Monk

I see some of our high-minded hate-speech laws, this time in England, are abuzz in the news again. A columnist, Victoria Coren, is in some trouble and may wind up in jail. Why? Because she wrote a bit too provocatively and broadly about her displeasure with Lucy Liu playing the role of Watson in the highly beloved English classic story of Sherlock Holmes for an American TV series titled “Elementary”. According to Ms. Coren, these are the two paragraphs that she wrote in a column that are the source of her legal troubles:

"Lucy Liu [told] the Times, 'It was a very big deal for me to play an Asian-American in Charlie's Angels; Watson's ethnicity is also a big deal', as if someone had bet her £100 that she couldn't cause at least three Conan Doyle fans to suffer a pulmonary embolism.

"Personally, I'd like to press Liu's face into a bowl of cold pea soup for that statement. It's not just her failure to distinguish between creating a new character and mangling a beloved old one (Tread softly! You tread on my dreams!), but the triumphant tone over such an appalling and offensive racial change. Let me be clear: I rather like the idea of an Asian Watson, but American? God save us all."

If Ms. Coren were a man, I could see more cause for a little teacup tempest on account of the violent imagery she takes up, but the fact that she is a woman would seem to take some of the heat of her statement away - who doesn’t like a good catfight?

More seriously, I am just reminded why I like our First Amendment. Personally, I could see a law proscribing what I would call ‘true’ hate speech, namely speech that calls for violence against others, especially against minority groups, including the outright elimination of groups, something much clearer like this. Though, even here, I could accept such speech if it were at least veiled in fiction; I wouldn’t care to ban “The Turner Diaries” for example. If a people are not above such hate-mongering, I don’t think a few criminal laws proscribing speech will help very much.

Now, I can see regulating such speech and books, by not allowing them a popular platform, such as school libraries and network television or mainstream theaters and auditoriums, but not much more than this. It’s just that the idea of turning mere speech into a crime makes me wince. Writers try to be provocative, or at least the best of them do, and it is not like life is all about love and rainbows. I hate the idea of chilling free speech, creating a situation where a person behind a keyboard has to wonder if he might be crossing a line, “Should I take back that bit about pressing her face into a bowl of soup? Should I just forget about the whole angle about an Asian taking such pride in appropriating a classic English role?” These may not be entirely wholesome thoughts, and let the writer risk losing popularity and readers. But I feel like it is safe to say that she is not a criminal. She may actually be more of a racist than she likes to think, but she is no criminal, at least not on account of these paragraphs.

(Source: News-LJ)

We should tune in to the Romney and Ryan show

The myth of a democratic socialist society funded by capitalism is finished

-- Janet Daley at The Telegraph

Right-wingers in Europe are getting excited by what the Republicans are doing, in being on the verge of unraveling all the New Deal and progressive legislation of the twentieth century in favor of Ayn Randian fantasies.


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Whatever the outcome of the American presidential election, one thing is certain: the fighting of it will be the most significant political event of the decade. Last week’s Republican national convention sharpened what had been until then only a vague, inchoate theme: this campaign is going to consist of the debate that all Western democratic countries should be engaging in, but which only the United States has the nerve to undertake. The question that will demand an answer lies at the heart of the economic crisis from which the West seems unable to recover. It is so profoundly threatening to the governing consensus of Britain and Europe as to be virtually unutterable here, so we shall have to rely on the robustness of the US political class to make the running.

What is being challenged is nothing less than the most basic premise of the politics of the centre ground: that you can have free market economics and a democratic socialist welfare system at the same time. The magic formula in which the wealth produced by the market economy is redistributed by the state – from those who produce it to those whom the government believes deserve it – has gone bust. The crash of 2008 exposed a devastating truth that went much deeper than the discovery of a generation of delinquent bankers, or a transitory property bubble. It has become apparent to anyone with a grip on economic reality that free markets simply cannot produce enough wealth to support the sort of universal entitlement programmes which the populations of democratic countries have been led to expect. The fantasy may be sustained for a while by the relentless production of phoney money to fund benefits and job-creation projects, until the economy is turned into a meaningless internal recycling mechanism in the style of the old Soviet Union.

Or else democratically elected governments can be replaced by puppet austerity regimes which are free to ignore the protests of the populace when they are deprived of their promised entitlements. You can, in other words, decide to debauch the currency which underwrites the market economy, or you can dispense with democracy. Both of these possible solutions are currently being tried in the European Union, whose leaders are reduced to talking sinister gibberish in order to evade the obvious conclusion: the myth of a democratic socialist society funded by capitalism is finished. This is the defining political problem of the early 21st century.

-- Janet Daley at The Telegraph

The economic plight in Europe is so devastating that many people are committing suicide over it. I'm a little surprised that there has not been more political radicalism with circumstances so poor.

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IN ATHENS — Antonis Perris, a musician unemployed for more than two years, was desperate. Perris wrote in an online forum late one night that he had run out of money to buy food and cursed those responsible for the economic crisis in Greece. “I have no solution in front of me,” he typed.

