PC Amok: The "N-Word"

Just to show how off the rails some people can get, see this story:

The leader of the nonprofit arm of the Human Rights Campaign (the HRC Foundation) has resigned after an investigation found she’d used the n-word twice.

Mary Beth Maxwell, who is white, previously worked for Barack Obama’s administration.

Maxwell was exposed in an email sent to staff by HRC President Chad Griffin which was obtained by Politico.

The email said an investigation was launched after an employee had complained about Maxwell’s use of the term.

No, Maxwell didn't use the word as an insult to anyone; she was relating a couple of incidents in which the word was used.

The President of HRC also wrote that Maxwell did not use the term with intent to insult someone else at HRC, and said that in the first incident she “recounted an upsetting personal story in which the term was used.”

“In the second instance she repeated the word in describing an external situation that they found horrifying, in which racial and homophobic slurs were used,’ Griffin wrote.

What kicks the whole thing up into the realm of face palm is this:

“I share this context because the lesson learned here is that not having bad intent in using the word does not make it acceptable,” Griffin added. “I want to be clear: intent does not matter. It is the impact of the word that matters.”

In other words, Big Brother is watching you.

Let me point out that, Griffin's comment notwithstanding, intent is everything. When it gets to the point where you can't even quote someone else's use of a particular word for fear of offending someone, then we're headed down a steep, nasty slope. This is really nothing more than a few snowflakes setting themselves up as thought police.

The irony here is that this is the position of an organization that regularly uses the word "queer". From HRC's website: "The Human Rights Campaign is America's largest civil rights organization working to achieve lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer equality." Some of us remember when being called "queer" was an insult.

I had hopes when Griffin became head of HRC that he would whip the organization into line -- historically, it's one of the least effective civil rights groups ever. Instead, it looks like HRC has whipped Griffin into submission.

More PC Horsepucky (Updated)

(Note: the updates are additional comments that occurred to me on rereading this piece, as part of the text.)

My reaction to this story is to make a point of seeing any film that has Armie Hammer in the cast:

Hollywood star Armie Hammer has deactivated his Twitter account following a shade-filled thinkpiece that questioned his entire career.

While generating Oscar hype about his new film, gay romantic drama Call Me By Your Name, Hammer hit back against the negative article. . . .

The actor was responding to an essay on BuzzFeed, titled Ten Long Years of Trying to Make Armie Hammer Happen.

The article’s author, Anne Peterson, challenged Hammer’s career as “a beautiful, pedigreed white man” which afforded him opportunities to safely fail and bounce back.

This, I think, tells you all you need to know about the article:

But Hollywood would never give up on a guy that handsome, that tall, that white, with a jaw that square.

It's a hit piece, no more, no less, that goes to all sorts of places that have nothing to do with Hammer as an actor. The author really seems to resent the fact that Hammer comes from money (his grandfather was oil tycoon Armand Hammer) and keeps coming back to it, making the point over and over again that he's a "rich asshole," in spite of all the comments from people who actually know him that he's not.

Apparently, from some of the comments, it's intended to be a piece about white male power and privilege in Hollywood. What it is is a mean-spirited attack on one man. Frankly, if you want to do a piece on white male power and privilege in Hollywood, do a piece on white male power and privilege in Hollywood. It's not that hard to figure out. (The author, by the way, has a Ph.D. from the University of Texas and wrote her dissertation on the gossip industry. Maybe that explains why the "think piece" is so shallow.)

I've only seen Man From U.N.C.L.E., of Hammer's previous work, and he was more than adequate as Ilya Kuriakin. Not brilliant, maybe, but good. To blame the movie's failure on casting Hammer and Henry Cavill (whom she characterizes as "a junior-varsity Tom Cruise") as the leads, rather than a script that simply wasn't up to snuff, seems to be a case of bending reality to suit one's agenda. (Cavill, by the way, has a history in film and television going back to the beginning of the millennium.)

Footnote: This is exactly the kind of response I'd expect from someone defending the article:

Trans.: It's about me! It's always about ME ME ME!

And of course, given the tenor of this piece (thesis: "White straight man bad"), I would guess that if the author did write a piece on an actor or actress of color, the subject would need no defending.

Ironically enough, someone made the point just before this tweet appears in the article that Hammer has devoted a lot of energy to supporting black and gay filmmakers.

