Blogging

Guess the Nationality!

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Is everyone up to speed on writer Mark Steyn’s troubles up in Canada? If not, you can get a pretty good take on the basics by reading this.

Lots of pundits have weighed in on the fracas, most of whom have very little to say which is interesting or insightful. But I keep reading them because they can sometimes be unwittingly and unintentionally hilarious.

Case in point is this overly long analysis of some of the legal issues involved by a (GASP!) real live lawyer. I found the bulk of it to be just like the same-old same-old that has passed before, until I got almost to the end and found….

“Sometimes, I think a statement or a publication can go too far, and in that case, the right to be free of vilification will outweigh the right to freedom of speech.”

I have little doubt that the majority of you who hail from the United States and who just read the line above greeted it with a snort of derision, or at least a roll of the eyes to go with that moue of disgust that rose unbidden to twist your expression. I also have no doubt that most of you who were nurtured in foreign climes are wondering what we could possibly see as wrong.

Americans live in a country that contains every culture, tribe, nationality, race, creed, and philosophy that exists. The only way for anyone to have a “…right to be free of vilification…” is if the culture is completely homogeneous. If there is an absolute code of behavior, values, and mores that everyone is obliged to follow, then it might be possible. But in a place where two or more cultures rub up against each other?

That is why we are snorting and making moues at our keyboards.

Follow the link above to the source of the quote and you will see that the author is a native of Australia who is currently studying in England. You would think that she would have realized by now, considering how the decisions that shaped her life has caused her to hop continents and experience other climes and cultures, that the statement that a “…right to be free of vilification will outweigh the right to freedom of speech…” is risible. But I also noticed that she started her blogging career writing for a Libertarian blog, and it doesn’t seem to have occurred to her that the very idea of someone being banned from saying insulting things about others is hardly in line with Libertarian philosophy.

I mean, where exactly does the concept of “liberty” come into play in such a case, anyway?

The point to all this (and there is a point for all of you who came down this far in the post), is that this is yet another illustration as to why Americans are more sophisticated than the rest of the world is willing to admit. The government in Canada is so worried about the self esteem of a select few that they have decided to force people to shut up, even though the speech in question is harmless and factual. A law student who has spanned a fair amount of the Earth’s surface seems to think that this is a good idea, only grudgingly ceding that maybe they are going just a touch too far in the Great White North.

But down here in The Land of the Free we realize that the path to advancement is to complain, grumble, and gripe about everything! We know, better than any other people in history, that the only way to see anything clearly is to hold it up to fierce and unrelenting scrutiny. Both truth and falsehood will become apparent in short order, and we trust people to make the right decision as long as the heavy hand of government doesn’t filter the debate.

How can you be more sophisticated than that?

(Hat tip to Mark Steyn.)

UPDATE
It has been pointed out that I made a mistake. The blog I linked to above is a team effort, and the person who wrote the post I commented on is not the Libertarian at the site. Their take on the subject is here.

Click on that last link and scroll down to the bottom to see that they linked to my own post. That was very kind of them, but it seems they were a might peeved over the identity confusion.

“A bunch of very smart economists who should know better have managed to confuse Legal Eagle with me. Mark Steyn didn’t make the same mistake, linking to both posts and noting the difference. Which if nothing else suggests he’s a very careful writer.”

Except that I’m hardly an economist. In fact, few of the writers here are. My own background, for example, is in law enforcement and the civilian use of armed self defense. Whether or not I’m smart enough to have known better I’ll leave to my readers to decide.

I suppose this illustrates the fact that it is easy to make a mistake concerning the identity of someone on a group blog, particularly when that blog doesn’t place signatures on the posts. (Just glance at the line under the title of this post to see what I mean.) Unless you have actually been reading the site for awhile, it would be easy to become confused as to who authored what.

Abu Muqawama Retires

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Abu Muqawama is an excellent blog that is on my daily blog reading list.   It focuses on counterinsurgency issues, as well as wider issues in military affairs.   I tend to favor it because of the humility of the authors.   Often they comment on issues, and are authoritative, yet allow for the fact that ladies and gentlemen may have legitimate disagreements.

Unfortunately, The Abu Muqawama has revealed his identity as Andrew Exum and has stated that he will no longer be blogging regularly.   Instead his co-bloggers, Erin “Charlie” Simpson, Dr. iRack, and Londonstani, among others, will continue where Abu Muqawama leaves off.

Andrew Exum will be missed, but the blog will continue.   Good luck to Andrew in is intellectual endeavors.

I nonetheless look forward to the new Abu Muqawama blog.

Zen comments as well.

Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride

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Megan McArdle is upset by something that Roy Edroso, a writer for The Village Voice, has said about her. He called her a “libstick libertarian”, which she feels is a misogynistic statement.

Well, it is a sexist comment! Considering that Mr. Edroso let it slip in an article where he rates ten Conservative blogs as to their Stupid to Evil ratio, Megan seems to be most incensed that he would be considering her femininity as a factor. What would being female have to do with being either stupid or evil?

She has a point, but that isn’t what I want to discuss. What puzzles me is how Mr. Edroso could have missed including The Chicago Boyz in his list!

Aren’t we Evil enough? We certainly try! I’m a gun-toting self defense instructor, and I even teach violent crime survivors how to shoot their disadvantaged attackers without charging them anything. To a New York liberal writing for a Leftist propaganda rag, that should put me somewhere above Joe McCarthy and just a little lower than Pol Pot. I mean, c’mon!

And stupid? I have bathtubs full of stupid at home, just in case a Village Voice columnist comes on by and wants to borrow a gallon or two. There are a few thousand rounds of ammunition in my living room alone, and I keep the guns used in the self defense class in my basement. According to those discredited studies the anti-gun lobby keeps quoting, I should have accidentally shot myself and every member of my family a few dozen times over by now. The fact that I haven’t shot anyone yet can probably be taken by a Liberal as proof that I am so stupid that I can’t even screw up right! If, that is, they can get over the fact that I am so stupid that I own guns in the first place.

And let us not forget my fellow Chicago Boyz! I doubt that any of them will be able to rise to the lofty heights of both Stupidity and Evility that I have achieved, but they all have their own geniuses in these areas. I figure that our combined talents creates a giant black hole that sucks all Goodness and Smartiness out of just about anyone unfortunate enough to glance at the title bar.

So the next time Mr. Edroso is compiling his little list, he should first stop on by and see what’s cookin’ with The Boyz.

“How many record execs does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

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Very funny:

First of all, before we change anything, is the light bulb really burned out? Maybe we just need to breathe some life into it; repackage it, maybe the light bulb could do a duet with somebody (Sheryl Crow? Tim McGraw?) in hopes of getting some crossover appeal, maybe it could be in a beer commercial, maybe we could get it out on the road with a brighter light bulb. The other thing to think about is that this summer, Honda is rolling out a 100 Million dollar campaign for a new car aimed at thirty-somethings who consider themselves adventurous/spontaneous but can’t really afford something like a luxury S.U.V. and it might be a perfect campaign to tie this light bulb into, at least it would be the perfect demographic, in terms of age.
 
Also, and this is just an idea: what if we found out what video games are being released in the third quarter and maybe pitched the idea of having our light bulb make an appearance in the video game at some certain level of completion; like, you get to a dark cave, let’s say, if it’s an adventure game, and if you have enough points you can get the light bulb – and it would be our light bulb, obviously – and then it’s easier to see in the cave…

Not only is this passage funny and, from what little I know, accurate about how record-industry people actually talk (which is why it’s funny), it’s also a great piece of viral marketing because it got me and a lot of other bloggers to link. But it’s entertaining, so I don’t mind linking.

Journalism Whitewash

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One of the first things Dan and I agreed on about blogging is that we wouldn’t go after the “easy” targets like Krugman because that kind of “fisking” is already all over the web and we aren’t adding anything to the discussion that hasn’t been done before.

However, this “free pass” does not apply to journalists. In general, we believe that most journalists are uninformed about the topics that they write about beyond a superficial level and as a result often miss the entire point of the issue. There are exceptions, of course, such as Michael Lewis, who wrote the great books Moneyball, Liar’s Poker and the Blind Side about baseball, finance, and football respectively. Michael Lewis represents the pinnacle of journalism in that he inhabits and deeply understands the topics that he writes about and weaves together a gripping tale of individuals that illuminates rather than obscures his topics.

In 2007 I attended a seminar on journalism sponsored by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs that I wrote about in this blog post. At the seminar I asked the journalists how they could compete against bloggers who wrote about a narrow range of topics that they understood exceedingly well while the journalists were mostly generalists who skimmed the surface and threw in “the human element”. Their basic answer is that the reader couldn’t trust someone like me because they don’t know my motivation but the journalist in the paper or through the official channel was a trustworthy professional by comparison.

While I thought then (and still do) that this answer is mainly bullsh*t it was a pretty thoughtful and effective answer on their part, because this cover of objectivity is better than trying to engage bloggers on their own terms who understand the topics that they write about (on good blogs, that is) far better than the journalist ever could.

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