Who Loves Dictators?

It all depends on the dictator, but they all have their supporters. What's inexplicable is how Mark Steyn has tried to suggest that it's only liberals that get behind dictators. Really? Why then did Jonah Goldberg write such a loving eulogy for Augusto Pinochet? Why did Reagan send his buddy Don Rumsfeld to kick it with Saddam in the 1980s? Those are two examples off the top of my head, the fact is, I don't see dictator support as a liberal quirk.

Corporate Censorship

What would you say if a large, bureaucratic organization forced an individual out his or her job for publishing material that some might find offensive? It seems that, for Mark Steyn, it depends on whether this organization is a private corporation or a government. Witness this from his column on the infamous Danish cartoons:

"Back in Jutland, the cartoonists had originally accepted the Muhammad assignment in order to test the boundaries of freedom of speech in Denmark. And they failed only insofar as the episode tested freedom's boundaries not in Denmark, where nobody has been prosecuted; nor in the U.S., where CNN's craven straddle artfully finessed the issue; nor in France, where the sole editor to publish the cartoons was subsequently fired by his boss, as is a private employer's right;"

Oh okay, so a private company can censor, got it. What about a government? Not so much:

"No, the Western jurisdiction in which the Danish cartoons have most comprehensively demonstrated the constraints on free expression is our own decayed dominion: only in Canada have the commissars of the state launched an official investigation for the alleged "crime" of publishing the cartoons."

Keep in mind that, as disagreeable as you may find the complaint against Levant, all Ezra had to do here was answer some questions, he has incurred no financial loss and, if anything, has greatly enhanced his public profile. This is Ezra's wardrobe malfunction. This French guy (who Steyn cannot even be bothered to name) lost his job over this. But, no big deal, that's an employer's right - to censorship.

If the government censors someone, that's a crime to Steyn, but if a private enterprise does this, that's okay. Wonderful, nice to see another right-wing champion of free speech in action.

Bizarre Defence of Mark Steyn

I should confess that I haven't really been following the whole brouhaha over Steyn being the subject of a human rights complaint. I'm sure it's helping his book sales though - the pundit's equivalent of a wardrobe malfunction I guess. In the meantime it's curious as to what kinds of defences are being offered for Steyn. Here's Joseph Hayyim taking a crack at it:

"My concern in the whole situation boils down to this: When one is prevented from spreading lies, one can be prevented from telling truth. It sounds obvious and trite, though so many believe that it is "wrong" to offend, and that this sin trumps all. Is free speech hate speech if it offends? Is it so very wrong to offend? If we have the decency to avoid offense in most cases, will we not have the wisdom to speak painful truth?"

Holy confusion, Batman! Mr. Hayyim appears to suggest that it's okay to offend, not just with some kind of painful truth - but also with lies! I wonder what would happen if I wrote a post where I assert that Mr. Hayyim is a convicted sex criminal. Yes it might offend and it might be factually incorrect, but is that so wrong? I suspect that I would receive a letter from Mr. Hayyim's legal counsel in short order asserting that it is.

Mark Steyn needs to get out more

In latest Macleans, Steyn is on about how G.I. Joe is based in - shock! - Belgium. He goes on to generally decree the lack of patriotic soldier films (one imagines in the vein of The Green Berets). He goes on:

"When conservatives complain that the movies' dreary biases are not even in the studios' commercial interest, they correctly point out that the U.S. is pretty much a 50/50 red state/blue state split, and there's a huge underserved market waiting for a picture in which Brian D. Johnson's vigilante G.I. Joe born-again Christian crazy kicks Islamobutt from Ramadi to Jalalabad and back. But, back at corporate HQ, the vice-presidents look at the real market, and throw in all the bonus blue states -- Canada, Europe, Asia..."

So Hollywood is nefariously responding to market forces. Uhhhhhh, isn't that what conservatives keep telling the rest us to do? Moreover, has Steyn not seen Top Gun, Rambo, any Chuck Norris movies, The Patriot, Transformers, True Lies or any number of other movies that depict the US security establishment and/or a violent defence of American patriotism in a highly sympathetic light?

