Wow. I can count the time that we had priests come to the house on one hand. For example, when my grandfather was dying and couldn't get to church, the priest came for a living room Mass. We had such a living room Mass said by a young priest once when I was in college in a big house we rented with lots of students. When I was in pregnancy bedrest for months with my son, a priest came to administer me communion and reconciliation. A priest coming to your house -- what an occasion! I think in the entire time we were growing up, perhaps Father came to dinner at our house once -- we just weren't Worthies, as my mother used to call the people on the parish council who had that kind of relationship with the clergy.
So...instead of clumping along with 50 other kids with scuffed patent leather shoes to the church for long spring afternoons languishing in Communion lessons and practice, Katrina had two priests all to herself to come to the house to prepare her for Communion -- it seems like an untold luxury, like a doctor's house call, like a special delivery. It tells you something about that Church's relationship to power and privilege of the sort Katrina, who grew up in a wealthy and privileged family, is herself ready to criticize. Perhaps there was some special circumstance, perhaps life in an embassy in a foreign country. But in any event, it was special!
I remember when I wanted to play with the older kids on the roundabout in the school yard and I ran and tried to jump on, and instead got dragged underneath. A heavy bar hit the back of my head, and I got a nasty cut. Terrified older classmen took me to the nunnery; the sisters were in the middle of their heavy noon-day meal, and we were surprised to discover this luxury -- roast chicken on big platters and gravy tureens, while we had liverwurst sandwiches and school milk in cartons.
The nuns were so shocked and repulsed at the crying kids and my bloodied head that they couldn't move. One efficient nun with the manly name of Sister John Mary who we thought was cool because she wore an actual jackknife on her belt along with her rosary and was sometimes the handyman in the school, had the presence of mind to grab me and hustle me into a small bathroom off the kitchen, and try to wash my head with miles of harsh paper towels. She carried me carefully into a couch in the front parlour and put me on a fancy embroidered settee.
The last thing I remember before nearly fainting in terror -- my best friend, distraught, on the playground, had told me I was going to die -- before my mother arrived from work, pale and worried, in a taxi -- was Mother Superior fretting that I might get blood on their couch -- and horrors, might miss my First Communion, which was coming up that very Sunday. The prospect of either sin of commission or omission seemed terrifying indeed.
My mother took me a mile up the hill to the doctor's and had me stitched me up, then set me on the porch with the strict order not to move. With wobbly legs and a heavy head -- it felt funny to move -- I made it to my First Communion at St. Michael's, the church in the small upstate town of Penn Yan, NY, fearful that I might in my weakened state commit that most serious of blasphemies, dropping the Host on the floor.
Yes, that was the Church to me -- the kindness and practicality of Sr. John, on the one hand, and the fussiness of Mother Superior, on the other, and the different aspects of this institution built on the Rock of St. Peter.
So, yeah, priests coming to the house!
Lots more to say about this but I'm busy now -- so read the Storify and I will be back later.
So we got a new pope today, Pope Francis, the first Jesuit and the first Latin American.
And that means a deluge -- a veritable tsunami -- of hate, vicious rumour, false claims, bigotry, hysteria, insanity -- nearly all of it revolving around the ever-popular themes of gay rights and women's reproductive rights, and the hypocrisy of an old institution that opposes these rights as a matter of ancient doctrine, yet is found itself to have clergy members who committed the crime of sexual assault of children.
We get all that, truly we do. But how many priests out of the millions of priests in the world -- what percent -- are caught in pedophilia or cover it up? It's not some huge percent. The Church combats this vigorously nowadays as do Catholic schools -- I know, I've raised my children in them. What is this really about for you? Isn't it really more about the fear that your own personal freedoms might be in jeopardy -- and your externalization of this on to an easy target? But why?
On Twitter, when one of the faithful tweeted the news about the post and made little stick figures with their arms upraised, rejoicing, some twit claimed this was six little boys with their buttocks spread for pedophiles.
Sick.
That's how gross it gets -- that's how constantly sick, gross, and obsessed it gets, and never stops.
I joked that Google's servers probably fell over today with frantic searches of the terms "Jorge Bergoglio" and "pedophilia".
I had to endure Facebook friends instantly typing that they hoped the new Pope would be better to gays.
But why? It's not a position of the Catholic Church to validate homosexuality and bless LGBT marriage.
That may not square with the views of many people, particularly in the United States, and my personal views, but it's the Church's position. Why the zeal to reform it when it does not affect you?
I
assure you that the new Pope, just like the old Pope, will not get in
the way of any of your orgasms or uses of birth control, Draxtor -- or
indeed, anyone else's. Rest assured. He has no army.
And that's just it. Whenever someone starts in about gays and the Catholic Church, I ask them if they personally had any Catholic official stop them from being as gay as they wished. They never can come up with any real stories. I ask anyone if they couldn't buy or use birth control as they wished. They never come up with any real stories. Then...what's this really all about?
As for pedophilia, when are we going to stop the hysteria on this? Yes, it's a real issue -- but it's a real issue being prosecuted, and first and foremost, addressed by very active Catholic parishioners themselves. Why do *you* need this?
