Mark Steyn on the reaction to Garland

The New Neo Posted on by

Mark Steyn has some obligatory reading on the “Yes, but…” reaction to the attack on Pam Geller, and he doesn’t mess around:

The Washington Post offered the celebrated headline “Event Organizer Offers No Apology After Thwarted Attack In Texas”, while the Associated Press went with “Pamela Geller says she has no regrets about Prophet Muhammad cartoon contest that ended in 2 deaths”. The media “narrative” of the last week is that some Zionist temptress was walking down the street in Garland in a too short skirt and hoisted it to reveal her Mohammed thong – oops, my apologies, her Prophet Mohammed thong (PBUH) – and thereby inflamed two otherwise law-abiding ISIS supporters peacefully minding their own business.

It’ll be a long time before you see “Washington Post Offers No Apology for Attacking Target of Thwarted Attack” or “AP Says It Has No Regrets After Blaming The Victim”. The respectable class in the American media share the same goal as the Islamic fanatics: They want to silence Pam Geller. To be sure, they have a mild disagreement about the means to that end – although even then you get the feeling, as with Garry Trudeau and those dozens of PEN novelists’ reaction to Charlie Hebdo, that the “narrative” wouldn’t change very much if the jihad boys had got luckier and Pam, Geert Wilders, Robert Spencer and a dozen others were all piled up in the Garland morgue.

Read the whole thing. It’s worth remembering that Steyn himself was charged in Canada under a law against so-called “hate speech,” and that the aftermath of that case was that Section 13, the portion of the law that had banned hate speech promulgated by phone or over the internet was repealed (for now, anyway).

Steyn continues:

Alas, we have raised a generation of But boys. Ever since those ridiculous Washington Post and AP headlines, I’ve been thinking about the fellows who write and sub-edit and headline and approve such things – and never see the problem with it. Why would they? If you’re under a certain age, you accept instinctively that free speech is subordinate to other considerations: If you’ve been raised in the “safe space” of American universities, you take it as read that on gays and climate change and transgendered bathrooms and all kinds of other issues it’s perfectly normal to eliminate free speech and demand only the party line. So what’s the big deal about letting Muslims cut themselves in on a little of that action?

As I said, read the whole thing. And it’s got quite a cartoon at the very end.

Seymour Hersh, Obama, and the Bin Laden raid: liars liars pants on fire

The New Neo Posted on by

My question is quite simple: who’s the bigger liar, Seymour Hersh or President Obama?

A lot of attention is being paid to Hersh’s piece in the London Review of Books that claims that “a single source says Obama lied about the raid, and that it was a joint US-Pakistani operation that was supposed to end in a drone strike.”

The problem is a single unnamed source does not a credible story make, especially when the source is speaking to and filtered through the mind of one Seymour Hersh (see this and this for previous posts of mine on Hersch and his veracity or lack thereof).

I distrust Hersh’s reporting so intensely that even if if reflects poorly on Obama, whom I also distrust intensely, I would be hard-pressed to figure out who’s lying and who is not. My guess is that probably both are lying, but it’s just a guess. So I see no need to waste a lot of time reading Hersh’s article, and I’ll rely on Ed Morrissey to digest it:

The ISI, according to Hersh’s one source, had pulled bin Laden out of the Hindu Kush in 2006 to bring him to Abbottabad, in part by bribing locals to rat him out. The US got confirmation about bin Laden’s location by basically doing the same thing, this time with military aid that went directly to the officers involved in this transaction in the form of protective gear. The problem, according to Hersh, is that the Saudis were spending a lot of money to keep bin Laden hidden because bin Laden was also a Saudi.

This is where the narrative starts to slip off the rails, though, and it brings up an important point. The first issue in any story written by Seymour Hersh is ”¦ Seymour Hersh. He has a habit of running with single-source stories that don’t pan out in the long run, and this tale has a number of red flags. This would be a big one. It’s certainly possible that some Saudi group would have coughed up cash to keep bin Laden out of harms’ way, but it wouldn’t have been the royal government. They were one of bin Laden’s targets, in part because of their alliance with the US, and especially the American military bases in Saudi Arabia.