Footnote 2: Inevitably, director Luis Guadagnino is asked to justify not casting gay actors. It's a criticism leveled at everyone who does a gay-oriented story using straight actors, from those who don't seem to see the logical conclusion: if sexual orientation is a requirement for acting a particular role, then no gay actors should ever be cast as straight characters, right? (And of course, the point is, they're actors: they make their living making us believe they're someone else.)

OK -- that's all the political correctness I can handle right now.

A$$holes du Jour

Fox News, of course.

A Fox News anchor hosted a segment with a Tea Party leader and claimed U.S. Olympic gold medal winner Gabby Douglas and others aren’t showing enough patriotism because their uniforms aren’t covered in stars and stripes.

And of course, we all know that Olympic competitors all design their own uniforms. Always.

This puts me in mind of a post from Pam Spaulding a couple of days ago.

Poor Gabby Douglas. She is rightfully celebrating the fact that she set a historical precedent of Olympic athletic achievement as a woman of color — the first black woman to take the all-around individual title in gymnastics. But in the wake of her win, she is mocked by members of her own community on social media about her hairstyle and its upkeep. So unreal. And not surprising. As I’ve blogged before, kinky natural hair is political.

So we've got racism on the right (no surprise there) and authoritarian identity politics on the left (no surprise there, either).

So here we have a sixteen-year-old girl who has just set a historical precedent as the first black woman to take an all-around gold medal in gymnastics, and all these losers can do, when they should be celebrating, is carp over bullshit details.

These should all be today's "Disgusting People,", but somehow that title seemed more appropriate.

Grace and Humor

Two qualities that are in increasingly short supply. And rest assured, I'm finding it on the left as much as on the right. Two items I ran across recently really bring it home.

Found this at C&L:

After a member station launched an incredibly insensitive radio promotion designed to tweak Mayor Michael Coleman of Columbus, Ohio for joining the national boycott of Arizona over its new anti-immigrant law, Clear Channel found itself in the center of a national controversy and the target of the ire of Latino communities across America.

Here's a transcript of the promo:

It all started when Coleman made the decision to ban city employees from visiting Arizona on official business. He joins other cities and counties in making his decision to protest Arizona’s new law, SB 1070, which essentially sanctions racial profiling.

WTVN-AM’s response? “WTVN would like to send you where Americans are proud and illegals are scared—sunny Phoenix, Arizona! You’ll spend a weekend chasing aliens and spending cash in the desert. Just make sure you have your green card!”

NCLR President and CEO Janet Murguía was not amused.

I wonder if she's amused by anything. I read the text as a dig at Arizona -- there's a fairly high snark level there.

This is, if anything, even more egregious. It's about that McDonald's commercial from France that I linked to the other day. Here it is again:



The comment:

My initial reaction was: "Huh, doesn't really seem very 'come as you are' what with the dad situation. WTF?". Rather seems like a fail on the whole theme there, McDonald's (which is why I put it in the Assvertising series). I thought it might be really positive but it just...wasn't.

I've left a couple of comments in the thread to the effect that the ad comes up just the opposite of the way a lot of commenters are interpreting it -- there are a couple railing about "reinforcing heteronormativity," which I take as a total misread. Some of them left me speechless.

There may be more on this later -- right now, the clock is demanding that I get up and move.

Old News, Same Response

I tend to get a little more than fed up with the politically correct left from time to time, particularly when their comments reveal that they obviously don't get it. I just ran across this article at Pink News, a reaction to the reaction to that atrocious article about Stephen Gately's death by that homophobic bitch Jan Moir, which I commented on as part of this post.

This one is by someone named Adrian Tippets, and he is sooo lost.

But silencing viewpoints is more likely to breed homophobia than end it. How, other than by debate, does one challenge prejudice? When we deny the freedom to speak each time we hear something we don’t like, as Thomas Paine reminds us, everyone becomes a slave to their own opinions.

Freedom of speech is not just about the right to speak your mind. It is also the right to listen, to have opinions of all sides exposed to scrutiny. It has no value without the freedom to think differently. Moir gives expression to doubts that are lingering in the back of many people’s minds. For all we know, there may even be a grain of truth, somewhere among her bizarre utterances.