FLICK Rex Murphy

I really cannot believe that people are still on about this "Flick off" campaign that the government has launched to conserve electricity. Whatever taboo that the word "fuck" once held has greatly dissipated over the past decade. The Globe and Mail routinely quotes people saying "fuck" without bothering to asterisk any of the letters. (My goodness, what could they have meant by f***?) Recently, Mark Steyn wrote the following for Macleans:

"Fuck!" "Fuck!" "Jesus Christ!" "Fuck!" Fuck-fucketty-fucketty-fucking-fuck.

Seriously, look it up - even writers who drone on about our decadence and moral decay don't bother to bleep it out anymore.

It seems everyone is okay with "fuck" in just about any context. Everyone that is, except Rex Murphy who used his CBC soapbox tonight to whine about it. Someone ought to buy Rex a FCUK t-shirt. Look, the way I see it, most of tune out government public awareness campaigns because they come off as so much sanctimonious nagging (come to think of it, Rex comes off that way too). Kudos to whoever had the idea to make this effort at least a little bit interesting.

Mark Steyn: Armchair quarterback for school shootings

The Poor Man has a really great take on Mark Steyn's tasteless blame-the-victim approach to dealing with the VA Tech massacre.

Unfortunately we can't all be manly men like super hero Mark Steyn who would have totally rushed the guy and caught all the bullets in his mouth and spit them back at him. Look at Mark Steyn's manly visage, he has a beard, like Chuck Norris or Shipwreck from GI Joe.

As usual, any number of groups have piled on to turn VA Tech into a soapbox for their issues however tangentially they may be related. But for Steyn to harp on university kids for not being all manly and butch like him and other high school drop-outs is particularly odious. (Note: I am not intending to tar high school drop-outs by association with Mark Steyn, most of them do NOT become far-right columnists.)

Incidentally, right now Mark is preoccupying himself giving sympathetic coverage to Conrad Black at his trial. Black is so manly that he throws fancy parties where he dresses up as Cardinal Richelieu and other really macho characters. Thank you for pointing us to the pinnacle of manliness, Mark, I'll go buy a Richelieu outfit and start buying shoes for a crazy lady.

LifeSite Divorced from Reality (Again)

I'm sure that there are many ways to make credible and/or principled arguments for things that LifeSite advocates (whether or not you agree with them). This is not one of them. Ian Hunter writes for LifeSite an article titled "A world without children a result of worldwide 'demographic death spiral'" and uses Mark Steyn's dubious demography to suggest that the whole world, starting with Japan, is on the edge of a demographic death spiral.

That's odd, because, well, the last time I checked, on a global level, human population is still exploding. One or two regions of population decline has done little to alter that reality.

Hunter's article is consumed with this panic that there will be no more children anywhere - kind of a sad thought I suppose (unless you've been on a jetliner with a crying baby recently). But if you look closer, that's not the problem for Steyn or Hunter, the real problem seems to be that there will not be any white babies in the future:

"In some places in Europe, birthrates are even lower; these countries look to immigration -- increasingly from the Muslim world -- to bolster a shrinking workforce. But grief awaits anyone who warns that this might be sowing the seeds of our own destruction."

Oh, so its not a problem of no babies then is it? Hunter predicts that anyone suggesting this would be called a "racist." Okay, Ian Hunter, tell me what you would call someone who holds the position "white babies are preferable to brown babies." Of course he'd discard me as the sort of snooty person who is "more concerned about careers and possessions than about replenishing the Earth or continuing the species."

Let me counter that by saying, if there's one way to "replenish the Earth" and continue with our species it's surely to limit our populations. Unless of course you are in denial about just how taxing humans are on the planet. For the rest of us though it isn't clear how LifeSite expects to ever be taken seriously.

Hoisted by his own Petard?

Conrad Black has always loved big words. I mean really, alarmingly big words. He often comes off as an irritating university sophomore eager to show off. His word usage mixed with his name dropping gets irksome - and this is coming from someone who probably name-drops and deliberately uses flowery language way too much.

All this leads to this gem. Conrad-loving Mark Steyn points out that:

"[Prosecutor Jeffery Cramer] took the opportunity to reiterate to the jury over and over that “four men in this room stole 60 million dollars”, and to bolster it he produced some quotes from Conrad Black’s memos, unusually loquacious by corporate standards and at least potentially damaging for jurors unfamiliar with his ornate rhetorical style."