Here's how I answered this hysteria on the Daily Beast from Geoffrey Robertson, a lawyer with a political axe to grind -- he called for declaring 100,000 cases of pedophilia to be a "mass crime against humanity". I urged that all cases be prosecuted, most certainly. But who is he to demand that the church change the age for the administration of the sacraments to 13 or older, simply because of his theory that fear and reverance cause young children to be molested?!
There may not be that many cases; there may be more. But seriously, guys? A mass crime against humanity, when it is not a policy and not endorsed and in fact combatted? If the superiors moved the offending priests around and didn't help prosecute them -- and we know that's what they did -- then sure, that's wrong and that's to be vigorously fought. But mass crime against humanity? And you never show up -- ever -- to talk about hanging of gays in Iran or killing of women who go to school in Afghanistan. That's just the problem. There are real mass crimes against humanity in the world, and it is not the Catholic Church that perpetrates them. You know that in your heart. Why the obsession about Catholicism? Because you can?
I called for Pope Benedict to resign when I heard that he suppressed information about pedophiles and prevented prosecution. Not many Catholics did that. But later I was told that Christopher Hitchens, whose articles on this I believed, were not correct about this. I will have to study up on this, but I still think that the appearance of impropriety still matters even if there was not any criminal act. In that thread, you can see one of the faithful taking the position that "Popes don't resign". Well, they do. Benedict did, in the end. He faced not only infirmity and the scandals of pedophile cases but the financial scandals of the Vatican as well. The institution is coping with it and has now elected a new Pope. It isn't about you -- if you aren't Catholic and don't wish to remain Catholic -- something you can opt out of, like other major religions who keep you in thrall -- with the help of government goons.
I wrote a complaint recently to the New York Times about an oped piece urging Catholics to give up the Church itself for Lent. I just thought it was one too many straws of hate and bigotry and ridicule that the Time has endlessly indulged -- especially with Frank Bruni and Maureen Dowd. They would never run a piece like that about Judaism or Islam -- it's just not on. Catholicism has to serve as the whipping boy for every modern "progressive's" need to reform -- or eradicate! -- religion because, well, it can. The costs for bashing it aren't as great. You won't face an angry mob ready to burn down your house. Happy?
The zeal to reform the Catholic Church by those who aren't in it, or have lapsed from it, always puzzles me. Why the obsession? Frank Bruni, who is openly gay, is particularly notorious for putting out column after column fretting about Catholic policies. Join the Episcopalians, Frank! The new Pope is not about your penis! You are free! Why not appreciate that you have that freedom, unlike people who live under theocratic states, and appreciate that the new pope is focused on helping the poor, and call it a day?
No, it's not about silencing criticism of the Church, or telling people they can't have freedom of expression critical of the Church -- which of course, they don't need my permission to enjoy in vast quantities. Not when the din, the roar, the screeching, the fury, the tsunami of social media are all so amplified and pervasive against Catholics and the Catholic clergy. No, it's about something else at this point: conceding that Catholics who support their church, critically or not, have a right to do so, and you can find another church or group or no group at all if you are not happy with it. They will either opt out of their church and move to other religious institutions that are more modern on social issues -- or they won't, for various spiritual and private reasons. It was supposed to be about choice always, remember? Your pro-abortion stances? Remember how Clinton put it, "Safe, legal, and rare?" Now you've dumped that stance, and converted it to "health".
I got into a debate with an ardent Planned Parenthood pro-abortion rights woman the other day who was hysterically flogging the "war on women" narrative and producing as evidence a study that said...about 100 women who waited until late in the third semester and couldn't then get legal abortions were stuck having kids and most regretted it. Well, that's unfortunate, but...why did they wait? Did their birth control fail or did they not use it? Did they think they could hold on to a man this way? And they're a small sample. Nine out of ten abortions take place in the first semester -- the drop-off is sharp then to the second, and a very small minority are in the cutting off point of 24 weeks. So why are we having this hysterical outrage? What would you talk about if you didn't have these tiny edge cases to flog? The huge cost of Obamacare, maybe?
Then there's always the person who says, but there was that rape victim who couldn't get treatment at a Catholic hospital, or couldn't get a needed partial-birth abortion during a miscarriage. Well, just 11 percent of the hospitals in America are Catholic-operated. Most of the time, you have a choice. In those very, very few -- one? two? three? -- cases you've read about from the screaming leftist media, was there really no choice? Really? And would it really be a widespread problem given that the cases are rare in the first place, and the number of Catholic hospitals in fact dwindling? (The one in my neighbourhood was closed, for example).
Oh, and now you're going to say the Pope is responsible for AIDS in Africa, having been thwarted from moving me with your hysteria about the "war on women". But...there are under 10 percent of Africans in the Catholic Church. Even those who are Catholic don't follow the Pope on the question of birth control. You're going to tell me with a straight face that non-Catholics, and people who are no different than Catholics in America in terms of using birth control if they can access it, are scared into not using condoms and get AIDS *because of the Pope*? That ordinary Africans who aren't Catholics and maybe not even religious at all are scared of...the Pope?