How much is true, and how much is sheer fantasy? Hersh describes a coordination in the Pakistani military that seems too large in scope to have been a secret for four years, and only uncovered by Hersh’s single source…

That’s probably more than enough to get the idea. It’s common knowledge that Bin Laden and the Saudi government were enemies, for example, and it should be common knowledge that Seymour Hersh is an unreliable source himself.

And yet for some reason he is still being published by many media outlets. Why? Because he writes what they want to hear, and he sounds like a guy who’s really in the know. The famous Seymour Hersh! To me the most interesting question raised by Hersh’s article is: why is the left turning on Obama, at least to this small extent? Or is this just Hersh and the London Review of Books trying to make a sensation and draw readers?

Despite BDS, hate speech laws have no place in a free society

The New Neo Posted on by

I understand the temptation to pass hate speech laws.

But there’s a temptation to do a lot of things that are wrong and lead to an unacceptable loss of liberty. We are not free to do anything that harms another person, but with just a few exceptions (for example, the old yelling “fire” in a crowded theater*) we should be able to say anything. Once speech is made actionable because it expresses hate or harms some group’s feelings, we are already far far down a steep and slippery slope. “Speech” includes propaganda.

But it’s different in Canada:

“I can tell you that Canada has one of the most comprehensive sets of laws against hate crime anywhere in the world,” wrote Sirois.

She highlighted what she termed “hate propaganda” provisions in the Criminal Code criminalizing the promotion of hatred against an identifiable group, and further noted that “identifiable group” now includes any section of the public distinguished by “among other characteristics, religion or national or ethnic origin.”

The article indicates that Canada is considering using these laws against the groups promoting boycotts of Israel.

Now, I happen to be a supporter of Israel, and I am completely against the BDS groups and their lying propaganda, and believe them to be highly antisemitic for the most part although they deny it. In a country with hate speech laws, they would be one of the groups I’d consider it sweetest to prosecute. But I support neither such laws nor such prosecution, because the hate speech laws are still wrong even when used against groups whose work I despise.

More and more and more as time goes on, I think that a large part of American exceptionalism is its attitude towards free speech and therefore its commitment to liberty, which is beginning to seem unique in all the world but is increasingly threatened.

[* See this for the evolution of that doctrine and its present-day manifestation.)

Happy Mother’s Day: mothers and babies

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of my traditional Mother’s Day post. It was written while my mother was still alive.]

Okay, who are these three dark beauties?

A hint: one of them is the very first picture you’ve ever seen on this blog of neo-neocon, sans apple. Not that you’d recognize me, of course. Even my own mother might not recognize me from this photo.

My own mother, you say? Of course she would. Ah, but she’s here too, looking a bit different than she does today—Mother’s Day—at ninety-eight years of age. Just a bit; maybe her own mother wouldn’t recognize her, either.

Her own mother? She’s the one who’s all dressed up, with longer hair than the rest of us.

The photo of my grandmother was taken in the 1880’s; the one of my mother in the teens of the twentieth century; and the one of me, of course, in the 1950s.

Heredity, ain’t it great? My mother and grandmother are both sitting for formal portraits at a professional photographer’s studio, but by the time I came around amateur snapshots were easy to take with a smallish Brownie camera. My mother is sitting on the knee of her own grandfather, my grandmother’s father, a dapper gentleman who was always very well-turned out. I’m next to my older brother, who’s reading a book to me but is cropped out of this photo. My grandmother sits alone in all her finery.

We all not only resemble each other greatly in our features and coloring, but in our solemnity. My mother’s and grandmother’s seriousness is probably explained by the strange and formal setting; mine is due to my concentration on the book, which was Peter Pan (my brother was only pretending to read it, since he couldn’t read yet, but I didn’t know that at the time). My mother’s resemblance to me is enhanced by our similar hairdos (or lack thereof), although hers was short because it hadn’t really grown in yet, and mine was short because she purposely kept it that way (easier to deal with).