The next morning, Perris took the hand of his ailing 90-year-old mother. They climbed to the roof of their apartment building and leapt to their death.

[...]

So many people have been killing themselves and leaving behind notes citing financial hardship that European media outlets have a special name for them: “economic suicides.”

-- Ariana Eunjung Cha at The Washington Post

In 21st-century Amsterdam, you’re free to smoke marijuana and pick out a half-naked sex partner from the front window of her shop. But you can be put on trial for holding the wrong opinion about a bloke who died in the seventh century.

-- Mark Steyn at The National Review

Mr. Steyn's rhetoric can be a bit overblown at times, so that one must read him with a grain of salt, but he paints a stark and dark picture of the supposed Islamicization of Europe, and I want to keep some record of the article.


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The years roll on, and the gag gets a little sadder. “The most tolerant country in Europe” is an increasingly incoherent polity where gays are bashed, uncovered women get jeered in the street, and you can’t do The Diary of Anne Frank as your school play lest the Gestapo walk-ons are greeted by audience cries of “She’s in the attic!”

According to one survey, 20 percent of history teachers have abandoned certain, ah, problematic aspects of the Second World War because, in classes of a particular, ahem, demographic disposition, pupils don’t believe the Holocaust happened, and, if it did, the Germans should have finished the job and we wouldn’t have all these problems today.More inventive instructors artfully woo their Jew-despising students by comparing the Holocaust to “Islamophobia” — we all remember those Jewish terrorists hijacking Fokkers and flying them into the Reichstag, right? What about gangs of young Jews preying on the elderly, as Muslim youth do in Wilders’ old neighborhood of Kanaleneiland?

As for “Islamophobia,” it’s so bad that it’s, er, the Jews who are leaving. “Sixty per cent of Amsterdam’s orthodox community intends to emigrate from Holland,” says Benzion Evers, the son of the city’s chief rabbi, five of whose children had already left by 2010. Frommer’s bestselling travel guide to “Europe’s most tolerant city” acknowledges that “Jewish visitors who dress in a way that clearly identifies them as Jewish” are at risk of attack, but discreetly attributes it to “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” “Jews with a conscience should leave Holland, where they and their children have no future,” advised Frits Bolkestein, former Dutch Liberal leader. “Anti-Semitism will continue to exist, because the Moroccan and Turkish youngsters don’t care about efforts for reconciliation.”

If you’re wondering what else those “youngsters” don’t care for, ask Chris Crain, editor of The Washington Blade, the gay newspaper of America’s capital. Seeking a break from the Christian fundamentalist redneck theocrats of the Republican party, he and his boyfriend decided to treat themselves to a vacation in Amsterdam, “arguably the ‘gay-friendliest’ place on the planet.” Strolling through the streets of the city center, they were set upon by a gang of seven “youngsters,” punched, beaten, and kicked to the ground. Perplexed by the increasing violence, Amsterdam officials commissioned a study to determine, as Der Spiegel put it, “why Moroccan men are targeting the city’s gays.”

Gee, that’s a toughie. Beats me. The geniuses at the University of Amsterdam concluded that the attackers felt “stigmatized by society” and “may be struggling with their own sexual identity.”

[...]

In this back-to-front world, Piet Hein Donner and the University of Amsterdam researchers and the prosecutors of the Openbaar Ministrie who staged his show trial are “mainstream” — and Geert Wilders is the “far” “extreme” “fringe.” How wide is that fringe? Mr. Wilders cites a poll in which 57 percent of people say that mass immigration was the biggest single mistake in Dutch history.

If the importation of large Muslim populations into the West was indeed a mistake, it was also an entirely unnecessary one. Some nations (the Dutch, French, and British) might be considered to owe a certain post-colonial debt to their former subject peoples, but Sweden? Germany? From Malmö to Mannheim, Islam transformed societies that had hitherto had virtually no connection with the Muslim world. Even if you disagree with that 57 percent of Dutch poll respondents, the experience of Amsterdam’s chief rabbi and the gay-bashed editor and the elderly residents of Kanaleneiland suggests at the very minimum that the Islamization of Continental cities poses something of a challenge to Eutopia’s famous “tolerance.”

Yet the same political class responsible for this unprecedented “demographic substitution” (in the words of French demographer Michèle Tribalat) insists the subject remain beyond discussion. The British novelist Martin Amis asked Tony Blair if, at meetings with his fellow prime ministers, the Continental demographic picture was part of the “European conversation.” Mr. Blair replied, with disarming honesty, “It’s a subterranean conversation” — i.e., the fellows who got us into this mess can’t figure out a way to talk about it in public, other than in the smiley-face banalities of an ever more shopworn cultural relativism.

-- Mark Steyn at The National Review

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I am not familiar with Geert Wilders, but I do believe that tolerance has to be more than a one-way street.

I didn't know Europe was still struggling this hard. It sounds like they are locked in their own version of America's Great Depression from early last century, and it is not clear that that the leaders really do not prefer it - a sort of peon-izing of the common population.