That's just insane. The real problem is African men who feel it diminishes their manhood to use trojans, and feel women aren't spontaneous if they use birth control -- and some of them who still believe that having sex with virgins or underage girls will cure them of AIDS. Is that the Pope's problem?! If the Catholics don't offer you birth control, other US-funded programs under Obama in Africa *do* -- not to mention many other programs from private charities, other countries, and the UN. What is this really about? It's about hate and hysteria. The Church is not going to change their views on this. They are going to continue to help people in Africa. They are not what prevents Africans from getting and using condoms. Next.
If you fail on the sex front -- and really, the new Pope is not about your personal penis and your personal vagina and you remain absolutely free from interference in their use, I assure you -- then perhaps you can dig up something on the political front? Argentina was the site of a bloody war against communists and socialists in the 1980s, known as the "Dirty War" that defined for many people their understanding of human rights, justice, and the complicity of the US in human rights abuses abroad.
The New York Times worked furiously to dig up some dirt on the new pope in that regard, and waved the "Dirty War" flag around -- as many did, but in fact the cardinal was not found to have done any wrong-doing. The human rights movement is strong in Argentina. If they had a case, they would make it. That doesn't stop legions of Anonymous -- who else -- from retweeting the claim -- false -- that this Pope is responsible for kidnapping two Jesuits. WikiLeaks re-upped their release of all cables on this Pope -- he was a runner-up in previous elections. Guess what -- the cables don't show any wrongdoing.
Naturally, the fact that this pope is an anti-communist and opposes liberation theology is going to be mined for all it's worth. Keep mining! It will not affect the ability of anyone to ascribe to communism or liberation theology if they wish. Politics in Argentina are fairly free and I think they've got it covered. Meanwhile, what about women who get shot and killed in Afghanistan for administering vaccinations to children?
I expect endless raging and ranting about the Pope now, until everyone moves on to the next thing -- maybe the Kardashians will get pregnant or married or something.
What I didn't expect wasthis nasty exchange with Katrina Vanden Heuvel, who I know socially, with a high degree of venom and even craziness. What spawns this in people? Being told the truth? Getting a push-back on their closely-held narratives like "the war on women"?
Read it, if you want to see why the left, or at least more immediately the Nation, is doomed.
The United States offers our heartfelt congratulations to His Holiness
Pope Francis, who will lead and guide the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics
and serve as a symbol of faith and hope to all. For Teresa and me, our
Catholic faith is a source of strength and comfort every day, from
Sunday to Sunday, in moments of difficulty and moments of joy, and an
inspiration to act on issues of social justice and global
responsibility. Teresa and I will keep the Holy Father in our prayers as
he begins a new era for our Church. On this momentous day, the United
States renews our commitment to working closely with the Holy See to
advance our shared belief in peace and humanity. We offer the Holy
Father our warmest wishes of success in advancing peace, freedom, and
human dignity throughout the world.
That's the position supported by Obama, whom I didn't vote for, by a new Secretary of State, about whom I've been critical of (on Magnitsky). I was surprised to see him reference his own faith and it even felt inappropriate to me, but that's how he did it. He engineered it to fit in with Obama's secular socialist agenda, "an
inspiration to act on issues of social justice and global
responsibility".
But that's okay. The Catholic faith is that, for many people, including me. And it does have 1.2 billion adherents, and some 20 percent of the population in the United States. Why can't that be respected? Take what you will from it, and leave the rest alone. Kerry did this diplomatically and respectfully. The State Department has
an elaborate program in defense of LGBT rights. They didn't feel they
needed to flog it in the message to the Pope. The US now opposes the
Vatican at the UN on these issues. But they still could feature working
together on some humanitarian causes.
No, it is not about your sexual organs. They are intact and untouched. The Pople doesn't have an army. What he has is an ancient doctrine of dignity that does not suit modernity.
A painting of a camp meeting by J. Maze Burbank from 1839. Read the history of camp meetings here.
I've been meaning to blog this -- I've been surprised at hundreds of visitors coming to my blog from a discussion on the TED site about whether or not TED is a cult.
Of course it's a cult, as I wrote back here -- and somebody in that discussion linked to my article and that's why I got all those visitors.
I didn't want to bother to have to join the site, post content on TED.com and then only have them delete it if they felt like it. But I really had nothing more to say. TED is a cult. I started analyzing at length Grace McDunnough's TED talk (she's one of the Feted Inner Core in Second Life) but then I just got tired of it.
I will come back to it some day. It reminded me of one of my favourite forgotten hippie songs from the Ultimate Spinach. That is all:
I felt bad that such a slight article -- short (for me) and hardly substantive -- could get so much readership and linkage. It just states the obvious: that TED talks sit squarely in the American tradition of the camp meeting, the revivalist religious movements in the 1800s which were famous in upstate New York, where I'm from, which is even called the Burnt-Out Place because the Holy Spirit passed over it so many times. (We have the Mormons' Hill Cumorrah, for example, too, where the Angel Moroni appeared). I even went to camp meetings myself 40 years ago and somewhere around here I even have a cassette tape of Brother Cornwall. So the tradition is all very familiar -- the only thing is that I don't mind if a religious meeting selects its doctrines and doesn't let people ask questions during the meeting and doesn't present conflicting points of view -- I do resent it when a tech meeting does that.
