddenly went green, though the writer who mapped out the passage may have wished it so. But if you read the whole thing, there's an overarching theme which is that America is here to stay and intends to set both the tone and the standard for the international landscape for the forseeable future. Whether you're a mullah in Iran or a prince in Saudi, last night you heard that a) we're going to keep cleaning up the Middle East till everyone can vote, b) we're strong enough to do this and c) we're going to render the Middle East oil blackmail moot. I'm not going to give Bush enough credit on the vision thing to equate hydrogen cars and Islamofascism with SDI (Star Wars) and Soviet Communism, but I think that in W's energy policy there's a national security element, specifically that the less oil the world imports, the less power and significance OPEC and the Islamonutters exercise over the rest of the world. In this regard, comparisons between Bush and Carter are inapt - Carter's energy policy was isolationist, an attempt to insulate us from the rest of the world and especially a Middle East he couldn't handle. Bush, by contrast, is firmly internationalist, looking at an approach that would allow us to exercise our will in the region with even greater freedom and even less potential consequence. Putting on a sweater and adjusting your expectations so you can stear clear of Khomeini is very different from setting a course where you can challenge Iran at will without it cramping your style.
posted by gbarto at 9:37 AM Sunday, January 29, 2006Let them google "luxury car"... and the Chinese revolution will come.During the Cold War, there were a lot of actors who weren't sure which vision they wanted to triumph. Most just made anti-anti-communist noises, but some were open sympathizers. Some folks went so far as to visit Castro and declare him a nice guy even as they warned that the U.S. should bow out of the Cold War because we would be annihilated. It was never clear to me why these nice, sensible and horribly misrepresented dicators had to be obeyed lest they squish us like bugs, but I was a young man, so perhaps I misunderstood the seeming contradiction. Without Hollywood, we wouldn't have won the Cold War. The funny thing is, while our actors and directors may have had leftist leanings, they were in a business that was unavoidably capitalist: The best way to keep score in a town better described as an unending popularity contest than a city was salary per role and gross per film. Hollywood made movies that would sell and sell anybody. Because that's how you got your name in lights. The glamor of Hollywood was the flipside of the socialist realism of the communist enterprise. It painted a picture of the world that the Russians liked. Blue jeans, rock and roll, lives of abundance - left-wing communist sympathizers aplenty spent their lives making commercials for the American way. When the Soviet government found itself locked in an arms race with the United States, they couldn't provide that abundance. And so when they faltered, the people did not rush to save their system, but let it fall away in relief, and with hope that maybe the American way, or at least the European way, would now be open to them. * * * Google signed on with the Chi-comms. Some are sufficiently upset to have canceled their google ads, use a different engine, whatever. This is silly, unless you believe the power of Google rests in Google. That's like thinking that what moved us from Hollywood was the political thought of the actors. Google is a success because it enables people to find the stuff they want. Some of that is information. Some of that is stuff. All of it is liberating. When you can't find what you want on Google, you don't development a resigned contentment because it must not exist after all; you keep searching - checking back, rephrasing and letting the thought irritate till you discover something new and exciting. A restricted Google in China beats the hell out of no Google. It is the internet version of Hollywood, suggesting a world with so much more than what surfers in rural outposts could imagine. Who cares if you can't find liberty or human rights. People running those searches know already; people who don't have no need of them. The Soviet Union didn't fall because people were angry that they couldn't read the Declaration of Independence. It fell because the people couldn't find decent food or housing but had been exposed to the idea of a world where these were plentiful. Where poor people often still had cars and everybody expected at least three choices of each item in the supermarket. Where rich people might be evil or terrible, but at least they didn't haul away your family and stuff in the dead of night (usually). Here's where I would say fooey on Google over the China issue: If they - don't run ads don't let you look up cars or car stereos block sites with people whose teeth are clean and shiny or clothes are stylish Google stood up to the U.S. government because searching for what you want unobserved sells in the United States. Google didn't stand up to the Chinese because there's no money in linking to human rights sites anyway. Should we be outraged? Should we be appalled? If we think of Google as a moral agent for whom "Do no evil" was more than a slogan, we can get our dander up, of course. But realistically, Google is a business and to be treated as such. Because it is a business, it will take actions to make money where it can, including China. And that means China's in deep doo-doo, the more the people who use Google. Google is the ultimate tool for the information consumerist. It sells information access. It sells the service of putting your information up top. It pays for delivering its information (GoogleAds) to make money off a major segment of its customers. In every way, Google is about creating a world where the individual at the keyboard makes choices and comes to expect that the things he or she wants will at least in the internet domain probably be available. As I say, I don't care if you can't use Google in China to find out how bad the government is. If you can find out about the stuff Americans, Europeans and the Japanese take for granted, you can figure that out. In sheltering the Chinese from info about just how bad the Chi-comms are, Google may be doing a little evil. But by being what it is, it's an incredible threat to the Chinese, no matter how they try to rework it. And that's a very good thing.
posted by gbarto at 1:40 PM |
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