Who’s the hater here?

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I wrote a post discussing certain liberals who say Pam Geller spouts hatred but who defend her right to do so. Some of them don’t even feel the need to give quotes or details in order to illustrate this supposed hate of Geller’s.

One, however—Jonathan Zimmerman—offered these examples of Geller’s hatemongering statements:

A few years ago, I invited Pamela Geller to visit the class that I teach about “culture wars” in the United States. Geller had recently spearheaded a campaign to block the construction of a mosque near the site of the World Trade Center attacks. I wanted my students to understand why.

Moments into her remarks, the answer became clear: Pamela Geller is an anti-Islamic bigot who couldn’t care less about the facts. Geller said the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” was just the tip of a gigantic plot to “Islamicize” America. She warned that states and localities might adopt Sharia law, which would legalize polygamy and child marriage. And all of that would happen with the blessing of the “pro-Muslim” President Obama, whom Geller said could be a closet Muslim himself.

Geller herself came into the comments section of Zimmerman’s article to write this note about what Zimmerman had claimed she said that day:

Here is the video of the entire talk I gave to “Professor” Zimmerman’s class. It shows what a bald-faced liar he is. I never said the things he ascribes to me. Shame on Zimmerman and Politico.

She posts a link to the video after that, but I’ll give you the video itself. It’s long; a little over an hour, with the last 47 minutes or so devoted to a question and answer period she had with the students. Geller’s speech lasted about the first twelve minutes. Since Zimmerman had said that “moments into her remarks” Geller had revealed herself to be “an anti-Islamic bigot who couldn’t care less about the facts,” I figured I wouldn’t have to listen long to hear the type of hateful and fact-falsifying comments to which he referred.

I waited. And waited some more. I listened to the first 30 minutes of the video, and nowhere in that portion did I hear Geller say anything that I thought could reasonably be interpreted as Zimmerman portrays it. Perhaps she gets around to it somewhere in the last half of the question and answer period; I stopped listening when I got to minute thirty because all I had heard until then from her were very reasonable remarks, and I didn’t have unlimited free time at my disposal. Zimmerman had written that her bigotry, disregard of facts, and those other statements had occurred “moments into her remarks,” and I had given it much more than what are ordinarily regarded as “moments.” I heard nothing of the sort.

What did the video actually reveal? A libertarian position, including statements such as the fact that we need to offer support to moderate Muslims, because after all, “Who has suffered more at the hands of jihad than Muslims?”

She also says, “You can’t criticize Islam without being called a racist;” that certainly seems to be true, although “bigot” is the more popular descriptor these days. At minute 20:28 she makes it quite clear once again that she’s not accusing all Muslims. And around minute 22:20, as she is about to mention to the class an FBI statistic involving the number of hate crimes against Muslims, she adds as caveat, “Everybody check everything I say; I insist.” Doesn’t sound much like a disregard of the facts to me.

Watch and decide for yourself (and if there’s suddenly a lot of hatred expressed by Geller in the last 30 minutes, please let me know):

[NOTE: Here’s more about Jonathan Zimmerman. He’s a professor of education and history at NYU. He writes many op-eds, and on Philadelphia’s NPR he “discusses contemporary news events in historical perspective…In 2008 he received NYU’s Distinguished Teaching Award, the university’s highest teaching honor.”]

Strange bedfellows

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve written a lot about the Pamela Geller incident and the reaction among pundits and the press, because it seems to me it has brought out some disturbing, although important, truths. The main one is how many people are willing to offer what Salman Rushdie called (in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo murders) the “Yes, but…” defense [sic] of free speech, which he rejects as no defense at all. Free speech means freedom for speech with which you disagree, by people you don’t much care for.

Another thing this has brought out is the virulence of the verbal attacks against Geller by her critics in this country, some of whom I’ve already pointed out, and their failure to offer any proof to back up their accusations. Another is that both Geller’s defenders and her verbal attackers (not her violent attackers, but her verbal ones) don’t necessarily break down neatly into the left vs. right camps you’d think they would.