Can we see the obvious? No one "silenced" Jan Moir. She not only had her piece published in a newspaper with a circulation of some 2 million, she did a follow-up piece in which she played the victim card, as well as dodging the issue:

The point of my column – which I wonder how many of the people complaining have fully read – was to suggest that, in my honest opinion, his death raises many unanswered questions.

That's a flat lie. The point of her column was to cast aspersions on Stephen Gately and demean gay men as a group. I don't see any other possible interpretation. The "unanswered questions" are in her own head (and I shudder to think what it must be like in there). If she maintains that 33-year-old men don't just drop dead, well, she's wrong. I happen to have known someone of about that age who died of exactly the same causes. In his case it took longer, but it was beyond anything the doctors could do -- they simply could not drain his lungs fast enough. If he hadn't been in the hospital, he would have gone much more quickly. As for "intimacy with a stranger," that's certainly none of her business, and bringing it up is nothing more than a naked attempt to buy into the "unhealthy lifestyle" mantra so beloved of the professional homophobes. If open relationships or three-ways give her the willies, she shouldn't participate in them.

Now Tippets is trying to justify her, as you can see from the quote above. And if you read his commentary, it becomes painfully obvious that he has no idea what he's talking about. It's straw man followed by red herring followed by logical disconnects that don't even have names yet, used to argue positions that have nothing to do with this story at all.

Let me state it clearly: Jan Moir stated her opinion on something that was really none of her business to begin with. She did so offensively and quite obviously to damage as many people as possible with her insinuations. Now, of course, she can't deal with the criticism (have you noticed how that works) and is squawking about freedom of speech. And here's some airhead who, presumably, is to the left of Attila the Hun, trying to defend her from the legitimate consequences of that "free speech."

Got news for you Adrian, and Jan Moir as well -- nothing's free in this world. And whatever you do or say is going to come back and bite you in the ass.

Obama Follow-Up

A follow-up on the Obama/McClurkin controversy from Think On These Things, a pro-Obama site. It seems like a reasonable post, in the same way that the "moderate" left wing is "reasonable" -- which is simply to say that the conclusion is, predictably, "Why can't we all sit down and talk?"

One of the commenters gets it right:

Still, I’m unconvinced and unmoved by your attempted parallel. You cannot pray the gay away. There is nothing for me to say (and no way to “dialog”) with an “ex-gay” Preacher convinced he has all the answers and that I’m sinful and God abhors my “lifestyle” and I need to change something that’s as basic as my eye color in order to avoid eternal damnation. Were it a political position, we would have some room for discussion, but it is a religious doctrine, not subject to facts, science or reason.

I have no place at their table, and never will. They are not people I can compromise with.

The left has compromised itself almost out of existence. We see the results of this kind of compromise in the workings of Congress -- take the confirmation of Leslie Southwick as an example, and the fate of the FISA bill, still TBD -- as well as the general tone of discourse in this country. And yet the moderates keep coming back and saying "Do it to me again."

As for Obama and McClurkin -- there isn't a gospel singer in the country who is pro-gay, or at least neutral? You have to find someone who is preaching a message based on ignorance and prejudice, and then come up with a white preacher to preach tolerance to black people? Excuse me?

On this kind of stage, everything you do has a message -- that's a part of contemporary public discourse that tends to be overshadowed by the specifics, but there's no getting around it. That may be good or not (I tend toward not, but I'm not making up the rules), but it's there.

Let me lay it out very simply: by choosing McClurkin for this tour, Obama has offended the gay community. That's built-in. You can say the gay community is being over-sensitive, but you can't tell me that there were no alternatives. Now, by choosing a white minister to counter McClurkin, Obama has reinforced the anti-gay prejudice in the black community by giving the message that gay is a white man's disease. Again, there were alternatives. You can sit there and try to justify this all over the place and keep moaning that we need to sit down and talk, but until you can tell me how to talk to people who unilaterally declared war on me and who dont' recognize my right to exist, pardon me if I have reservations.

The question is, why should I continue to be reasonable? I'm not being met with reason, I'm being met with lies and distortions. Being reasonable is only a recipe for defeat, and this fight is too important.

So pardon me if I'm prepared to come out swinging.

(Via Andrew Sullivan, who calls it "a sane post." Kee-rist!)