That's my main critique of TED:
o the selection process is arbitrary and secretive and it's just a "gut feeling" of the organizers without any sense of accountability or transparency
o there are never conflicting points of view represented in a panel format with a debate
o there are opportunities for the audience to ask questions
This is not going to change, so somebody else has to make something different and call it FRED or DRED, FOR REAL EDUCATION or DAMN REAL EDUCATION or whatever.
And then there's this odd thing. You can still see the Google cache of the critical "conversation" on the TED site itself linking to my blog, with the title "Are TED Talks becoming a kind of weird technology & religious cult ..." but if you go to the site you now get something else -- "TED is evil and here's the proof" (citation of a lot of Transhumanists among its speakers). You also see a lot of the comments were deleted. Oh, well. That was my instinct from the beginning -- don't waste time there, they'll just delete it. So hurry to see that Google cache if you care.
Still, it's good to keep up with the critique of TED and someday I may take more time to critique individual videos -- there are so many horrible ones (gamification).
Nathan Juergensen has done what he calls "an epistemic" critique of TED which is good -- most people stop at the juncture where they realize its elitist or costs too much, and then the TED zombies shut them up by explaining how they have free meetings and free videos now and invite People of Colour and all the rest. Juergensen explains what's really wrong -- not the corporativism, but the pretense that it isn't corporativism:
Perhaps the biggest complaint I heard was that TED smells of corporatism. With the Facebook IPO around the corner, we are all well aware of the big venture-capital sums floating around Silicon Valley (the new Wall Street?). What’s infuriating is how Silicon Valley capitalism consistently attempts to sell itself as outside or even above corporatism. In announcing Facebook’s IPO, Mark Zuckerberg, whose company has consistently violated user privacy in the name of profit, stated that “we don’t build services to make money.” He actually said that.
Yeah, Zuckerberg did say that, I blogged about it at the time, it was so telling, the awful socialism of these people making billions from others socializing. You can't help thinking if there were less of that technocommunist glitz, Zuckerberg might have had a better IPO for his investors, geez. For Juergensen, TED is like the medicine show, another historic American social phenomenon:
“Consumers” are savvy, and they know when they are being sold to. So many of the TED talks take on the form of those famous patent medicine tonic cure-all pitches of previous centuries, as though they must convince you not through the content of what’s being said but through the hyper-engaging style of the delivery. Each new “big idea” to “inspire the world” and “change everything” pitched from the TED stage reminds me of the swamp root and snake oil liniment being sold from a wagon a hundred years past. As Mike Bulajewski pointed out in a Tweet, “TED’s ‘revolutionary ideas’ mask capitalism as usual, giving it a narrative of progress and change.”
And there is the religious framing which he noticed as well:
The conferences have come to resemble religious meetings and the TED talks techno-spiritual sermons, pushing an evangelical, cultish attitude toward “the new ideas that will change the world.” Everything becomes “magical” and “inspirational.” In just the top-ten most-viewed TED talks, we get the messages of “inspiration,” “astonishment,” “insight,” “mathmagic” and the “thrilling potential of SixthSense technology”! The ideas most popular are those that pander to a metaphysical, magical portrayal of the role of technology in the world.
I don't mind capitalism the way these folks do, but I agree that the medicine show is the archetype, since the gadgets they're selling are always supposed to make you "better". Who doesn't doubt that SixthSense, this augmented reality thing, is coming soon to a Google Glass near you?
Another critic of TED I've found is in the New Statesman, a journal I have been coming back to more to read critiques of technology.
I’ve long been amused by the slogan of TED, makers of the ubiquitous TED talks. TED’s slogan is this: ‘Ideas worth spreading.’ Apparently TED has some ideas, and we should spread them. What ideas? Ideas that TED in its infinite wisdom has picked out for us, ideas which are therefore implied to be true and good and right. What should we do with these ideas? We should build a message around them - slick presentations by charismatic faces captured in high definition - and we should spread that message far and wide
The genius of the format is that nobody really watches them: we play them on iPods or we run them in our browsers while working on other things, but it’s rare that people put one on the television and sit down and really focus on them. They come at us from the side of our vision, sneaking past our preoccupied neural circuitry and planting little seeds in the nooks and crevices of our minds, like mould spores on a damp window frame. In the darkest hours of countless nights I’ve woken convinced that a solar-powered cup holder will end third world debt, but not really knowing why.
If you want something really cringe-worthy about TED-as-a-cult by somebody who thinks that's a good thing, read this about TEDXWomen.
There were over 70 speakers from over dozens of countries, ranging from former Secretary of State Madeline Albright to a 20-year-old college student who founded a nonprofit at the prodigy age of 15.
The event kicked off with the candid acknowledgment that the idea of having a women-specific conference is controversial.