Some liberals, for example, like Jonathan Zimmerman, absolutely loathe her and yet they pause in the midst of their vilification* to heartily and strongly defend her right to speak. His article is even titled “Je Suis Pamela Geller,” at the same time he’s also calling her an “appalling bigot” and “hateful” in it. Whereas some who are supposedly on the right and who might actually agree with some of her premises have said she should have kept quiet and not offended Muslims.

And yet it’s Zimmerman, who clearly despises her, who is defending her. Steven Lubet at TNR does almost exactly the same thing as Zimmerman—calls Geller a “a nasty-hearted Islamophobe” and calls her campaign to stop the ground zero mosque “despicable” and “repulsive anti-Islam activism.” Yet he adds:

Blaming her, even partially and conditionally, for an act of terror stretches moral reasoning beyond the breaking point…

There comes a point…when defiance is the only feasible response to censorship. In a better world, we would all respect the religious sensitivities of others, and no one would have cause for offense. Alas, we live in a world where atheist bloggers are hacked to death in the streets of Bangladesh, and Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris has been forced into hiding for four years after being placed on an Al Qaeda hit list. Self-silencing””at the point of a machete””is not the answer to this problem.

Lubet then makes sure the reader knows how much he hates Geller:

I stand second to no one in my contempt for Pamela Geller and everything she represents. Her derision of Islam and Muslims is morally wrong, but that does not make her morally responsible for the attack in Texas…

The defense of free expression should become stronger in the face of violent threats, not weaker.

It is to the shame of American liberalism that the assertion of such an essential ideal has defaulted to reactionary hatemongers such as Pamela Geller.

Like the NY Times, Lubet feels absolutely no obligation to illustrate what he’s talking about when he excoriates Geller in this way. The only specific offense of hers he even mentions is her opposition to the ground zero mosque—a position which, by the way, was shared by the majority of Americans and New Yorkers (by enormous margins). If that’s her offense, then most of America are reactionary hatemongers, too. And Lubet doesn’t even offer another example of her awfulness; we’re supposed to just take his word for it.

I find this one of the most curious aspects of the entire episode, although very emblematic of the leftist mind as I’ve come to know it. It is open season on Geller, and no one seems to feel the need to prove that she deserves such contempt. Nor was Geller a household word until this incident, so it’s not as though all the readers are familiar with her work. And yet some of the same people doing this also manage to defend free speech with some vigor, while the majority of their fellows (and some on the right as well) do not.

The distinction seems to come down to which people still value liberty at all. Some have lost that sentiment entirely, it seems.

[NOTE: *In the comments to Zimmerman’s article (at the moment, it’s the one at the top of the list), Geller herself offers this video in refutation of Zimmerman’s claims about what she actually said at the event he is describing.]

Nate Silver: polling problems

The New Neo Posted on by

Earlier this morning I wrote about the fact that even Nate Silver, pollster extraordinaire, got this one wrong, and by a significant amount. I was thinking as I wrote that post that pollsters had gotten the Israeli election wrong as well. Both were predicted to be very close; both were not, in particular the UK election.

What went wrong with the polls? Now Nate Silver himself asks that question. Ever since the election of 2012 in this country, I’ve come to respect Silver as a pollster, because despite all the criticism he got that year, he was spot on. Here’s what Silver says:

Perhaps it’s just been a run of bad luck. But there are lots of reasons to worry about the state of the polling industry. Voters are becoming harder to contact, especially on landline telephones. Online polls have become commonplace, but some eschew probability sampling, historically the bedrock of polling methodology. And in the U.S., some pollsters have been caught withholding results when they differ from other surveys, “herding” toward a false consensus about a race instead of behaving independently. There may be more difficult times ahead for the polling industry.

I remember that, in the leadup to the election of 2012, a lot of conservatives were mocking the skewed polls, pointing out the cell phone problem, and in general saying the polls were biased. After the election, when the polls turned out to have been pretty accurate (and Silver extremely accurate), that put some of those arguments to rest. Now the arguments have woken from their slumber, making us wonder again—and making Silver wonder, as well.