ENDA and Alphabet Soup

A series of thoughtful and interesting posts from AmericaBlog on the ENDA crisis. First is this post from John Aravosis of a couple of days ago, followed by a link to this editorial from Bay Windows.

The House is on the verge of passing groundbreaking workplace protections for millions of Americans. It’s the first piece of legislation Congress has seriously considered since the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) was passed in 1993 that offers American workers protection from arbitrary firings. It’s not perfect. Few pieces of civil rights legislation are. But it would provide a concrete base upon which to expand ENDA protections not just to transmen and women but to also add provisions to the bill that would require employers to offer domestic partnership benefits to the partners of their LGBT employees if they offer such benefits to their heterosexual employees — a provision that is not in the current bill. As it happens, that’s exactly how Congress dealt with the FMLA. It was a nine-year fight of submitting bills, amending them and persevering through two vetoes of the bill by President George H.W. Bush. The bill that was eventually signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1993 was much more comprehensive than the one first approved by Congress. This is not unusual; it’s how the legislative process works.

There is much concern that if a bill protecting employees solely on the basis of sexual orientation is passed then protections for transmen and women will be forgotten. It’s hard to take that concern seriously given the flurry of support that’s been forcefully expressed for trans rights now that we know a trans-inclusive ENDA simply will not pass in the House as its currently configured.

Claiming that Frank has betrayed the trans community, as some are now doing (Los Angeles Times sportswriter Christine Daniels wrote this week that he was engaged in a strategy to “throw the transfolk overboard”) is breathtakingly ignorant of the facts.

The targeting of the Human Rights Campaign for its failure to align itself with the LGBT organizations that have promised to work to defeat a non-inclusive ENDA is equally ignorant of reality. Who can seriously expect the nation’s largest organization working to pass legislation on our behalf to refuse to work with Pelosi and Frank?

This petulant insistence on purity, principle and perfection is a hallmark not just of the LGBT community, but of American politics in general. Just look at James Dobson’s and the Christian right’s demands that the Republican Congress take up an overly broad Federal Marriage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution when a much narrower provision that would have allowed for civil unions stood a much better chance of passage.

Not that I’m comparing progressive LGBT activists with the Christian right. After all, the Christian right is capable of delivering votes, huge sums of money to candidates and hundreds of thousands of phone calls to lawmakers when an issue is deemed important enough to warrant it. Progressive activists? Not so much.


He also publishes a response to his posts from Dana Beyer, a trans activist currently nominated for the board of HRC. Beyer's comments strike me as terrifically slanted and one-sided (the comment about Stonewall being "run by trans women" is only the most egregious example, although the assertion that "gays guys were added to the trans community" with Stonewall is a very close runner-up, particularly since there was no "trans commnity" at the time), and a prime example of the insistence on ideological purity that has effectively neutered the gay left. (I'm not going to comment on the anger in her post. I figure that transpeople are carrying a lot of the same load as gays, and anger is just part of the package. Hell, I'm very angry. I figure I have every right to be.)

Beyer also spends a fair amount of her response claiming that "mainstream" gays are afraid of the gender nonconformity represented by the trans community without once touching on the fact that it is those organizations who are now demanding the full monty on ENDA that repeatedly call for us to tone it down at Pride parades and the like -- the same organizations who are now on the side of the angels in refusing to support the first gay rights bill that might pass Congress. Forgive me if I smell more than a faint whiff of hypocrisy. Sorry, boys and girls, but you're not going to have it both ways here: to say that expressing gender nonconformity is desirable when it is going to kill our chances for federal civil rights legislation but not OK when we're celebrating the range and diversity of our various interlocking communities is one big load of manure. In my opinion, Beyer's full of beans on this one, and she should look to her political allies if she wants to pinpoint whose responsible for this.

A Note: Questioning gender norms has always been part of the gay experience, and it's a very complex historical phenomenon. As a young gay boy growing up before there was such a thing, I had no gay role models. I liked boys; therefore, my only model was women. Fortunately for me, the gay movement started to happen before I'd gotten completely screwed up, and I was able to reconcile being male with wanting males. (Let's hear it for the Information Age!) Also, as I've mentioned before, I count a large number of drag queens, female impersonators, transvestites and even a few transpersons among my friends and acquaintances, and they are not coming from the same place and don't, I think, belong in the same categories. Gender-fuck is one thing; transsexualism is something else entirely, and I seriously question the legitimacy of equating them. This is something that's implicit in a recent post by Chris Crain, where he talks about transgenders and their legal weddings: the point is, transsexuals are not interested in redefining gender, they are interested in moving from one to the other and seem to be quite willing to take on all the definitions of their new identity. Consequently, my attitude toward the conflation of transsexuals and gays is simply that it's a dodge and doesn't indicate anything except a political alliance.