The First Lady of Malawi led a Conga line of CEOs, founders, visionaries, and entrepreneurs while Beninoise singer-songwriter (and UNICEF ambassador) Angelique Kidjo started a dance party on stage.
At least I've done my civic duty now so that anyone coming to this page wanting more about the TED cult now has more meat on the bones from people who have written it up better than I could.
First, there's Newt, going on a toot. Newt is not going to be the Republican presidential candidate. So while you can go on punching the punching bag set out there to make a more marked contrast with Mitt Romney, you will be punching in thin air soon.
And naturally, you see how this man can't be president, if he is going to antagonize not only one percent of the population (American Muslims) but the X percentage of the population that finds it bigoted to rant about the "mortal Muslim threat" as if it were some real thing. He launches the theory of "stealth jihad" to the effect that parallel to overt terrorist acts, jihadists are mounting a stealthier attack via politics and culture.
I'm more ready to believe in "stealth socialism," having seen its birth and adolescence and young adulthood since the 1980s (cultiminating in Obama), than I am to believe in "stealth jihadism." To be sure, jihadism borrows more than a little Leninism for its own ideologies. But "stealth socialism" was always articulated openly: package "progressive" (socialist) values in single issues, work as "community organizers" doing social services and promoting single issues, claim that progressivism isn't socialism -- and voila. But the reason the "stealth socialism" works is there is a huge audience for accepting progressivism, single issues, even hidden agendas. Not *that* huge (the Occupy Wall Street movement has now dwindled down to its loony and/or hard left core). But certainly way bigger than the audience for accepting a set of religious beliefs that will involve refraining from alcohol, not making interest in a bank account, covering your head, not being able to drive, or even being stoned for adultery. Just not there.
“I believe Shariah is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it,” Mr. Gingrich said in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington in July 2010 devoted to what he suggested were the hidden dangers of Islamic radicalism. “I think it’s that straightforward and that real.”
This is the sort of comment that plays in a think tank or plays on a blog or in a forums comment (or in a political campaign!), but it doesn't play as president -- as political leader. And walk over to any other think-tank and debate the obvious: where is this "mortal" threat? If your purpose is to explain how theoretically, there are aspects of the Islamic faith, or forms of Islamic fundamentalism, that are antithetical to American liberal values, you will simply not be persuasive if you claim that Islamic radicalism is a "radical threat". Not when most people ignore the precepts of Sharia law, including even some American Muslims (they're like Catholics in that regard). Not when terrorists are headed off or caught after they commit their terrible acts, proving that the threat is repelled.
Romney said in a debate in June "“We’re not going to have Shariah law applied in U.S. courts. That’s never going to happen.” He immediately added, “People of all faiths are welcome in this country.”"
Of course, there's something to be said for mounting the intellectual arguments against having shariah law in the US, in the event some local community starts demanding it. It *is* pretty theoretical, unless you think about what has happend in Great Britain, where there have been some cases where courts reportedly upheld Shariah law concerning marriage or property matters (certainly not anything like stoning adulterers or taking away women's driving licenses or something).
And while I respect that it sounds completely absurd "and takes your breath away," this notion of the "mortal threat," as Akbar Ahmed, chairman of Islamic studies at American University in Washington phrased it -- there's something very discomfiting about what comes next in this NYT piece:
But Dr. Jasser, a Phoenix physician and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, said non-Muslims like Mr. Gingrich were not the most effective advocates for what he believes is really a debate within Islam.
“Unfortunately, as long as a non-Muslim opens the discussion, whether it’s Gingrich or someone else, it’s going to hit a brick wall in the Muslim community,” Dr. Jasser said.
Well, why can't we all argue against Islamic fundamentalism, regardless of our religion or ethnicity?!
So what if it doesn't seem effective, or is discredited for being extreme?
The debate has to be open. Open to anybody, regardless of their ethnicity, faith or views. That is what freedom of speech is about. Why are these preconditions being set?
During the trial, prosecutors said Mr. Mehanna considered himself part of Al Qaeda’s “media wing,” translating and posting materials online that glorified jihad. But the defense argued that Mr. Mehanna was well within his First Amendment rights in posting such content and that he was expressing his own views against American foreign policy, not working with Al Qaeda.
Do we have another Mumia in the making here? Looks like it:
“Speech about even the most unpopular ideas serves as a safety valve for the expression of dissent,” the group said, “while government suppression of speech only drives ideas underground, where they cannot be openly debated or refuted.”
I don't see the ACLU turning in a statement about the right of Lowe's not to advertise on a TV show they are not comfortable with, nor, of course, defending Ginrich's right to say extreme things (and they don't pre-emptively that way on a case not yet at trial -- oh, except for their campaign against SOPA.)
Well, nobody's suppressing Newt's right to speak, they're just suggesting he isn't fit to be president. Ok, so don't vote for him?
But that's not enough for these Muslim leaders:
Mohamed Elibiary, a Muslim and an adviser to law enforcement agencies in Texas and to the Department of Homeland Security, is a conservative Republican who said he once idolized Mr. Gingrich. He said he no longer did.
