‘A dangerous belief that everything is relative’

Posted on March 24, 2012 | Leave a comment

Salman Rushdie from Reason in 2005:

The idea of universal rights–the idea of rights that are universal to all people because they correspond to our natures as human beings, not to where we live or what our cultural background is–is an incredibly important one. This belief is being challenged by apostles of cultural relativism who refuse to accept that such rights exist. If you look at those who employ this idea, it turns out to be Robert Mugabe, the leaders of China, the leaders of Singapore, the Taliban, Ayatollah Khomeini. It is a dangerous belief that everything is relative and therefore these people should be allowed to kill because it’s their culture to kill.

I think we live in a bad age for the free speech argument. Many of us have internalized the censorship argument, which is that it is better to shut people up than to let them say things that we don’t like. This is a dangerous slippery slope, because people of good intentions and high principles can see censorship as a way of advancing their cause and not as a terrible mistake. Yet bad ideas don’t cease to exist by not being expressed. They fester and become more powerful.

Read the whole thing.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged ,

Barney Rosset: A free-speech warrior passes away

Posted on February 25, 2012 | Leave a comment

It’s always sad to be introduced to a remarkable life through an obituary. This week, it happened again.

Book publisher Barney Rosset, whose Grove Press pushed the limits of free expression by giving a home to controversial works of literature by the likes of Allen Ginsberg, D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and William Burroughs, died on Tuesday. He was 89.

I had never heard of him until USA TODAY published the extensive, well-written AP obituary, which revealed how important Rosset was to the First Amendment:

Rosset waged a long and costly war on behalf of free expression. When he started Grove, his wish list included two erotic books, both decades old, that had never been distributed unexpurgated in the United States: Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.

In 1954 a copy of Chatterley was mailed from Paris to New York. Officials seized it and charged Rosset with promoting “indecent and lascivious thoughts,” a policy that dated back to obscenity legislation passed in the 1870s. Rosset sued the U.S. Post Office in 1959 and his attorney, Charles Rembar, crafted a defense based on a Supreme Court decision written two years earlier by Justice William Brennan that “all ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance — unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion — have the full protection of the guarantees.”

A federal judge, Frederick van Pelt Bryan, ruled in Rosset’s favor. An appeals court upheld Judge Bryan and the government declined to take the case to the Supreme Court. The Post Office’s ability to declare a work obscene had effectively been ended.

Reason‘s Nick Gillespie also reminds us that beyond his efforts on behalf of free speech, Rosset also broadened America’s literary palate:

If you grew up interested in literature and writing and a world bigger than the one you were immediately born into, you owe a debt to Rossett and people like him …  In a pre-Internet, pre-everything-at-your-fingertips-world, books weren’t just frigates (as Emily Dickinson would have it), they were battleships and aircraft carriers, capable of completely rescuing you from whatever isolated bunker you called home.

Very true. Thanks again, Barney.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged ,

Project Censored loves … Cuba?

Posted on February 22, 2012 | Leave a comment

Does anybody still care about Project Censored?

If you’re unfamiliar with the name, they’re the media watchdogs whose annual list of  the “top 25 censored stories” is a year-end staple of alternative and free-weekly newspapers.

Project Censored started being irrelevant around 2000, as this Mother Jones article makes clear. (A lot of the stories they say are underreported or ignored are anything but, among other offenses.)

PC slipped deeper into irrelevance in 2007 when it embraced 9/11 conspiracy theories. Two of the biggest names on its masthead resigned in protest.

That record is sorry enough to make most right-thinking people write off Project Censored for good, but if you need another one, try this: those indefatigable guardians of press freedom absolutely adore Cuba, a totalitarian society with one of the most oppressive media environments on earth.

The latest example appeared this week on Project Censored’s website. The author, Peter Phillips, recently attended a conference in Havana, and his piece includes you-have-got-to-be-kidding-me lines such as this: “These are multi-generations of people who have never suffered media advertisements.”

Indeed they haven’t. Or “suffered media” of any kind that wasn’t first approved by the government.

Glowing reports about Cuba are pretty standard for Project Censored. Here’s Phillips again in an especially Walter Duranty-espue dispatch, “Cuba Supports Press Freedom”:

I toured the two main radio stations in Havana, Radio Rebelde and Radio Havana. Both have Internet access to multiple global news sources including CNN, Reuters, Associated Press and BBC with several newscasters pulling stories for public broadcast.

It’s good to know that a few dozen members of Cuba’s official state media can access some news sites on the Web.

Unfortunately, they can’t Google anything.

In 2008, the same year Phillips went on his stage-managed tour and posted that report, Reporters Without Borders revealed that “The Internet in Cuba is highly controlled.”:

There is a “national” network which gives users an email address and allows them to send emails abroad but not to surf the net. The “international” network, which costs three times as much, gives access to foreign news websites like the BBC, Le Monde, and Nuevo Herald (Miami-based Spanish-language daily). But if you type in “google.fr”, for example, you are redirected to the pages of the official Cuban newspaper Granma or the news agency Prensa Latina.