Pam Spaulding has contributed a post discussing the discourse more than the nuts and bolts of strategy, and I think he makes some good points, underscored by Beyer's response and some of the I comments I received in my own posts on this subject: to repeat myself as a foundational statement, "sloppy definitions make sloppy arguments." Nor does backdating terminology convince me of anything -- you simply cannot go back to 1968 and talk about the "gay community" or the "trans community" -- those things didn't exist then, and it's questionable whether we can legitimately point to them as existing now.

One further thing that I think is very relevant to Aravosis' comments on the discourse, and that I think is patently obvious in Beyer's comments and the comments on my own previous posts is the incredible defensiveness of the trans responses, expressed in the finger-pointing that forms such a strong part of their comments. I take this as, in part, a reflection of the PC authoritarianism that forms the foundation of gay left politics, and perhaps also informed by the sneaking suspicion that Barney Frank, John Aravosis, Chris Crain and I are right. Pragmatism and the far left are pretty much strangers, in my experience, and I'm of an age at this point that I would like to see some results, not just more posturing.

Chris Crain also makes a strong point about the "gay leadership" in this issue: they are not in any way representing the community, despite their claims to the contrary. My own reaction to the groups who are demanding all or nothing is that they've once again sold me out. I really wish I were a major donor so I could call Matt Foreman and simply say, "No more money from me."

This is obviously an ongoing issue, so there may be more on it later. What you see here, however, is my thinking as of now.

All, or Nothing At All?

(Updated and smoothed out from this morning's initial post.)

The big fight over ENDA -- within the community, at least -- is whether to go for passage of a bill that focuses on sexual orientation or go for defeat of a bill that includes gender identity and expression. John Aravosis has a couple of posts on the debate, the first including Barney Frank's statement on the possibilities, and the second outlining the options. I happen to agree with Frank and Aravosis on this one -- get what we can and build from that. (And please, let's give the Democrats a chance to pass something.)

Pam Spaulding seems to be touting the other side in this argument, and there are some holes in her post:

The one thing we have on our side in the battle for a trans-inclusive ENDA is the fact that corporations have already dealt with this -- and it was clearly in evidence at this conference, where the large vendor hall featured a ton of Fortune 500 companies in just about every sector you could imagine - defense contractors (Raytheon, Boeing), banking and finance (Capital One, ING, Wachovia, HSBC, Merril Lynch, Wells Fargo), retail (Best Buy, Target, JC Penney, McDonalds), Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, Toyota, Motorola, Sun, the list goes on and on. For most of them, LGBT anti-discrimination policies are a no-brainer, a done deal -- it's good for business, recruitment and retention, and a source of pride. That level of inclusion and commitment to equality makes this internal debate and debacle on the Hill about stripping down ENDA look petty -- and cowardly.

That's just the least little bit slanted. Yes, corporations are in the forefront on this -- and this is news exactly how? We're dealing with the government here, a/k/a the last bastion of the derriere garde, and I think Frank has a lot deeper understanding of the way it can work to best advantage. His statement makes a lot more sense to me than Joe Solmonese's (quoted in Spaulding's post): Solmonese seems to be getting ready for a major pout and I have no patience to spare for that. That is too much the tone of most of the statements I've heard on ENDA from the left wing of the community. It's just counterproductive and fairly immature and isn't getting us anywhere. Sure, it's quite noble to stick to your principles, but let's get real, just a little bit: the reaction to transgendered persons is not the same as to gay persons and the education process, without which nothing, is not at the same place.

Spaulding has an earlier post in which she attempts to analyze the strategies, but her focus is on HRC and the major gay and trans rights groups. I think she's also badly misreading the likely results in this Congress:

The latter point brings me to a thought that immediately came to mind when I heard trans inclusion was in jeopardy. The concern of Pelosi and others that there would be a "bruising" debate on ENDA that focused on the "T" seems like a red herring. Of course it will be bruising. No matter when this came up for debate, the usual suspects -- the professional anti-LGBT forces -- would blast disinformation and bigotry non-stop. There would be high volume bleating and hysteria based on "she-males," transvestism, drag queens, bathroom paranoia, etc.

Quite frankly, I feel like this needs to come out in debate on the House floor, and better that it does under the mantle of the Bush Administration and the legacy of a Republican run Congress, which has done everything to foment anti-LGBT sentiment for years. They should own this. The Democrats don't have the juice to undo years of this BS in the short time that they have been in power.

ENDA will fail, no matter its configuration because George Bush and allies on the Hill have shamelessly obtained their power by cultivating political support on a base of fear, hate and ignorance. The bill might as well fail now, and hold up its defeat as the first step in reviving a commitment to unite, not divide, and to move the civil rights bar forward.

As for the Republicans "owning" the defeat of ENDA, they already do, and it has done them no damage whatsoever. Having the whole bill go down because of a debate on the transgender part of it is a recipe for disaster for just the reasons that Frank outlines. (It also seems to be the mode that HRC has developed over the past twelve years: pull defeat out of the jaws of victory.) First, the debate on the House floor will happen on the Republicans' terms, because that is the pattern of the past twelve years and it hasn't been broken yet. We have absolutely no reason to believe that ENDA will be the bill to break it because, to be very honest, gay rights for most people is trailing sadly behind the war, the economy, and immigration. And, if that debate happens the Democrats are not going to tar and feather the Republicans with it because a significant number of Democrats will be joining the anti-bill forces because it includes transgenders, to whom they are not personally sympathetic and which they are going to have a lot more trouble justifying to their constituents. Basically, HRC, Spaulding and the others on that side of the issue are demanding that the Democrats set up a no-win situation for themselves, without reference to the reality of what can be done -- I guess because it's somehow ballsy.

I'd rather get ENDA passed without the transgender inclusion so we at least have something to build on. What the national rights groups seem to be supporting is an "I'll take my ball and go home" strategy. Nadine Smith has a post on this at Bilerico Project that I found highly instructive. I don't agree with her, although her historical parallels are powerful -- I'm just not sure if they're really parallel. Solid cases can be made for inclusion of sexual orientation and, in the case of the Americans with Disabilities Act, of HIV+ status in nondiscrimination laws on the basis of science and a history of increasing understanding. I think, if you stop to realize it, that gays and people with HIV are innately more sympathetic to most people simply because they are better known -- transgenders are new and strange and scary, while gay people live down the street and HIV patients are suffering from a virus. Transgenders are not the same. They are gays were a generation or two ago in terms of understanding, and the neanderthal right would, indeed, make heavy capital out of their inclusion -- their strategy rests on a very solid foundation of fear. (Actually, Smith makes a couple of statements I find ludicrous -- the remark about "This is not the time to do the bigots' work for them" is senseless -- if we were doing that, we'd just kill ENDA, which is what the transgender inclusionists want to do if they can't have their way. 'Scuse me -- just who is doing the bigots' work for them?) It's all very passionate and stirring, and I'm sure it goes down easy -- if you're a college sophomore.

Standing up for principle is laudable. When you stand up for your principles at the expense of those who are really suffering, then I start to find it not so laudable -- in fact, I find it somewhat self-absorbed and immature. (Yes, I know that transgenders are truly disadvantaged in this country, but look at it this way: because of the Black civil rights movement and the women's movement, the gay movement has had a much easier time of it. Get it?) This is democracy at work -- no one gets everything they want, not right off the bat.

After thirty years, I'd like to get something through Congress.

(PS -- I may come back to this later today -- it's a huge controversy -- although not all that substantial, really -- and I'm still catching up on it.)

Update:

Chris Crain reports on a WaPo editorial that really lays out my own position quite nicely:

It requires time and patience to educate the public and lawmakers about how prejudice harms some people. That's what gays and lesbians have been doing in their quest for equality for nearly 40 years.

And that's what transgender people will have to do. Delaying passage of ENDA, which was first introduced in the House in the mid-1970s by Rep. Bella Abzug (D-N.Y.), until the transgender community changes enough hearts and minds would be a mistake.

Read this post from Crain as well. Strikes me as right on the money.