He said the anti-Shariah campaign in the United States was “propaganda for jihadists,” offering fuel for the idea of a titanic clash of faiths. Those who truly want to protect American values should talk to Muslims, he said, not demonize them.
“There are plenty of American Muslim patriots who will defend American freedoms,” Mr. Elibiary said. “But you can’t be anti-Islam and find those allies.”
In other words, what this advisor to law-enforcement agencies is telling us is the following:
o don't go by First Amendment values, as we do for jihadists calling for support for Al Qaeda, don't speak on this issue at all unless you speak upon it in the form of a dialogue with hand-picked Muslim leaders who will defend American values
o don't speak out against Islam in any kind of strenuous way as Newt Gingrich is doing, or you will never get those allies to surface and show themselves -- they will run from you.
Of course, these allies are free to appear at any time and defend American values, and no doubt some of them do.
But you can see where this is going -- a "chill on speech," a refusal to recognize freedom of speech, even extreme speech. A demand for certain pre-requisites before you can even talk. Either you have to *be* Muslim, because you can never understand the special-snowflake situation and be credible in critiquing extremism ever-so-carefully OR you have to only discuss these issues in a pre-ordained interfaith dialogue mode, where you find the "good" Muslims to have the debate with so you can make sure the faith is shown in a good light.
Say, no one would ever tip-toe around like this with Catholics. They condemn priests' sexual abuse of minors -- and that's it. They go further and ascribe this offense to the entire priesthood or entire Church, and most people don't call them on it. Even conservative Catholic leaders don't demand that the press only speak of these offenses if they find a qualified priest who has reported such incidents or is a staunch proponent of prosecuting these cases.
Newt is pretty bad, implying there's a terrible mortal danger when there isn't -- in danger of not only crying wolf so that people become desensitized to the issue, but in danger of angering and inciting violence from jihadists themselvse, so these moderate Muslims tell us. Awful!
But frankly, they are bad, too. Because they make it seem like no one can criticize the obvious about Islamist extremists - like the terrorists who blew up 57 people in Iraq today! -- without inciting *more* jihadism because we have smeared the faith. Something wrong with that picture.
The story of a company pulling its advertising for a sit-com about American Muslims under pressure from a conservative family-values group has a lot of people mad on both sides of the issue.
Lowes Home Improvement, a furniture company (not the movie theater), pulled its advertising from this show about Muslims in Detroit after the Florida Family Association wrote and complained it would have "propaganda that riskily hides the Islamic agenda's clear and present danger to American liberties and traditional values."
That all seems overblown and extreme, when the worst thing that's going to happen to American Muslims is that they're going to get the same vacuous sit-com treatment that Jews, blacks, Hispanics, gays and other minorities have gotten on American TV, and be trivialized and homogenized. Maybe that's a sign of "having arrived" or "being accepted"? Maybe it's silly or politically correct? It's hardly likely to unleash the mullahs' murderous propaganda on to unsuspecting couch-potatoes.
The answer to speech that seems hateful and racist is more speech, however, not less, and that's not what the left or Sen. Ted Lieu are reaching for as solutions.
Moveon.org is agitating for Lowes to return their advertising support, and Sen. Lieu is looking for laws he can prosecute Lowes with (!). This is very bad stuff, and frankly, worse that the original offense of the conservative group, because these moves by the left and Lieu attack the whole system supporting the First Amendment, and don't just spread hate and mistrust.
The left has a hard time accepting the idea of the corporation as person, or the corporation as a profit-making entity, or the corporation as anything, really. They love collectives, but not in the form of corporations. So they think the solution to a speech problem they don't like is to impose behaviour on a free agent in a free market. That's wrong. They don't get to do that under American law. But of course, they are busy trying to erode that law.
No corporation can be forced to place or withdraw advertising. It's a free act in a free market and depends on the judgement of the corporation itself. Moveon.org, a nonprofit and a PAC, would ask for no less for itself. What if some moral majority somewhere in some state were able to compel Moveon.org to give some of their money to rightwing causes and support conservative businesses, out of some notion of "balance"? That's why I definitely oppose signing the petition about this.
Sen. Ted Lieu is worse. First, he said he would respond with some kind of legislation about this incident, as if he could write a law forcing corporations to support loopy sit-coms that are supposed to mainstream minorities -- the melting pot method used on every other minority in America. Or force corporations to do *anything* regarding their advertising. There is no way in hell that should pass.
Worse, he is casting around for California laws (Lowes is in California) that could be used to prosecute this speech of theirs -- this decision first to advertise, then pull the ad, then put up a Facebook explanation apologizing for putting their foot in, then pulling the Facebook.
This is wrong, wrong, wrong of Sen. Lieu. But how did he get like this? What on earth drove him to reach for these outrageous authoritarian solutions -- suppressing the speech and actions of corporations?!
It turns out Ted Lieu is an immigrant, his family came to this country from some Asian country not specified when he was 3, and he had a hard life, starting out in a basement, working in a store, working his way up. So he is very sensitive to the idea of immigrants and minorities being harmed by conservative groups like the Florida Family Association. Understood.