Interesting.

UK elections: Conservatives do much better than expected

The New Neo Posted on by

It was predicted to be a very close election, too close to call. But that turned out to be a bad prediction, because Conservatives have done very well indeed in the UK election, so well that there will probably be no need to form a coalition government:

The BBC forecast, with 635 of 650 seats declared, is Conservative 331, Labour 232, the Lib Dems 8, the SNP 56, Plaid Cymru 3, UKIP 1, the Greens 1 and others 19.

Parliamentary elections are complex things, and the parties involved are many and various. This makes a majority rather than a coalition government something of a triumph. Prime Minister Cameron defied those who said he could not increase the Conservatives’ lead, and even FiveThirtyEight (Nate Silver’s blog), which was so impressive at calling our own 2012 election, didn’t do so well with the Brits.

Hope this “conservatives do well; better than expected” trend manages to spread to our side of the pond for 2016.

Here’s a challenge I’d like to see the NY Times take up

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s a very simple one.

The august editors of the Times write:

…[T]he Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest in Garland, Tex., was not really about free speech. It was an exercise in bigotry and hatred posing as a blow for freedom.

Pamela Geller, the anti-Islam campaigner behind the Texas event, has a long history of declarations and actions motivated purely by hatred for Muslims…

Geller revels in assailing Islam in terms reminiscent of virulent racism or anti-Semitism…

As for the Garland event, to pretend that it was motivated by anything other than hate is simply hogwash.

Well now, there’s a tightly reasoned argument for you, worthy of the Times.

You may think I’m leaving out something important—some reason the Times gives for all this invective against Geller, some quotes or proofs or examples. Something other than the bald assertion of the editors, the argument from authority with the editors as the authority.

So here’s my challenge to the Times editors: give us some quotes from Geller. Some, you know, evidence of her hatred. Surely there must be reams and reams and reams. What has Geller said that’s so venomous and bigoted? About whom did she say it, all Muslims or Muslim terrorists? What was so hateful about the cartoon that won the contest, and why is it so obvious it wasn’t about free speech?

And while you’re at it, watch this video, and then tell us again that Geller’s Garland conference wasn’t about freedom of speech and that the very idea that it might have been is hogwash and pretense, and that it’s she who is the hater:

I realize that the Times editors will never do any of this, and it’s not just because they don’t read this blog. They will never feel the need to back up what they are saying in their editorial about Geller because they don’t have to do it—their readers neither demand nor expect it.

Corker-Menedez passes with overwhelming Senate majority

The New Neo Posted on by

It isn’t often you see a majority of this magnitude:

The vote on cloture on the Corker-Menendez bill was 93-6; the final vote on the merits, 98-1. With that, the Senate rebuked the White House’s plan to avoid Congress entirely on a final Iran deal. If there is a final deal, at least President Obama will be barred from immediately lifting sanctions, will have to turn over the whole deal to lawmakers and will risk a resounding bipartisan “no” vote. It is not ideal, but only Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) in the end made the perfect the enemy of the good to vote no on the merits.

So what, you might say? Lots of conservatives think it’s a bad deal because without it, a 2/3 vote would be needed to approve the deal as a treaty, and with it, a 2/3 vote (because of the necessity for a veto override) will be needed to block it. But they are ignoring reality, which is that without it there is not chance it would even come up before Congress at all, because Obama would consider it not to be a treaty, and he could win that argument.

Such a huge majority could only be achieved with a bill that didn’t contain any of the stronger amendments that McConnell blocked; in fact, no majority would have been achieved at all. The Don Quixotes among you probably don’t care; better no bill than this one. The Sancho Panzas (that includes me) disagree, and say this is a bill that at least has a chance of stopping some parts of an Iran deal, and it’s the only way that could have been accomplished.

I may be writing another post on this, but not today (busy day). In the meantime, I pretty much agree with what Scott Johnson has to say on the matter.