So outsiders might view this "ornate rhetorical style" might do what? Give jurors the impression that Conrad is an obfuscating asshole who is pleased to talk down to others? Gee, Mark Steyn, I wonder how anyone could get such a distorted view of this man?

Connecting the dots on Bush's book club

Glenn Greenwald has an expansive post (well worth reading) about W's "book club." This is the same meeting that I posted on the other day. It seems, from reading Greenwald that this is nothing but a meeting of the neocon usual suspects. The fact that Bush reads a book by a conservative anglophile about history somehow makes him appear well-read to people like Mark Steyn. It's astonishing that, as a sort of follow-up Karl Rove invites over some neocons (Greenwald has a fairly comprehensive list) and makes sure Bush has learned the right lessons from the book.

I wonder what would happen if some slipped, oh, say, Manufacturing Consent into the dust jacket of the next paean to imperialism that is tossed into Bush's lap. It would take something like that, it seems, to break up these exercises in group-think.

Baffling Incoherence

This week in Macleans, Mark Steyn writes:

"A 'social conscience' obliges the individual to act. Today we call for action all the time, but mostly from government, which is another way of excusing us and allowing us to get on with the distractions of the day. Our schoolhouses revile the Victorian do-gooders as condescending racists and oppressors -- though the single greatest force for ending slavery around the world was the Royal Navy."

One moment Steyn is chiding those who would call on the government to solve society's problems as essentially copping-out. The next moment, he praises a government agency - the Royal Navy - for ending slavery.

The troublesome thing for a lot of conservative hawks I suppose is that they want to lionize the military while saying that government is bad. The rest of the article is Steyn's usual complaints about why can't things be like they were back in the olden days as well as a cheap shot against Jean Chretien.
Picture: Anti-slavery activist William Wilberforce called on the government to end slavery.

Steyn vs. Bloom's Taxonomy

Once again, Macleans hasn't posted his column online (send me the link if they do). This time he asserts that George Bush recommended a book to him. Additionally Steyn asserts that Bush is very widely read in comparison to "powerful congressional committee chairmen." Which ones Mark? Did you ask all of them? Who are the powerful ones anyway?

Anyway, Bush, in this description asked Steyn if he had read the book. Does this mean that Bush read it? I ask people all the time if they have read books, some of them I have read and I am looking to recommend (as Steyn assumes), in other cases I am looking for a recommendation.

But maybe I'm being too mean to Steyn, maybe he edited down some more revealing detail of the conversation. I don't know that anyone has seriously accused Bush of illiteracy, the reliance of modern political figures on teleprompters means that Bush probably can read without having to sound out too many of the words.

What sets Bush apart and what makes all this alleged reading all the more appalling is that he seems to have learned nothing from it. His war is a mess and there were plenty of historical predictors. I don't even need to say the "V" word either, there was the British experience in Iraq, there was the American experience in the Philippines, the French in Algeria. The planning for Iraq considered none of this. Bush should have done something prior to firing Rummy in 2006. Knowledge is the lowest form of learning (if you believe Bloom). Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, Evaluation - all of these are higher levels of learning. Bush may read, I'm not sure that he comprehends.

Mark Steyn Again

I hope that this is the close of "Mark Steyn, WTF?" week but then you never know with that guy. Anyway, Steyn's central argument is something about how Europe is doomed because the Muslims in Europe have a higher birthrate. Steyn seems alarmingly comfortable with genocide but stops short of advocating it because it wouldn't work in his estimation. Or something like that. Anyway, I'm fairly sure that Dennis Perrin's post today is a parody of Steyn. Read it for yourself and judge.

Steyn on Genocide

Andrew Sullivan has discovered that Mark Steyn is a bit too comfortable with genocide. Dinesh D'Souza and others have admitted that sometimes it is a strategy of the right-wing noise machine to take ultra-extreme views, views that they may find abhorrent, but do so to push the "middle ground" rightward.

The question is, do we give Mark Steyn that much credit? The fact that Steyn describes what Milosevic and his generals did as a "cull" of Muslims ought to give us all pause. This man is sick and will do anything and say anything to promote his completely disturbing view of reality. As a Canadian I am embarrassed by his words.