Ted Lieu did so well under the "American Dream" (and, despite George Carlin's dark propaganda, he didn't have to be asleep to enjoy it). He went to Georgetown Law School, and also served in the military. He has an impressive personal record. But how did he get through Law School, and clerk and not learn a thing about the jurisprudence of the First Amendment?! There isn't any possible law in a state or in the nation that could force a company to advertise a show they don't want to advertise, just because they once *did* wish to advertise with it, and then changed their mind.
That he could even tell a reporter that he was going to look for such a law is just extreme -- and gravely troubling. I could never, ever vote for such a senator. All he is doing, in fact, is reinforcing the stereotype and fueling the fears of the conservative Florida group that classic liberal American values are undercut by alien ideologies.
If he doesn't find a law to prosecute Lowes with, he's going to pass some kind of condemnatory resolution -- really ill-advised as bullying and a chill on speech and a misuse of legislative power -- and also organize a boycott of Lowes -- something that elected officials should not be doing -- it's more the prerogative of civic groups or unions.
You can't force people to engage in politically-correct behaviour in society at large, in the marketplace. To be sure, there are rules imposed on schools and workplaces for such behaviour, and some would debate this is a good thing. But in the outside marketplace of ideas, goods, and services, there isn't such a "code of conduct" -- and can't be. It would be impossible to create and enforce without doing huge damage to the notion of free speech.
Lowes didn't do anything wrong. They caved under pressure from a community group, but that's their business judgement -- they saw a controversy brewing, and they wanted to remove their brand from it. If 30,000 people hate that, they can just not buy Lowes stuff. But they can't force Lowes to say things they don't believe, or enter a politicized fray.
Once again, there's another troubling undertow to all this in the Wired State. Nobody can say anything bad about the obviously bad Islamic agenda in a place like Iran without fear of political incorrectness or fear of having it somehow apply to American Muslims in Detroit. The left goes around braying constantly that they don't want to be accused of antisemitism just because they ferociously single out and criticize Israel,and constantly complain that they're in a context where they can't criticize Israel without being called antisemitic -- doesn't that same principle apply to Islam? And I'd add that in many cases, the leftists *are* antisemitic because they've become absolutely obsessive, unhinged, and hateful about Israel.
Has the same thing happened with this group in Florida, on the question of Islam -- the inability to distinguisn countries and individuals related in some way to them? It seems so. They should at least wait until the show airs before pouncing on some actual thing that actually undermines American values!
Meanwhile, Sen. Lieu and the left are the ones in this story actually active undermining American values supposedly in the name of tolerance. There are plenty of other ways to respond. They could condemn the group in Florida and Lowes, but rather than trying to deny them their First Amendment-protected speech, they should find new advertisers for the show.
So I'll link them for you because it's relevant. Sure, they're separate seemingly unrelated items but they are worth examining together to understand our times, the Internet, and the Wired State.
The game industry and the geek universe in general fight vigorously and viciously to disclaim any research indicating that violent video games have any negative effects on people, or that they can cause people to become violent in real life.
If you claim they do, you will be accused of advocating censorship and the Net-Nanny State or worse, get pizza delivered to your home unasked or your web site hacked. There is nothing more violent and ferocious than young male geek gamers insisting on their right to play violent video games, while claiming your moral or psychiatric or legal concerns are irrelevant.
Oh, wait, yes there is: the game company and their geek developers who make a profit and a living from video games who hate anything that might undermine their bottom line. This is an industry with billions of dollars and hundreds of millions of customers and they lobby really hard for their interests so you will not win. For example, if there is a scholarly conference on gaming, the companies will make sure to donate to it or sponsor speakers or cover costs or supply panels of experts or loyal professors in order to prevent anyone from taking too harsh and critical view of what video games are and what they do.
So, first, the Norwegian killer -- we went through weeks of frenzy while all the lefty pundits declared his atrocity and crime against humanity to be caused by...right-wing bloggers in the United States. Or creepy nationalist groups in England or Germany. Or Christianity and its history of the crusades. There was an ENORMOUS amount of stuff in this light and I recall making some notes to try to counter some of it but didn't find the time, and I felt that some kind of period of mourning should pass.
I remember a colleague wrote a rather pious blog with a title like "An Ordinary Terrorist" to imply that hate movements, right-wing belief systems, fundamentalist Christianity, etc. in combination with the Internet were producing this new sort of monster like the Norwegian fanatic. I was going to write a blog titled "An Extraordinary Terrorist" to illustrate how there were other factors at play in bringing this person to commit such a horrendous crime and that his obsessive writings in fact didn't even contain the references to American bloggers or even Jesus Christ such as to find some credible linkage between these figures and terror against other human beings, and that in fact there isn't the correlary that you might think. And among the points I wanted to mention was his war-gaming and desensitization to human suffering in this fashion.
Oh, I'm a very big believer in the idea that online affects offline, and that simulations don't end at the log-off. I've seen far too much of it around Second Life. But I do think you have to examine the correlations closely and concede that it's a percentage, not a blanket situation. Funny how so many people were willing to believe that Breivik could get insensed and kill people because he read...Pamela Geller's Atlas Shrugs, a stridently anti-Islam conservative blog. Yet they couldn't wrap their mind around the idea that maybe he shot people because he had been practicing to shoot people virtually for thousands of hours and had killed thousands of virtual people.
Interestingly, the furor died down about the Norwegian. The atrocity, as awful as it was, fell out of the news, to be replaced by the conflicts in Libya and Syria and whatever other issues attract people of conscience. After the memorial services in Norway, people stopped speculating and just let the investigation continue quietly
Now the preliminary examination is concluded and after 36 hours and 13 meetings, two psychiatrists have pronounced Breivik not fit to stand trial by reason of insanity and recommended that he be incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital.
This finding still has to be reviewed by a court and there may be opposition opinions.
But despite having said earlier that Breivik might be sane because he seemed to plan his murders so methodically, the psychiatrists are now saying he is delusional.
And, given that he thinks he is a commander with an avenging mission against Muslims and leftwing parties in Norway, in a movement consisting evidently of just one person, himself, and maybe a few sketchy links to some networks of haters, he does seem delusional.
The question is how somehow who can make preparations for murder, i.e. buy fertilizer and various chemicals over the Internet, study maps and approaches and timing, etc. and then coldly execute murders of so many people, could be out of touch with reality. Usally people who are crazy can't do things like drive a car.
I can only submit that maybe we don't know everything that can be known about the modern forms of crazy, and maybe one of those variables is the new ways in which video games affect brains.
Breivik was an active player of online and offline war games and this can be seen on his Facebook page and from other evidence. In these games, you endlessly kill other humans or beings remorselessly, and if you yourself are killed, you just respawn eventually or take a potion and get back in the game.
Dr. Yang Wang, a radiologist at the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis, and colleagues divided healthy men who were 18 to 29 years old and not frequent players of violent games randomly into two groups. One group was asked to play a shooter video game for 10 hours over the course of a week and to refrain from playing the game for a second week. The second group was instructed not to play any violent video games at all over the two-week period.
All of the study subjects had functional magnetic resonance imaging tests at the beginning of the study, after one week and at the end of the study. The analyses showed that at one week, the game players had less activation in parts of the brain associated with cognitive function and emotional control than they had at baseline, and than the control group. Activation increased again after the second week, when the men didn't play the game.
Yeah, I'm sure the Giga Om and Massively and Reddit lolbertarians and others are all fiercely disputing this like they often dispute the connection between online child pornography or simulation of child pornography in a world like Second Life and offline crimes against children. No matter. Law-enforcers and psychiatrists find the connections in practice and work toward remedies.
Just because your brain changes doesn't mean it changed for the worse, but if the areas affected are things related to "emotional control," maybe you can start to wonder about creating generations of people without remorse, who don't feel empathy for another's suffering.
I remember reading years ago in all the child development books popular in the 1990s that there was a window for establishing empathy. There was a certain time period in a toddler's life, say, 18 months or 32 months, when they realized that the green peas that they were rapturous about, for example, were not something that other people liked, even if they squished some right on their face. Or that they didn't like getting sand thrown in their eyes or a bop on the head from a shovel anymore than the toddler himself did. The lightbulb goes off during this phase and people develop empathy -- or it doesn't. Maybe it never has a chance to go off when a child is constantly plunked down by TVs or now even ipads or videos or distracted babysitters and never has an adult interacting with him in real time and shaping his impressions and providing feedback.
Apropos of early infant brain development: The other day I saw Laura Rozen, a columnist who used to be at Foreign Policy and is now on Politico write something awful on Twitter. I thought about responding to her because it really bothered me, but then got busy with something else. Today, I see she's deleted the tweet from her feed. It was a late-night parental frustration tweet that she was trying to deliver as something satirical and funny.
It went something like this: "Violated the number one rule for getting a toddler to go to bed, made eye contact." I can't find it even in Google cache now, it was 2 days ago or so.
I remember thinking, Good Lord, Laura. I realize you're an uber-important politico blogger and all, but geez, you can't nurture your child at night? You can't spend 30 minutes putting him to bed and reading him a story and *making eye contact*? You'd rather tweet than do that?
And if he gets up even at 11 pm because something's bothering him, you can't make eye contact and hold him and sing to him? Really? You really think that *not* making contact and leaving him to cry in his room is going to work?
These early years don't repeat. Can't you just invest in them now so society doesn't have to deal with a psychopath down the road?
No doubt as a professional upper class woman she does all the right things with her kid and maybe even stays at home and makes cookies. But I found that "don't make eye contact" tweet just...chilling. It wasn't funny to me.
As for the Norwegian killer, maybe what video games do for people already predisposed to looniness is make them develop skills. Enable them in fact to exercise executive function and have routine memes like "shooting" become mechanical expertise that kicks in even when they are so crazy they might not be able to drive a car somewhere. Maybe that's how it works?
I can only keep asking these questions. I think there's a link. I don't pretend there's an easy one to establish, or that all players of violent videos then go out and commit crimes against humanity. But some do, and even one such monster is one t0o many.
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