Pam Geller and hate

The New Neo Posted on by

I have heard, or read, person after person stating as a given that Pam Geller is a hater, and/or that what she is doing is hate speech, and/or that she hates Muslims. Just Google “Pam Geller hates” and you’ll come up with a ton of hits to that effect. But when I look at a random selection, I see a bunch of articles that either fail to quote something specifically hateful that Geller has said, or quote something out of context in a way that doesn’t fairly represent what was being said by Geller if you go to the source.

You can do it yourself if you want; maybe you can find some Geller quotes in articles criticizing her that are more pointed or more accurate, and which make a good case that Geller is a hater. But as far as I can see, this alleged hate by Geller seems like pretty weak tea compared to two other types of hatred: the hatred expressed by some of those accusing Geller of hate, and the hatred regularly taught by Palestinians to children in a manner that’s become so mainstream that it’s even featured on children’s TV programs (and that latter hatred taught by Palestinians is, by the way, not just against Zionists or Israelis, it’s against Jews).

You don’t believe me? For an example from the category of the Geller-accusers, take a look at the very first article on Geller that comes up in the aforementioned Google search. It’s not on an obscure website, either; it’s at the NY Daily News, and it’s by Linda Stasi (no, I’m not making that name up). Entitled “With Pamela Geller’s Prophet Muhammad cartoon stunt in Texas, hate rears its ugly face again,” it’s a bit confusing as to whose “hate” is being referenced there—the would-be killers’, or Geller’s, or perhaps the author’s.

You be the judge. Here’s the lede:

Looks like Pamela Geller will get her wish: More dead Americans at the hands of radical Muslims. Hell, the hatemonger finally even got ISIS to pay attention to her.

It goes on, of course. You really have to read the whole thing to get the full and robust flavor of it. But I’ll excerpt a bit more:

Geller, like ISIS and al Qaeda, revel in hate and nothing would make any of them happier than to be the catalyst for the killing of hundreds of innocent Americans to prove a point. Geller would be a hero to the hateful. Damn the cost in innocent lives, damn the heartache.

Don’t think for a minute that violence isn’t what she, just like the murderers of ISIS, want.

Although my own commitment to free speech means I won’t be calling for Stasi to be censored, I find it extraordinary that the NY Daily News would choose to publish something as—well, I guess the word could be “hateful” in its blame-the-victim mentality—as that. But of course they’re perfectly free to do so.

But if you really want to see hate, I suggest you take a look at this:

That is one of many such videos you can find at the excellent website Palestinian Media Watch, a site dedicated to publicizing what the Palestinian media and leaders actually say rather than what the sympathetic west would like them to be saying. It does invaluable work at exposing the teaching and institutionalization of hatred among an entire group:

Founded in 1996, Palestinian Media Watch is an Israeli research institute that studies Palestinian society from a broad range of perspectives by monitoring and analyzing the Palestinian Authority through its media and schoolbooks. PMW’s major focus is on the messages that the Palestinian leaders, from the Palestinian Authority, Fatah and Hamas, send to the population through the broad range of institutions and infrastructures they control.

PMW’s many reports and studies on Palestinian summer camps, poetry, schoolbooks, crossword puzzles, religious ideology, women and mothers, children’s music videos and the PA’s indoctrination of adults and children to seek Shahada (Martyrdom), have had significant impact on the way the world sees the Palestinians. PMW has presented its findings before members of US Congress and to members of Parliament in numerous countries, including the European Union, Britain, France, Norway, Sweden, Holland, Switzerland, Canada and Australia, and has lectured at universities and conferences world wide.

Browse the site, send links to other people if you’re impressed, and if you care to donate, please go here.

Ants are a curious race

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I had an ant infestation, mostly those large ones that can move very fast, although there were a couple of teeny tiny ones as well. They came out of nowhere—I couldn’t see where they were entering—and seemed evenly distributed in my kitchen and dining/living room.

I killed every one of them that I could. My philosophy is that ants belong outside; when they’re in my home they are not honored guests.

Today they seem to have departed. Maybe the word got back to the group that I wasn’t the best of hostesses—no hors d’oeuvres and not a single drink, much less the good Scotch.