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On Saturday The Times reported on an apparently growing phenomenon in Europe: “suicide by economic crisis,” people taking their own lives in despair over unemployment and business failure. It was a heartbreaking story. But I’m sure I wasn’t the only reader, especially among economists, wondering if the larger story isn’t so much about individuals as about the apparent determination of European leaders to commit economic suicide for the Continent as a whole.

-- Paul Krugman at The New York Times

Krugman gives me a nice opportunity to capture a good, brief summary on the European situation, which apparently makes America look like we are living in high cotton. Going for a single currency without being a truly unified government looks like a grievous mistake.
_ _ _

The story of postwar Europe is deeply inspiring. Out of the ruins of war, Europeans built a system of peace and democracy, constructing along the way societies that, while imperfect — what society isn’t? — are arguably the most decent in human history.

Yet that achievement is under threat because the European elite, in its arrogance, locked the Continent into a monetary system that recreated the rigidities of the gold standard, and — like the gold standard in the 1930s — has turned into a deadly trap.

Now maybe European leaders will come up with a truly credible rescue plan. I hope so, but I don’t expect it.

The bitter truth is that it’s looking more and more as if the euro system is doomed. And the even more bitter truth is that given the way that system has been performing, Europe might be better off if it collapses sooner rather than later.

-- Paul Krugman at The New York Times

LONDON — On one level Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian responsible for the biggest massacre by a single gunman in modern times, is just a particularly murderous psychotic loner: the 32-year-old mama’s boy with no contact with his father, obsessed by video games (Dragon Age II) as he preens himself (“There was a relatively hot girl on [sic] the restaurant today checking me out”) and dedicates his time in asexual isolation to the cultivation of hatred and the assembly of a bomb from crushed aspirin and fertilizer.

-- Roger Cohen for The New York Times


Mr. Cohen goes on to argue that such an assessment does not do justice to the case, taking the view that the heated culture of intolerance of right-wing parties, in Europe and and in America, help to lead wayward souls such as Breikvik to commit ghastly crimes and mass murder, with Breivik counting for upward of a hundred dead bodies.

Though, I think it is understood that violent rhetoric is generally not part of any mainstream poitical parties in Europe (while America is a little rougher), and Europe does have serious problems, as all the advanced Western nations seem to have, with assimilating Muslims into their culture. And it is hard to discount the lunacy factor of someone who likes to pose himself thus:



He apparently sees himself as a sort of super-hero. I marvel that he could refrain from donning a cape.

Breivik is a mass murderer and is someone for whom I can see the validity of the death penalty, especially since there can be no mistaking his guilt, but that doesn't change the issue hanging in the air: do Muslims want to be part of Western society, or do they want to convert Western society to Islamic ways?

I don't follow the news as closely as one might think, but it seems to me that we haven't seen a lot of jihadic violence in the West lately, and that Breivik has succeeded more fully in murder and mayhem. One can wonder if we have more to worry about from our right-wingers than from jihadists.

But the situation is fluid. For now, it seems that decent society is getting attacked from both Islamists and Christianists.

( The remainder of Cohen's column )

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In recent days, Western leaders have watched with growing alarm as Serbia’s hard-line prime minister, Vojislav Kostunica, who helped lead the revolution that overthrew Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, has replicated the nationalist talk of the late dictator, who used Serbs’ outrage that their ancestral heartland was dominated by Muslim Albanians to come to power in Serbia.

“As long as we live, Kosovo is Serbia,” Mr. Kostunica told the crowd in Belgrade. “We’re not alone in our fight. President Putin is with us,” he said of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

-- BOSTJAN VIDEMSEK and DAN BILEFSKY for The New York Times

In other big news this week, the American embassy in Belgrade was set on fire by Serbians in protest of our backiing of Kosovo's newly declared independence. The article suggests that this may be more about hard-right huffing and puffing than a true crisis, as moderate and younger Serbians are more interested in becoming part of the European Union rather than the status of Kosovo.

No less critically, it is also suggested that the Russians are not likely to step in big to squash Kosovo independence, but there may be more reason to worry. Recently, the Russians made a splash in the news when their fighter pilots buzzed our military ships. It was argued that the petro-dollar rich Russians under Putin are interested in showing off their status and power. Might they not choose the Kosovo issue as an opportunity to show up the Americans, as we are a bit over-extended to take on a full military challenge.

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Christopher Hitchens on some Kosovo hisotry

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♠
Roger Cohen gives us an uplifting overview of the transformation of East European communism with the fall of the Berlin Wall and how good can still wondrously happens in the world.

I think he throws in an Obama plug at the end, speaking of the desire for another great leader to marshal in another wave of liberating idealism and progress, but if this is in respect to the conflict with Islamism, I am afraid that would require more of the hawkishness of J.F.K. to brace the idealism of J.F.K.. McCain comes more to mind.

In any case, it's a good story.

( Cohen )

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