Hats Off to Beyerstein

Excellent post by Lindsay Beyerstein at This Modern World on the debate around the Virginia Tech shooting -- and our public debates on crises in general. A must read.

Apology My Foot

I have seen way too many calls for Pace to apologize for his completely out-of-line remarks about gays in the military. What is this crap? He's demonstrated that he has no respect for Marine regulations, has damaged troop morale, has endangered currently serving personnel, and has cast doubts on his fitness to command.

He should resign.

Brooks on Clinton

I never thought I'd find myself agreeing with David Brooks, and certainly not about Hillary Clinton. However,

Far be it from me to get in the middle of a liberal purge, but would anybody mind if I pointed out that the calls for Hillary Clinton to apologize for her support of the Iraq war are almost entirely bogus?

I mean, have the people calling for her apology actually read the speeches she delivered before the war? Have they read her remarks during the war resolution debate, when she specifically rejected a pre-emptive, unilateral attack on Saddam? Did they read the passages in which she called for a longer U.N. inspections regime and declared, “I believe international support and legitimacy are crucial”?

If they went back and read what Senator Clinton was saying before the war, they’d be surprised, as I was, by her approach....

If they went back and read what Senator Clinton was saying before the war, they’d be surprised, as I was, by her approach. And they’d learn something, as I did, about what kind of president she would make.

The Iraq war debate began in earnest in September 2002. At that point Clinton was saying in public what Colin Powell was saying in private: emphasizing the need to work through the U.N. and build a broad coalition to enforce inspections.

She delivered her Senate resolution speech on Oct. 10. It was Clintonian in character. On the one hand, she rejected the Bush policy of pre-emptive war. On the other hand, she also rejected the view that the international community “should only resort to force if and when the United Nations Security Council approves it.” Drawing on the lessons of Bosnia, she said sometimes the world had to act, even if the big powers couldn’t agree.

She sought a third way: more U.N. resolutions, more inspections, more diplomacy, with the threat of force reserved as a last resort. She was triangulating, but the Senate resolution offered her a binary choice. She voted yes in order to give Powell bipartisan leverage at the U.N.

The column, of course, is on Times Select. Here's a link, for those of you who subscribe. I'm taking this from John Aravosis' post at AmericaBlog.

I don't agree with Aravavosis' reservations about Clinton. I have other reservations, but "genuineness" is not one of them. I don't think there's a candidate at this point, on either side of the aisle, who is genuine. (That includes Obama.) Not being an either/or person myself, I have absolutely no problem with someone who's willing to look for a third way.

I also am fed up with public figures -- or anyone else -- having to apologize for everything they say or do. It's one thing when you're deliberately hateful, like the Dobson Gang (who are certainly not going to apologize for anything they say), but for making the best decision you can based on what you know at the time? Nope. You can shove that idea right up your PC butt.

Snickers

Oh, for the love of Pete! Can we get a grip, please? The commercial as aired was faintly funny and satirical. Even the alternative endings can be read that way, although they're a bit on the edge. They can all very easily be interpreted as a slap against homophobia. So will all those activists with knots in their panties please run right out to (pick one: Neiman-Marcus, Sears, WalMart) and pick up a sense of proportion?

WTF?

Every damned thing is news.

Cultural Exchange

Chris in Paris at AmericaBlog asks an interesting question:

Also, is this just another rich foreigner (or foreign government or NGO) who wants to do it their way instead of working with the local community to build a solution that is more integrated with local communities?

Oh, me. The lessons of history, etcetera etcetera. Oprah's approach, in the final analysis, smacks very much of a slightly more subtle brand of the cultural imperialism of the nineteenth century (and earlier, in the case of the Spanish in America), which was really nothing more than the deliberate destruction of native cultures. While I have some sympathy for the idea that in certain areas, some cultures could benefit by changes, to be really hard-nosed about it, what gives us the right to demand or instigate those changes? Our superior morality? Excuse me?

That seems to be the quandary of the PC left, except that area of the political spectrum is not marked by particularly rigorous thought so I doubt they ever notice that little problem.

