Jonathan

The city government of Hollywood, Florida, on behalf of residents who don’t like to have certain kinds of Jews as neighbors, is using zoning laws to harass the Jews while it leaves members of other religious groups alone.

The Jews voted with their dollars and their feet to live and worship in Hollywood. Their neighbors are free to leave if they don’t like the situation, but instead are using the city’s legal muscle to try and keep the newcomers out. (Religious Jews always live near their synagogues, so forbidding synagogues in residential areas makes it difficult for religious Jews to live in those areas.)

There would be an outcry and lawsuits if any American city tried such tactics against blacks or gays or members of other minority groups. What’s different here? Nothing, except that the Jews in question are a very small minority and Hollywood thinks it can get away with pushing them around. This is an appropriate occasion for an anti-discrimination suit against the City, and it’s nice to hear that the Chabad people are planning one.

The mayor of Hollywood is trying to protect herself and her cronies by vigorously supporting anti-religious zoning restrictions, but insisting, somewhat belatedly, that they be applied evenhandedly. No thanks. One of the main problems with such restrictions is that it’s easy for cities to get away with not applying them evenhandedly. That’s part of why they are useful to politicians. Hollywood is only vulnerable here because it applied its own rules in such a heavy handed and blatantly discriminatory way as to make its adversaries’ case for them; the City might well have gotten away with it if its officials had been a bit more subtle and tactful. And who is the mayor of Hollywood, an ex-social worker, to say that organized religious observance is inappropriate in residential neighborhoods? That kind of arrogance in government officials is a much bigger problem than are low-key Sabbath gatherings in people’s residences.

Bigwig of the Silflay Hraka blog posts photos and commentary about the liberation of the Ohrdruf concentration camp in 1945. The photos came into his possession by accident and he thinks they may never have been published. They are gruesome reminders of why we fought but also of why we are fighting, and are worth looking at even if you have seen such things many times before. Bigwig’s comments add quite a lot, as do some of the comments left by his readers.

Bigwig is ambivalent about posting previously-unpublished historical images on his blog. I don’t think he should be. Blogs are perfect for this sort of thing. If he had given the photos straightaway to a museum or other institution they might have been filed away for years until someone got around to looking at them. Now he can scan them onto his blog and people will see them immediately, and he can still give them to an institution for preservation. This was a great idea on his part. The more people who use blogs to post historically significant photos and reminiscences, the better.

“bubba” in the comments forwards this photo:

There’s been some discussion on blogs about this column by one of the Anglosphere’s deep thinkers. The idea is that atheists should call themselves “brights” as a way to distinguish themselves and to intellectually one-up those benighted believers.

This is a bad idea and won’t fly. Many Americans are religious and would reasonably take offense at the clear implication of the word “bright” as used in this way: that religious people are stupid. This point, and the likelihood that even many atheists would prefer to avoid conveying such sneering disrespect for alternative views as use of this word, in this context, conveys, are going to make a lot of people reluctant to use it. And if it doesn’t catch on here it isn’t likely to become a standard term in the way that “gay” has.

But I understand why people who hate religion would try to convince everyone else to use a term such as “bright.” Its use forestalls argument by assuming a conclusion — a conclusion that it asserts up front as though it were as obviously valid as someone’s name, and how dare anyone challenge it. (Are atheists bright? Yes, they tell us so themselves.) You have to wonder about the judgment and intellectual confidence of people who try to gain adherents to their position by using verbal sleight-of-hand rather than rational persuasion.

“Bright” has been compared to the aforementioned “gay,” but I think a better comparison is to the word “liberal” as it is used in the U.S. to describe political orientation. Americans who call themselves liberals are really socialists. But socialism doesn’t sell here, so American leftists play word games to avoid defending their positions via straightforward arguments in which they would be at a disadvantage. They use “liberal” in the same way as Dawkins uses “bright” — to avoid dealing with opposing views on the merits. Ask what liberals believe, and why, and you are likely to receive a circular response asserting that since the word “liberal” implies tolerance and love of freedom, people who call themselves liberals must favor these things, and therefore (it is implied) if liberals support something it must be favorable for tolerance and freedom. Thus, for example, the American Left favors racial discrimination as long as leftists are in charge of it and do it out of self-declared good motives. This doesn’t seem very liberal to me, but they keep telling us that it is, and since they are “liberals” who am I to object? This is a neat trick, and lots of people still fall for it (though less so over time, as leftists’ increasing use of the word “progressive” in place of “liberal,” presumably in response to how their own actions have discredited liberalism, suggests).

Why do you guys keep hyping economic-data releases hours after they come out? Don’t you know that the markets discount this kind of information within seconds? Of course you know it, so stop pretending that everyone else doesn’t. Yes, I realize the other financial-news networks do the same thing that you do, but that’s because they’re clueless too.

I know that this goes against journalistic conventional wisdom, but if you want to stand out in a way that gets you more viewers, you might consider doing things that your competitors don’t do. More interviews with economists and business analysts would be fine, but your over reliance on journo talking heads promoting the story of the day and interpreting economic news they don’t understand doesn’t cut it. Neither does your heavy use of talking-head conventional interpretations of political news. What might make you worth watching would be a few simple innovations, like a listing of the day’s economic releases in tabular or graphical form comparing them to previous stats. (Hint: we don’t care what the numbers are so much as how they compare to expectations, how the markets react, and whether there are obvious trends.) And would it kill you to time stamp your headlines, so that anyone could see at a glance if that latest news item is two minutes or two hours old?

Thanks.

P.S. And while you’re at it, maybe you should drop the car reviews, golf reviews, coverage of the CNBC annual barbecue, etc., etc. I can get that kind of stuff a lot more efficiently by browsing the WSJ “Personal Journal” section when I’m in the john.