Phillips also pays respect to Cuba’s brave, state-controlled journalists and their role as vigilant defenders of La Revolucion:

In the context of this external threat (from the U.S.), Cuban journalists quietly acknowledge that some self-censorship will undoubtedly occur regarding news stories that could be used by the “enemy” against the Cuban people. Nonetheless, Cuban journalists strongly value freedom of the press and there was no evidence of overt restriction or government control.

No government control? Phillips seems to be unaware of  Cuba’s harsh “Black Spring” crackdown on independent media.

During a three-day span in March 2003, as the world focused on the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the Cuban government ordered the abrupt arrest of 75 dissidents–29 of them independent journalists. All of the reporters and editors were convicted in one-day trials and handed sentences that could leave some in prison for the rest of their lives. They were accused of acting against the “integrity and sovereignty of the state” or of collaborating with foreign media for the purpose of “destabilizing the country.” Under Cuban law, that meant any journalist who published abroad, particularly in the United States, had no defense.

Here in the early 21st century, it’s hard to understand the moral and intellectual obtuseness of people like Phillips. But someone like Malcolm Muggeridge, an early supporter of communism whose eyes were opened to the terrible truth after a visit to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, understood them well.

These dupes, Muggeridge wrote, are “resolved, come what might, to believe anything, however preposterous …  to approve anything, however obscurantist and brutally authoritarian, in order to be able to preserve intact the confident expectation that one of the most thorough-going, ruthless and bloody tyrannies ever to exist on earth could be relied on to champion human freedom.”

Would it surprise anyone to learn that Phillips is a sociology professor at a state-funded college in California?

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged ,

‘It is an immense human idea’

Posted on February 8, 2012 | Leave a comment

Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul on the pursuit of happiness:

“So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.”

More wisdom here.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , ,

A Muslim reveals ‘Why the West is Best’

Posted on February 6, 2012 | 1 Comment

To paraphrase a well-known quote, nobody ever went broke denigrating Western civilization. That’s especially true if you’re a product of it and grew up enjoying its benefits.

Among academics and our creative classes, attacking the West’s perceived (and real) faults has been a growth industry for a long time. Because of that, far too many otherwise intelligent people  internalize those criticisms and move through their lives with a millstone of guilt around their necks regarding the society that nurtures them — a society that millions around the world aspire to join.

That’s why it’s so inspiring to discover a non-Westerner passionately defending the West.

City Journal’s review of Ibn Warraq’s Why the West is Best: A Muslim Apostate’s Defense of Liberal Democracy piqued my curiosity, especially these passages:

Warraq also rebuts the charge that the West has been uniquely evil, that its record of slavery, racism, colonialism, and imperialism has made it history’s arch-villain. As Warraq notes, racism and slavery are universal human evils, but “it was the West that first took steps to abolish slavery; that took legal measures to end institutionalized racism; and that voluntarily withdrew from its colonial possessions and abandoned any imperial ambitions.” He dispatches the widespread lie that the West is responsible for the African slave trade. Africans themselves kept slaves and provided the unfortunate people purchased by Europeans. … And Warraq reminds us that Muslim Arabs “engaged in the slave trade for thirteen centuries and shipped far more black slaves across the Sahara and the Red Sea than were sent across the Atlantic” during the four centuries of European slave trading.

As for racism, Warraq quotes a thirteenth-century Persian Muslim’s view that “the ape is more reasonable and more intelligent than the Zanji”—meaning black Africans, still called “slaves” in Arabic today. And anti-Semitism, Warraq writes, “is widespread in the Islamic world, often encouraged by the state” through government-controlled newspapers and other media. …

Finally, no people have been as successful at conquering, occupying, and exploiting territory as Muslims, eradicating the cultures they conquered and impelling their victims to believe, as Warraq puts it, “that their whole prior cultural heritage was worthless.” Compare this imperialistic cultural cleansing with European colonizers, who, for all their exploitation, nonetheless often studied and protected the cultural heritage of the peoples they colonized. Europeans established the formal academic study of these cultures, which even today serves as the basis for learning about them.

Evil didn’t first appear in the charters of Western civilization. It is embedded in the DNA of humanity. Every culture on earth — even the most primitive –  has  engaged in warfare, discrimination, mass murder, slavery and exploitation, but in the modern mind, ours is the only one held responsible for these crimes.

We should thank Warraq for reminding us that Western history, like all history everywhere, was made by flawed flesh-and-blood people, not omnipotent collaborators in a malevolent conspiracy against the world.

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , ,

Johnny Otis, an all-American original

Posted on January 25, 2012 | Leave a comment

With the passing of rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Johnny Otis, who died last week at the age of 90, America lost a musical creator and curator who, in his own way, did as much as Elvis Presley or Chuck Berry to shape the soundtrack of the modern world, as this San Francisco Chronicle appreciation story makes clear:

He discovered Little Richard and songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. He produced their song “Hound Dog” with Big Mama Thornton when Elvis Presley was still at Humes High. He met 14-year-old Etta James backstage at a concert at the long-gone Primalon Ballroom on Fillmore Street and, that very night, whisked her to Los Angeles to make her first record the next day.