It's obvious from the results of past "interventions" in native cultures that the problems will eventually pass far beyond those peoples into the larger world, and it's not always the results of deliberate cultural destruction. Look at the use in the tropics of farming methods developed in Europe and North America: total disaster. Look at the repeated attempts to impose "democracy" on nations with no traditions that feed into that particular concept, or feed into it in a way that doesn't fit our model. Sure, the Euro-American model works fine in Europe and America, and even places like India, Japan, and most of South America (finally). But other places, with stronger cultural traditions of their own, are prey to perversions of the model that cause us to recoil in horror -- such as Iraq before the invasion.

To be really dispassionate about it, we should just let cultures develop on their own, but that's a) impossible in this world, and b) we probably don't want to have to deal with the results in some cases.

So, I think in most cases my vote comes down on the side of working with native cultures to develop solutions to problems that fit their traditions and will lead to a more stable result, mostly because it you just butt in and start making changes to fit your world view without having a clear idea of what you're replacing, you're just making a mess. That said, Oprah's school seems like a good compromise, if you want to take responsibility for mucking around with someone else's culture.

Footnote: this post by poputonian at Digby's Hullbaloo gives a native take on European encroachment in North America. I should point out that cultural disruptions do not belong purely to Europeans and Americans, nor the the recipients of this bounty always non-White. There is ample demonstration in the history of the world that it's a bedrock phenomenon, whether the means is conquest, gradual "infiltration" due to migration or other causes, or trade, and happens no matter the color or ethnicity of the perpetrators. One can see a reflection of it in the development of languages -- think about things like loan words, or even the development of a language such as English, with its Germanic roots and Romance overlays, and even the deliberate piracy of the modern version. (In this light, it's no mistake that the Jesuit missionaries who ran the mission schools on North American Indian reservations forbade children to use their native tongues.)

FTLOP

This is getting a little out of hand:

During a backstage interview Monday at the Globes gala, [Isaiah] Washington denied involvement in a heated on-set incident in October during which an anti-gay remark was reportedly uttered.

"No, I did not call (co-star) T.R. (Knight) a faggot," Washington told reporters. "Never happened, never happened."

In his apology Thursday, Washington acknowledged "repeating the word Monday night."

OFTLOP

Knight, who said soon after the October fracas that he is gay, appeared in Tuesday's taping of "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" to discuss the original incident and Washington's recent comments.

"He referred to me as a faggot," Knight said of the October incident. "Everyone heard it."

So when does Knight come out with his apology?

Kill Muslim Children

Atrios directed me to this piece by Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon, which is a diatribe against Captain Ed for this piece about some of the fallout from this piece, originally at IMAO (whatever that is) and reposted at Right Wing Howler (which has since been shut down after a complaint by CAIR). Atrios' comment was unthinking, at best, and I expect better from him.

OK -- there's something about pots and kettles here.

The original piece is funny, in the best tradition of The Onion. (Well, maybe not the best -- The Onion's best pieces tend to be their really short ones, but this is certainly in the running.) Right Wing Howler reran it and lost their hosting after CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) complained about "hate sites." Now, CAIR is an advocacy group -- what politicians like to call "special interests" when they're referring to someone else's advocacy groups. Of course they don't want Muslims or Arabs to be the subject of satire. (F course, if you read the piece, it's obviously satire, Muslims are obviously not the target, and everyone -- CAIR, Marcotte, and Atrios -- completely missed the point.) Captain Ed's commentary seems perfectly reasonable to me, and on that basis I found Marcotte's diatribe very instructive. (I've only just started reading Captain's Quarters, and I don't agree with him on everything -- surprise! -- but he seems to be not only rational, but in fairly good contact with reality, unlike our friends at GayPatriot.)

To say that I didn't find Marcotte persuasive is sadly understating the case. "Brainless" works. Why on earth would anyone attack a commentator for referring to Jonathan Swift, with the main theme, apparently, that "how dare he do that when he obviously doesn't understand Swift," when he quite obviously does understand the application of Swift's "A Modest Proposal" in this case? The only thing I saw in Marcotte's post is that she is having a PC moment and is desperately trying to find a justification for it -- and failing miserably.

In fact, after reading her post a couple of times, I'm still not sure what the point is. I'm not sure there is a point -- unless it's to demonstrate that the left can be just as lacking in humor as it claims the right is.

Just another reminder of why I have no patience with the thought police at either end of the spectrum.

Don't take my word for it -- read the stuff yourself. The links are all there. See if you don't think Marcotte's piece is bullshit. It's the sort of thing that gives liberals a bad name.