My grandmother not only has the pretty ruffled dress and the long flowing locks, but if you look really closely you can see a tiny earring dangling from her earlobe. When I was young, she showed me her baby earrings; several miniature, delicate pairs. It astounded me that they’d actually pierced a baby’s ears (and that my grandmother had let the holes close up later on, and couldn’t wear pierced earrings any more), whereas I had to fight for the right to have mine done in my early teens.

I’m not sure what my mother’s wearing; some sort of baby smock. But I know what I have on: my brother’s hand-me-down pajamas, and I was none too happy about it, of that you can be sure.

So, a very happy Mother’s Day to you all! What would mothers be without babies…and mothers…and babies….and mothers….?

I only recently discovered this dancer…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and yet Galina Mezentseva has been retired for at least twenty years, and is of my generation.

The minute I watched the very first video that I’d ever seen of her, which featured her performing Odile (the Black Swan role in “Swan Lake”), I was riveted. I’ve seen plenty of dancers, and know the styles of so many that for the most part I don’t even have to see their faces to identify them. They are all a bit different, but they divide into types.

But Mezentseva is different from all of them. She has an unusual combination of qualities that could seem really mannered and affected but does not because some extraordinary conviction, a seamless dramatic commitment on her part, plus a tremendous physical strength that never comes across as delicate or fragile but is still very beautiful and feminine, as well as a musicality that never falters, transcends it all and puts her performance into another realm—the realm of the nearly inhuman.

There isn’t a moment you aren’t assured that her balance will be plumb straight. There isn’t a moment she isn’t fully stretched, particularly her endless (and somewhat thin, even for a dancer) arms. Nothing is left to chance, nothing is unintentional, and everything is of a piece. When upright with arms fully stretched, her fingers seem to extend outward into the space around her—to the ceiling, to the wings—and she gives the illusion of filling the entire stage not just with her presence, but with her body.

I’ve never seen anything like it. And this is a video, never the best medium for dance.

She poses sometimes, and that has a certain stagey element. But I don’t care, because her poses are the fullest, most extreme expression of the music and the ballet I’ve ever seen, and she does all of this without looking like a gymnast or contortionist. Remember that these videos were taken in the 70s and 80s, when this sort of physicality was almost unheard of. At one point she sustained a very severe Achilles tendon injury and was apparently never the same again, according to admirers, and I’m not sure whether any of these videos are after the injury, but they are still marvelous.

There are actually very few videos of her at all, for some reason. Here she is as Odette, the Swan Queen (I’m not keen on the photography here, which features too many closeups, but that’s a small and relatively unimportant point):

This one is a long documentary with excerpts from many ballets—very wonderful. There are a few talking heads here and there; you’ll have to speak Russian to understand them, because there are no subtitles. But there’s a lot more dancing than talking.

There are many other videos at YouTube, if you want to watch more.

George Bush is smarter than you

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a good one to send round to all your liberal friends who are still accepting emails from you It’s two years old, but it’s new to me:

I teach a class at Stanford Business School titled “Financial Crises in the U.S. and Europe.” During one class session while explaining the events of September 2008, I kept referring to the efforts of the threesome of Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and Tim Geithner, who were joined at the hip in dealing with firm-specific problems as they arose.

One of my students asked “How involved was President Bush with what was going on?” I smiled and responded, “What you really mean is, ”˜Was President Bush smart enough to understand what was going on,’ right?”

The class went dead silent. Everyone knew that this was the true meaning of the question. Kudos to that student for asking the hard question and for framing it so politely. I had stripped away that decorum and exposed the raw nerve.

I looked hard at the 60 MBA students and said “President Bush is smarter than almost every one of you.”

More silence.

I could tell they were waiting for me to break the tension, laugh, and admit I was joking.

I did not. A few shifted in their seats, then I launched into a longer answer.

Please read the whole thing.

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.