But as a consequence of the event, yesterday I had the Robert Frost poem “Departmental” drumming through my head, at least the parts of it I know by heart.

“Departmental” is an atypical poem of Frost’s. It’s almost Ogden-Nashlike, pretty light fare in its description of ants and the way they function. But of course Frost being Frost there’s a deeper message that has to do with bureaucrats and how they function in terms of compartmentalizing their duties, and their ability to block out whatever they don’t want to deal with. Here’s the entire poem; it’s well worth reading in its entirety, but I’ve excerpted a section:

Ants are a curious race;
One crossing with hurried tread
The body of one of their dead
Isn’t given a moment’s arrest-
Seems not even impressed.
But he no doubt reports to any
With whom he crosses antennae,
And they no doubt report
To the higher-up at court.
Then word goes forth in Formic:
‘Death’s come to Jerry McCormic,
Our selfless forager Jerry.
Will the special Janizary
Whose office it is to bury
The dead of the commissary
Go bring him home to his people.
Lay him in state on a sepal.
Wrap him for shroud in a petal.
Embalm him with ichor of nettle.
This is the word of your Queen.’

Federal appeals court rules that NSA phone program exceeded authorization of Patriot Act

The New Neo Posted on by

The ruling greatly increases the pressure on Congress to make significant changes””or end outright””the surveillance program. The judges not only ruled against the phone program, but sharply criticized many of the legal theories upon which the U.S. government has built out its surveillance capabilities since the 2001 terror attacks…

The program gathers metadata””the records of which numbers are called, the time, and the duration of those calls””but not the contents of the conversations.

The actual ruling can be found here, if you’re up for close to 100 pages of reading. It was handed down by a three-judge panel in New York.

It was a relatively narrow ruling in terms of its effect:

The court declined to address the issue of whether the program violates Americans’ rights, because, they found, it was never properly authorized by existing law. And the judges didn’t order the collection to stop, noting the legislative debate and the looming expiration of Section 215 will force action on the issue one way or another.

So I’m not sure that this is a very big deal at all.

What was Chris Cuomo thinking?

The New Neo Posted on by

Another Tweeter with an itchy Twitter trigger finger* learns that pausing to think before tweeting might be wiser:

Chris Cuomo is co-host of CNN’s morning show. He’s also a former law and justice correspondent for ABC News. He has a law degree from Fordham University and is a licensed attorney. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is his brother.

In other words, this is somebody you’d expect would know what he’s talking about on the subject of basic constitutional facts. And yet [he tweeted]: “hate speech is excluded from protection. dont just say you love the constitution…read it.”

Robby Soave’s piece at Reason then proceeds to cite the relevant words in the Constitution (First Amendment), as well as case law in which “the Supreme Court has consistently interpreted the First Amendment to protect all kinds of odious speech, including speech perceived to be hateful.” There are a few exceptions—such as the “fighting words” exception—but they don’t apply to the situation in question, which is the Pamela Geller case.

How on earth did Cuomo make a goof of that magnitude? You might say that Cuomo must have known it wasn’t true but thought that no one would catch him. And yet that doesn’t make sense because Twitter is the sort of place where everyone on the other side is waiting to pounce on you and show off their own bon mots if your bon mot is flawed. So how is it that I, a mere blogger who went to law school 9,000 years ago, am aware that the Constitution generally protects even hate speech, and Cuomo seems unaware of it? This is not an esoteric legal principle, either; it’s a basic one.

[* NOTE: Like the way that sounds? I do.]

On Freddie Gray’s knife

The New Neo Posted on by

The Baltimore Sun reports that an investigative Task Force of the Baltimore Police Department has found that, contrary to the assertion by prosecutor Marilyn Mosby, Freddie Gray’s knife was illegal (just as the arresting police had claimed):

While Mosby said Friday that the officers had made an illegal arrest because a knife Gray was carrying was not a “switchblade,” a violation of state law, the police task force studied the knife and determined it was “spring-assisted,” which does violate a Baltimore code [§59-22].

Details, details.

According to attorney Andrew Branca of Legal Insurrection:

The organized Task Force composed of senior department officers with access to specialized knowledge and the opportunity to examine the knife in complete safety and at their leisure concluded, as the arresting officers had, that the knife was unlawful. That makes laughable any argument that the officer’s own conclusion under stress to that effect was unreasonable on its face.

And if the arresting officers perception of probable cause for the arrest was not unreasonable, the arrest was not unlawful. Period…

Now Marc Zayon, Officer Nero’s attorney, is seeking an independent examination of the knife recovered from Gray at his arrest.

Branca’s entire piece is well worth reading; it contains much much more, and is fairly shocking (even at this point, when we shouldn’t be at all shocked) in its revelations about the scarcity of evidence for the charges against Officer Nero. Branca adds:

There never seemed to be much of an evidentiary basis for the more serious criminal charges brought by Mosby against the officers”“the second degree depraved heart murder and the multiple counts of manslaughter, in particular. Thus Mosby’s charges were always exceedingly vulnerable from “the top.”

Now it seems that even the lesser charges may lack even the minimal evidentiary basis to survive a probable cause hearing that due process demands the officers be entitled to, making Mosby’s charges vulnerable from “the bottom.”

I wonder whether Mosby may end up regretting not having taken a little more time to think this through. Yes, I know her charges were politically motivated and time was of the essence, but I doubt she wanted to make herself look like a bumbling fool.

And then there’s this:

When charges were announced Friday against Alicia White for the death of Freddie Gray, her phone started buzzing from journalists and bail bondsmen.

The problem was, they were calling the wrong Alicia White. The elementary school cafeteria manager from East Baltimore was not the Baltimore Police sergeant charged with manslaughter in the high-profile police custody death – even though court records listed her…

“The middle initial was off. Her address, her height, her weight, her driver’s license number – all of the information was my client’s information,” said Jeremy Eldridge, an attorney who says he has been hired by the resident.

“Her life has been a living hell the past four days…”

Alicia White wasn’t the only one, either:

An attorney for Lt. Brian Rice said his client’s information was also entered incorrectly when prosecutors filed charges, but declined further comment.

On Friday evening, Tammy and Brian Rice of Brunswick, Md. said they were receiving multiple calls from reporters looking for the lieutenant. Brian Rice of Brunswick is a plumber, they said.

Heck of a job, Mosby, heck of a job.

Pilot practiced for that Alps crash on the previous flight

The New Neo Posted on by

Passengers noticed nothing out of the ordinary, but Alps-crash copilot Andreas Lubitz had practiced his descent-programming skills on the previous flight.

He apparently waited until the pilot had stepped out of the cabin for a few minutes, and then he set about his business:

Over the course of three or four minutes, Lubitz…designate[d] “100 feet” as the selected flight level. He did this several times, while the pilot was out of the cockpit.

But this was just after the plane had already begun its descent. After each occasion that he chose “100 feet” he then corrected himself and entered the correct flight level. The course of the plane was not altered at all.

So no one noticed at all. Here’s how it went:

LubitzProgram

The article speculates that, although it’s unknown what was in Lubitz’s mind at that point, he seems like a “man steeling himself for the challenge he has set himself, building up the courage but at each point pulling back – until finally the pilot re-enters the cockpit and normality returns.”

Perhaps. But my theory is that he may have been purposely desensitizing himself to the act of setting the altitude so that it became more and more routine, as well as testing whether he could get away with it. By the time he decided to follow through on the return flight, he was calm, collected, and ready.

And those people who were on that outbound Germanwings flight that left Duesseldorf at 06:01, arriving in Barcelona at 07:57 on the 24th of March, 2015, can thank their lucky stars that it seemed to be—and functioned as—an ordinary, uneventful trip. But now they know what was actually happening.

[NOTE: At the end of the article is the following:

Were you on the outbound Duesseldorf to Barcelona flight in March? Have you been affected by the issues raised in this story? You can email haveyoursay@bbc.co.ukwith your comments.

I would be very interested in reading any of the responses.]