Otis’ musical contributions were rich and varied, and his 1994 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was greatly deserved. But perhaps the most remarkable thing about Otis was the brave way he lived his life, and what it says about the endless possibilities in America for self-invention and self-expression — even at a time when racism and segregation obscured those opportunities.

Here’s something a lot of people didn’t know: Johnny Otis was not a black man. He was the child of Greek immigrants, and his real name was Ioannis Alexandres Veliotes. He grew up in a largely black neighborhood in Berkeley, Calif., where he developed his love and affinity for African-American culture.

But Otis didn’t just immerse himself in the all-American culture of black people in this country — he consciously reinvented himself as “black” (or “black by persuasion,” as he called it). His remarkable musical dexterity flowed from that deep well of cultural understanding and allowed him to communicate with all Americans in the national language of the blues, which Ralph Ellison described as “an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances.”

In the wake of his death, some have framed Otis’ remarkable life as an expression of “anti-racism.”  It’s true that he arrived at a deeply segregated time in our history (though that was starting to change), and the arc of his life proved that racial categories are meaningless. It’s also true that the rock ‘n’ roll music he pioneered probably has done more to shatter those categories on a human level than any legislation could.  But mere anti-racism is a much too simplistic evaluation of his importance.

At his core, Otis was an extravagant example of America’s near-limitless freedom to shape your life in any way you choose. He was also a potent symbol of  the  subtly multiracial society that Albert Murray revealed in The Omni-Americans:

“American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite. It is, regardless of all the hysterical protestations of those who would have it otherwise, incontestably mulatto. Indeed, for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences, the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other.”

Greek immigrant child Ioannis Alexandres Veliotes, who became black musical impresario Johnny Otis, helped point America back to its miscegenated heart. For that, we should all be thankful.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , ,

The practical problem with ‘truth vigilantism’

Posted on January 14, 2012 | Leave a comment

New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane’s  blog posts on “truth vigilantism” have certainly generated a lot of discussion.

What is “truth vigilantism”? It’s the theory that reporters for the Times should aggressively fact-check “false” assertions made by politicians or other newsmakers in the course of reporting on them — even, apparently, if the assertion is an opinion, hyperbole or  statements that are difficult to submit to a truth test.

I thought The Wall Street Journal‘s James Taranto had the best response to the dust-up:

Brisbane’s examples make clear that when he poses the question whether the Times should become a “truth vigilante,” what he is asking is whether the entire paper should become an opinion section–whether the Times’s news pages should emulate (editorial columnist Paul) Krugman, albeit perhaps with a somewhat softer tone (“misleading interpretation” instead of “complete fabrication”).

To hear Brisbane tell it, there is a demand for such a transformation. He writes that he gets emails from “readers who, fed up with the distortions and evasions that are common in public life, look to The Times to set the record straight” and who “worry less about reporters imposing their judgment on what is false and what is true.”

If that kind of “judgment” is what they want, they can get it from Krugman and the paper’s other columnists and editorialists. Why do those readers feel something is lacking in the paper if reporters are more restrained about expressing their opinions than opinion writers are?

Exactly right. Those complaining to the Times about this seem to think that ostensibly unbiased reporters, who juggle multiple assignments across various beats, locations and time zones, should act more like hyperfocused partisan bloggers, who live to parse political speech down to the subatomic level. If you think charges of “media bias” are pervasive now, they’d be much more difficult to refute if news organizations adopted this policy.

But bias is the least of the problems with “truth vigilantism.” By far the biggest is this: Few organizations have the time, or the bodies, to do it, especially in today’s downsized, Web-driven newsrooms ruled by a culture of “first and fastest.” As Jack Shafer of Reuters points out:

But to be fair to Brisbane — and I promise not to make this a habit — I think he was asking how fully reporters must tweeze every utterance spoken by newsmakers. Politics teems with gray areas and half-truths. If a reporter were to investigate every assertion of fact — assuming that that’s possible on deadline — the story he was supposed to be working on would dissolve into pixel dust. Infinite skepticism is swell, but it requires infinite fact-checking, and who has time for that?

Holding our leaders accountable is important, but fact-checking must be practical, and it must draw a careful distinction between actual misrepresentations of facts and mere expressions of opinion, no matter how poorly framed or obnoxious they seem.

Thankfully, Jill Abramson, the Times‘ executive editor, seems to get it. She wrote this as an addendum to Brisbane’s second blog post on the matter:

We have to be careful that fact-checking is fair and impartial, and doesn’t veer into tendentiousness. Some voices crying out for “facts” really only want to hear their own version of the facts.

Good point. There are plenty of problems with independent fact-checking organizations like Polifact. It would be a shame if great news organizations like The New York Times start heading in the same direction.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged ,