27 February 2006 @ 11:22AM >> “I’m the luckiest person in the world. I could have ended up in Guantanamo Bay. Instead I ended up at Yale.”

25 February 2006 @ 11:38AM >> Reader Matt Walliser writes:

Evan,

Recent news about iTunes hitting their billionth download made me think a little more about your post a while back about the recording industry not adapting to new mediums. If they’re not careful, they’ll obsolete themselves to Apple’s iTunes. Apple has made it so convenient to get music onto your iPod, that people don’t seem to mind paying a buck for a song. The lawsuits brought forth by the RIAA agianst people who download music can only serve to push people towards iTunes. If Apple creates their own label and plays their cards right, they could have channel dominance from top to bottom. The best part is, it’s being handed to them by the very channel they’re about displace!

While I’d hate for any one company to completely control music distribution, the massive success of iTunes is a wake-up call to an industry that has been hitting the snooze button on every previous wake-up call since the dawn of the Internet era. Maybe this time, the industry will pay attention.

24 February 2006 @ 1:51PM >> Here’s a funny and endearing 15-minute video that has nothing to do with politics but is not at all politically correct: Yellow Fever. Enjoy!

24 February 2006 @ 9:17AM >> Over at TCS Daily, Ed Driscoll takes a look at the state of independent online video and declares that the days of the one-man TV network are “coming soon.”

Ed interviewed me for the piece, and I obligingly supplied him with this rah-rah quote:

Ten years ago, the expense associated with putting together even the most rudimentary online video would have put it out of reach for most people. Even if you had your own camera, you probably didn’t have video editing software or a computer capable of running it. If you did have access to an editing suite, then you probably didn’t have sufficient bandwidth to make the resulting video available online. And even with unlimited bandwidth, the people on the other end — the potential viewers — probably didn’t have enough bandwidth to watch what you made. Today, however, none of those are limiting factors. You can buy a usable consumer-level DV camera for around $500. You can buy a “pro-sumer” DV camera for under $3000. You can even shoot in high-definition HDV for under $5000.

And near-ubiquitous bandwidth availability is also a factor. Although high-speed broadband has been available in most corporations for a few years, broadband is just beginning to penetrate the home market in large numbers. This means that we’re really at the very beginning stages of mass viewing of online videos. We haven’t hit the inflection point yet, but I suspect we’ll see, within a few years, the same massive growth with online video that we saw with the web in the mid-1990s. Eventually, maybe 10 years from now, we’ll have full-screen, full-motion on-demand high-definition video available directly to the home [via the Web]. That’s the ideal video delivery platform, and if we’re still a decade away, it means there’s plenty of room to grow in this market.

My favorite quote from the piece, however, is Driscoll’s closing: “If Dan Rather could host a TV show for 25 years, why not you?”

23 February 2006 @ 9:22PM >> Hopefully, these cartoons won’t get anyone killed. Or these.

23 February 2006 @ 9:17AM >> Although they often find themselves on opposite sides of the political divide, renowned legal scholar Alan Dershowitz and former advisor to two presidents Bill Bennett have come together to condemn the pitiful surrender of the press in the matter of the cartoon intifada:

Since the war on terrorism began, the mainstream press has had no problem printing stories and pictures that challenged the administration and, in the view of some, compromised our war and peace efforts. The manifold images of abuse at Abu Ghraib come to mind — images that struck at our effort to win support from Arab governments and peoples, and that pierced the heart of the Muslim world as well as the U.S. military.

The press has had no problem with breaking a story using classified information on detention centers for captured terrorists and suspects — stories that could harm our allies. And it disclosed a surveillance program so highly classified that most members of Congress were unaware of it.

In its zeal to publish stories critical of our nation’s efforts — and clearly upsetting to enemies and allies alike — the press has printed some articles that turned out to be inaccurate. The Guantanamo Bay flushing of the Koran comes to mind.

But for the past month, the Islamist street has been on an intifada over cartoons depicting Muhammad that were first published months ago in a Danish newspaper. Protests in London — never mind Jordan, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Iran and other countries not noted for their commitment to democratic principles — included signs that read, “Behead those who insult Islam.” The mainstream U.S. media have covered this worldwide uprising; it is, after all, a glimpse into the sentiments of our enemy and its allies. And yet it has refused, with but a few exceptions, to show the cartoons that purportedly caused all the outrage.

[...]

What has happened? To put it simply, radical Islamists have won a war of intimidation. They have cowed the major news media from showing these cartoons. The mainstream press has capitulated to the Islamists — their threats more than their sensibilities. One did not see Catholics claiming the right to mayhem in the wake of the republished depiction of the Virgin Mary covered in cow dung, any more than one saw a rejuvenated Jewish Defense League take to the street or blow up an office when Ariel Sharon was depicted as Hitler or when the Israeli army was depicted as murdering the baby Jesus.

So far as we can tell, a new, twin policy from the mainstream media has been promulgated: (a) If a group is strong enough in its reaction to a story or caricature, the press will refrain from printing that story or caricature, and (b) if the group is pandered to by the mainstream media, the media then will go through elaborate contortions and defenses to justify its abdication of duty. At bottom, this is an unacceptable form of not-so-benign bigotry, representing a higher expectation from Christians and Jews than from Muslims.

[...]

When we were attacked on Sept. 11, we knew the main reason for the attack was that Islamists hated our way of life, our virtues, our freedoms. What we never imagined was that the free press — an institution at the heart of those virtues and freedoms — would be among the first to surrender.

23 February 2006 @ 2:15AM >> Reader Tim Coyne disagrees with my stance on the cartoon intifada:

I realize that we labor under the extant luxury of being ignorant of the sensitivities of the Muslim culture and approach. Reposting a cartoon that has been declared offensive under the guise of clarity is offensive. That ettiquette should be easily handled. The cartoon has been more fully explained than our Iraqi policy. The simple point is that the image of the prophet is not used by his adherents.

It’s been used by infidels. Nobody needs to publish it.

How many times do you explain a joke that disgusts your grandmother and friends? ‘Til they get it? ‘Til they submit to you and your filthy liberties rather than their own sensitivities? If they demonstrate a similar offense (the Virgin in elephant dung, the Infant of Prague masturbating, Christ on the cross as a flasher) are we all now just having a good time? Chuckle.

As for upbraiding a publisher for using sense, if not sensitivity, in deciding not to add fuel and redirect fire, perhaps if you posted your address (preferrably in a community well-represented by insulted Muslims), employed a largely open-door policy, built and posted a large sign and invited and encouraged a large staff to come and go at all hours under your assurance that all would be safe, you’d go through a few extra considerations before gratuitously piling on.

That boldness might be better spent and more honestly portayed in, say, interviewing young devout Muslim children on their views of what exactly is the coarseness of that (probably misguided cartoon)approach. Look for understanding rather than charges. Then, maybe you can extend some higher value rather than extol the baser performances.

I have a feeling this is one subject where we’re not going to end up agreeing.

If the cartoons had depicted Muhammad in a beaker of urine, I could understand people being offended. But the fact that the cartoons were so mild is a huge part of the story. None of them were any worse than your average political cartoon. Some of them were just depictions of Muhammad. And yet, they’ve led to dozens and dozens of murders around the world and untold destruction. Kind of makes you wonder what’ll happen when something makes them really mad!

Don’t get me wrong, Muslims have every right to be offended by the cartoons, however tame. We do not get to dictate what brings others offense. But the minute one person’s preferences are allowed to override another person’s freedom, you have just crossed the line into tyranny.

In free societies, the offended are able to vent steam by speaking out. Mobs don’t roam around the streets, randomly killing, setting buildings on fire, etc. Now, it is apparent that this does occur when people are offended in the Muslim world. These people obviously have different sensibilities.

But, we need to remember that Denmark is a sovereign country. Should the sensibilities of rampaging mobs in Libya get to dictate the bounds of speech in Denmark, or in any other western country where the cartoons were reprinted?

Because if we’re ready to cede our free speech rights when it comes to publishing political cartoons about Islam, what’s next? If it’s just easier to cave in and appease the mobs, what shall we do if the mobs decide that they don’t like an editorial that condemns the use of terrorism by radical Islamists? What then? Do we once again decide that we’d rather avoid all that unpleasantness and just keep our mouths shut?

Fascism has had many forms throughout history, but one pattern always repeats: weakness never leads to being left alone.

22 February 2006 @ 7:48PM >> Looks like the Bush Administration has another security-related scandal to worry about:

Government documents declassified today reveal that President Bush was briefed last summer of “a substantial risk” that Vice President Dick Cheney would shoot an elderly male in the face sometime in the next several months.

[...]

In a Presidential Daily Briefing given to Bush in August 2005, the CIA warned that the vice president was a potent threat to the senior population at large, and in particular “possessed the capabilities and intentions to spray a senior citizen with projectiles fired from a shotgun or other weapon.” A second brief identified the population at risk as those “between 70 and 80 years of age,” and warned that the vice president posed the greatest threat to “seniors in close proximity to the vice president when he is armed.”

The brief, which urged the White House to take “the most thorough possible precautions to disable this threat to the faces, necks, and chests of the nation’s elderly,” was issued a full six months before the events of Feb. 11.

[...]

“To learn that the president’s own people advised him in advance of the strong likelihood that Cheney might spray a helpless geriatric victim with bird shot, and still he did nothing, brings to light very serious concerns about this administration’s Cheney-containment policies,” said Victor Steinberg, director of the Froman Institute, a D.C.-based organization that monitors vice-presidential violence.

22 February 2006 @ 12:23AM >> Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank is taking heat from the WashingtonPost.com ombudswoman Deborah Howell:

Dana Milbank can be controversial with readers. The Post reporter has his fans — and I can be one of them — but I think his appearance on MSNBC last week was a mistake in judgment.

Milbank wore hunting gear — an orange stocking cap and striped vest and gloves — on Keith Olbermann’s show Monday night and made several meant-to-be-humorous remarks about Vice President Cheney’s hunting accident.

[...]

The mail was swift and sure. I got hundreds of e-mails, many prompted by conservative blogs. A number of readers asked the same question as Mark O’Brien of Mechanicsburg, Pa.: “Is Milbank an opinion columnist or a reporter?”

The answer isn’t simple. Milbank, a national political reporter, writes the frequent Washington Sketch column on Page 2 and also does the occasional news story. Editors here do not consider him an opinion columnist.

[...]

Washingtonpost.com, which is under different management than the print Post, lists Milbank as an opinion columnist. I think that’s right. Milbank said, “I realize there’s a fine line between making observational judgments and expressing an opinion.”

If Post editors insist he is not an opinion columnist, then Milbank ought to drop the funny hats and stay away from comedy shows.

[...]

It all comes down to what Stephen Stanford of Saltillo, Miss., wrote: “If you are going to keep using his work, how about labeling it as opinion and not news?”

Exactly.

Or, how about admitting that opinion sometimes sneaks into the writing of even the most earnest “objective reporter”? How about doing away with the labels “reporter” versus “columnist”?

This discussion goes to the very heart of the problems that plague the modern news media. Outlets insist that their “reporters” are objective, while “columnists” aren’t held to the same supposedly-stringent rules of objectivity. But what distinguishes a “reporter” from a “columnist”? If you look through many newspapers, you may have a hard time figuring out which is which. Even the Washington Post and WashingtonPost.com don’t seem to agree how to categorize someone like Milbank. If two sides of the same news organization can’t figure it out, how can they expect the reader to understand the distinction?

I don’t think Milbank’s the bad guy here. His situation is merely the result of the unrealistic set of rules and assumptions that govern the modern newsroom. Milbank’s just being Milbank. If you read him regularly, you see the same kind of snarky—dare I say blog-like—attitude in his writing that you see on display when he mocks the Vice President by donning day-glo hunting gear on a national news program.

So, maybe it’s time for the establishment media to rewrite its rules. The existing environment doesn’t seem to lead to a very good product, and it’s preventing people like Milbank from doing the sort of work that they so clearly ache to do.

A year ago, I posted my interview with Dana Milbank, to which I added this observation:

The problem [for the news media] is, if significant segments of the population think you’re biased, perception is what matters, not reality. In the establishment press, your credibility is locked up in portraying yourself as objective. Any perception of bias makes the claim of objectivity seem like a lie. If people think you’re lying about that, they might not believe you even when you’re giving them cold, hard facts.

Under the rules of the blogosphere, bias isn’t a problem. Everyone’s expected to have a bias, and it is our duty to broadcast that bias, because it helps readers understand when to view our claims with a little extra scrutiny.

As Mr. Milbank points out, just because you shun objectivity doesn’t mean you dismiss objective fact. Fact and opinion can be commingled without killing anybody, so long as your facts are facts. But for years, the establishment media has been promising us that what they say is fact. And for years, they’ve been letting us down. From the Dateline NBC’s bottle rockets under the gas tanks to Dan Rather’s bogus memos, from the newspaper circulation scandals to the admitted cover-up of Saddam Hussein’s atrocities, Big Media doesn’t have much credibility left. So it’s a little hard to believe that all the people who’ve been cutting corners in the mainstream press for non-political reasons wouldn’t take similar liberties with the truth in their political coverage.

[...]

Objective reporting died because it requires objectivity at the individual level. But you see the world one way, I see it slightly differently, and frankly, I’m not so certain of myself that I’d stake my credibility on the world being exactly as I perceive it. If I say I’m an objective reporter, I’m claiming that I can distinguish between reality and my perception of it. I’m saying that I can tell you a story about an event significant enough to write about, and not a single word of what I say will be colored by my own thoughts on the topic. How can I make such a promise and honestly mean it?

Instead of requiring perfect objectivity from each individual, open source reporting allows distributed objectivity. I can post a message online, and if my bias goes overboard, someone else can point that out. The checks and balances are built-in, because rival bloggers have much more incentive to scrutinize their competitors than rival media outlets do. The establishment press club is too cozy. They can’t police themselves. When you’re living in a neighborhood of glass houses, nobody wants to be the first person to start a stone-throwing war. I’ve seen the blogosphere derided as a circle-jerk, but it’s more like a circular firing squad. In a good way. The bullets chip away the falsehoods, leaving truth.

[...]

If Dana Milbank freed himself from the bondage of the unattainable ideal of objectivity and joined the blogosphere, he could help drive the national discussion in a more direct way, and I bet he’d have more fun. He asked how the Post could work with bloggers. Well, he was kind enough to participate in this discussion, so in a way, he and the Post already are working with bloggers. But why must the blogosphere remain completely separate from the establishment media? Why not experiment with blending the best of both? If the Post wants to learn about the blogosphere, what better way than starting a blog? Unleash Dana Milbank! Give him a co-branded website with a separate domain name, and let him say what he wants to say outside the artificial constraints of objectivity. But back it up with the kind of world-class organization that only exists in the establishment press. Become a hybrid.

Join us, Mr. Milbank. I think you’d like it over here.

After being spanked for his latest stunt, I’ve got to think that this suggestion is looking a bit more enticing to him.

21 February 2006 @ 1:23AM >> Jacob Grier is a libertarian who loves coffee. So how does he feel about Starbucks?

Let’s begin with the easy issue: Starbucks is driving independent coffee shops out of business. Anecdotally, this may seem obviously true. Many people can name a favorite coffee shop that went out of business soon after a Starbucks moved into the neighborhood. The fact is, though, that Starbucks is creating a market, not destroying it. Growth in both independent and corporate coffee shops has been huge over the past fifteen years, thanks in large part to consumers being introduced to specialty coffee drinks in the safe confines of their local Starbucks.

The Specialty Coffee Association of America, a leading trade group, tracks American retail sales. In 1989, the SCAA estimates there were 585 coffee houses operating in the U.S. By 1995 that number had risen to 5,000. By 2003, there were 17,400 shops in operation.

Starbucks growth is notable, but it’s far from the sole factor driving these new shop openings. The SCAA reports that 57% of the shops open in 2003 were independent, having only one to three locations. Microchains (4-9 units) made up another 3% of the market. All the large chains combined make up the remaining 40%. [Source .pdf]

A 2004 article in the Willamette Weekly finds a similar pattern at work in Portland. In 2003, a misguided miscreant attempted to blow up a new Starbucks in a neighborhood where residents claimed to not want the imperial corporate giant. But a survey of the local yellow pages reveals that indie shops were doing just fine in Portland:

According to the Portland Yellow Pages, before Starbucks came to Portland in 1989, there were 28 coffee shops in the city. Today, there are 91 non-Starbucks coffeehouses in Portland proper, compared with the chain’s 48 stores within city limits.

Grier also identifies a coming “third wave” to revolutionize the merchandizing of coffee, much in the same way that Starbucks precipitated the “second wave”:

In the third wave, the goal is to complete the evolution of coffee from commodity to connoisseur beverage. In essence, specialty coffee needs to become more like wine. You wouldn’t buy a bottle of wine labeled solely by country of origin and with no vintage date, yet people buy coffee like this all the time. Changing this means using detailed labeling, not just by country but by the specific grower or even the individual lot of beans. It means putting the roast date on every bag, ensuring freshness. And it means investing in the equipment and the training necessary to make sure that the best qualities of each coffee are brought out when it is finally served to the customer, or else the rest is all for naught.

Starbucks is clearly not a part of this third wave, but so what? For there is no third wave without a second to precede it. Even now, while Starbucks can’t deliver the quality I’d like on the scale on which it operates, I’m glad to see one of its kiosks when I walk into an airport lobby for an early morning flight. I can get better coffee in the airport now than I could a decade ago. The same could be said for almost any other spot in America, thanks either directly to Starbucks or to the smaller shops filling in the market it helped create.

I’ve written about my own Starbucks experience before, although it didn’t have much to do with the quality of the coffee.

21 February 2006 @ 12:00AM >> Yeah, I want to hand my money over to an outfit called “Violent Cooperation Company”:

Our companys name is VC “Violent Cooperation.” Violent Cooperation inc. was founded in 2001 with the purpose to finally solve the dilemma between seller and buyer: “Will the buyer send money or does seller send out the goods first?” At one moment when many action sites started up Violent Cooperation’s Escrow Service, the decision of a unique problem has been found to a very common, sore problem. Violent Cooperation has opened a consumer-to-consumer market in the USA, amongst them eBay is known.

(From a spam e-mail recently received.)

20 February 2006 @ 5:47PM >> Via the Taipei Times, AP reports:

Police and soldiers patrolled the deserted streets of the northern Nigerian town of Maiduguri yesterday, one day after thousands of Nigerian Muslims protesting caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed attacked Christians and burned churches, killing at least 15 people.

[...]

On Saturday, rioters burned 15 Christian churches in Maiduguri in a three-hour rampage before troops and police reinforcements restored order, Nigerian police spokesman Haz Iwendi said.

[...]

A reporter on the scene saw mobs of Muslim protesters swarm through the city center with machetes, sticks and iron rods. One group threw a tire around one man, poured gas on him and set him ablaze.

Chima Ezeoke, a Christian Maiduguri resident, said the protesters attacked and looted shops owned by minority Christians, most of them with origins in the country’s south.

“Most of the dead were Christians beaten to death on the streets by the rioters,” Ezeoke said.

Witnesses said three children and a Catholic priest were among those killed.

[...]

Thousands of people have died in this West African country since 2000 in religious violence fueled by the adoption of the strict Islamic or Shariah legal code by a dozen states in the north, seen by most Christians as a move to impose religious hegemony on non-Muslims.

20 February 2006 @ 5:22PM >> The London Telegraph reports:

Four out of 10 British Muslims want sharia law introduced into parts of the country, a survey reveals today.

20 February 2006 @ 4:34PM >> There are two parts to the story of the cartoon intifada that are being under-reported. First is the original rationale for publishing them. Second are the cartoons themselves.

Rare are the media reports that describe all twelve cartoons, and since most news outlets refuse to show them, people have no idea just how insane it is to be rioting, murdering and firebombing over these images. The tame nature of the cartoons is a huge part of the story. To withhold this information from people is to distort the public’s understanding of the full story.

As for the original rationale for publishing the cartoons, Flemming Rose—an editor at Jyllands-Posten, the first publisher of the images—explains:

I commissioned the cartoons in response to several incidents of self-censorship in Europe caused by widening fears and feelings of intimidation in dealing with issues related to Islam. And I still believe that this is a topic that we Europeans must confront, challenging moderate Muslims to speak out. The idea wasn’t to provoke gratuitously — and we certainly didn’t intend to trigger violent demonstrations throughout the Muslim world. Our goal was simply to push back self-imposed limits on expression that seemed to be closing in tighter.

At the end of September, a Danish standup comedian said in an interview with Jyllands-Posten that he had no problem urinating on the Bible in front of a camera, but he dared not do the same thing with the Koran.

This was the culmination of a series of disturbing instances of self-censorship. Last September, a Danish children’s writer had trouble finding an illustrator for a book about the life of Muhammad. Three people turned down the job for fear of consequences. The person who finally accepted insisted on anonymity, which in my book is a form of self-censorship. European translators of a critical book about Islam also did not want their names to appear on the book cover beside the name of the author, a Somalia-born Dutch politician who has herself been in hiding.

Around the same time, the Tate gallery in London withdrew an installation by the avant-garde artist John Latham depicting the Koran, Bible and Talmud torn to pieces. The museum explained that it did not want to stir things up after the London bombings. (A few months earlier, to avoid offending Muslims, a museum in Goteborg, Sweden, had removed a painting with a sexual motif and a quotation from the Koran.)

Finally, at the end of September, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen met with a group of imams, one of whom called on the prime minister to interfere with the press in order to get more positive coverage of Islam.

So, over two weeks we witnessed a half-dozen cases of self-censorship, pitting freedom of speech against the fear of confronting issues about Islam. This was a legitimate news story to cover, and Jyllands-Posten decided to do it by adopting the well-known journalistic principle: Show, don’t tell. I wrote to members of the association of Danish cartoonists asking them “to draw Muhammad as you see him.” We certainly did not ask them to make fun of the prophet. Twelve out of 25 active members responded.

We have a tradition of satire when dealing with the royal family and other public figures, and that was reflected in the cartoons. The cartoonists treated Islam the same way they treat Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and other religions. And by treating Muslims in Denmark as equals they made a point: We are integrating you into the Danish tradition of satire because you are part of our society, not strangers.

Mr. Rose goes on to make an important point:

Has Jyllands-Posten insulted and disrespected Islam? It certainly didn’t intend to. But what does respect mean? When I visit a mosque, I show my respect by taking off my shoes. I follow the customs, just as I do in a church, synagogue or other holy place. But if a believer demands that I, as a nonbeliever, observe his taboos in the public domain, he is not asking for my respect, but for my submission. And that is incompatible with a secular democracy.

[...]

As a former correspondent in the Soviet Union, I am sensitive about calls for censorship on the grounds of insult. This is a popular trick of totalitarian movements: Label any critique or call for debate as an insult and punish the offenders. That is what happened to human rights activists and writers such as Andrei Sakharov, Vladimir Bukovsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Natan Sharansky, Boris Pasternak. The regime accused them of anti-Soviet propaganda, just as some Muslims are labeling 12 cartoons in a Danish newspaper anti-Islamic.

The lesson from the Cold War is: If you give in to totalitarian impulses once, new demands follow. The West prevailed in the Cold War because we stood by our fundamental values and did not appease totalitarian tyrants.

18 February 2006 @ 12:20PM >> This seems reasonable to me:

Two U.S. Democratic senators said on Friday they would introduce legislation aimed at blocking Dubai Ports World from buying a company that operates several U.S. shipping ports because of security concerns.

Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Hillary Clinton of New York said they would offer a measure to ban companies owned or controlled by foreign governments from acquiring U.S. port operations.

“We wouldn’t turn the border patrol or the customs service over to a foreign government, and we can’t afford to turn our ports over to one either,” Menendez said in a statement. The Senate Banking Committee also plans to hold a hearing on the issue later this month.

P&O, the company Dubai Ports World plans to buy for $6.8 billion, is already foreign-owned, by the British, but the concern is that the purchaser is backed by the United Arab Emirates government.

The UAE company would gain control over the management of major U.S. ports in New York and New Jersey, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Orleans and Miami and that has sparked national security concerns among lawmakers.

17 February 2006 @ 1:18AM >> If you think you can avoid the wrath of the Islamist masses simply by not publishing cartoons, you obviously don’t know the people who’ve declared war on Western civilization. According to this report:

Aliye Cetinkaya, a journalist from the Turkish daily Sabah newspaper, who was reporting on the recent protests over the offensive caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, was stoned in Konya for reasons demonstrators said were provocative - as she did not cover her head. Cetinkaya was taken away by male colleagues after stones hit her head and shoulders. The female journalist was attacked for being ’sexually provocative’ for not wearing a head scarf at the demonstration [...]

A group of protestors insisted that Aliye Cetinkaya get off the bus where she was reporting the march, as they claimed she was provoking the crowd. At this moment, somebody started reciting the Koran into a microphone.

Approximately 30 people then started throwing stones at Cetinkaya, seated with her legs dangling from the back of the vehicle and taking notes. They claimed that her clothes and way of sitting was inappropriate while the Koran was being read, and shouted words of abuse at her.

Better start buying your headscarves, ladies! Cartoons aren’t the only thing that can provoke these folks. Lack of proper headgear can, too. Maybe The New York Times should stop showing pictures of unveiled women out of respect for Islam.

16 February 2006 @ 10:43AM >> Taxpayer-funded NPR has decided against posting on its website or even linking to the twelve cartoons that caused the Muslim world to erupt in deadly rioting. According to Bill Marimow, the network’s Vice President of News:

[T]he cartoon is so highly offensive to millions of Muslims that it’s preferable to describe it in words rather than posting it on the Web. In this case, I believe that our audience can, through our reports — on radio and the Web — get a very detailed sense of what’s depicted in the cartoon. By not posting it on the Web, we demonstrate a respect for deeply held religious beliefs.

First of all, it’s not one cartoon, Bill, it’s twelve. Did NPR describe them all? If so, I can’t find it anywhere on your website.

NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin says the reaction to this decision has been overwhelmingly negative:

Of the hundreds who wrote to me, more than 70 percent insisted that NPR was wrong not to show the cartoon, while 20 percent agreed that NPR did the right thing in not reprinting any of the drawings to avoid exacerbating tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims. The remaining 10 percent expressed frustration over being forced to choose between the two legitimate values — freedom of speech and religious tolerance — that now seem to be in conflict.

Dvorkin posts a number of the e-mails he received. Here are two that struck me as particularly insightful:

I am a Norwegian and have seen the cartoons. They are not the least bit offensive compared to other depictions of, let’s say, Jesus, that have been printed throughout time. Seeing the cartoons will shock people, for if those innocent cartoons are considered blasphemous, then nothing questioning Islam should by implication be printed. Without the publication of the cartoons no fully informed decision can be made by your readers. You say that one should not publish lest one hurt religious feelings; I say that one cannot grant tactfulness to irrational feelings, for by doing so one sanctions the ideas behind those feelings and the aggressors who respond with violence instead of peaceful discourse.

Harald Waage

That’s the real shame of the media’s reaction. Free speech has been defined down to the lowest common denominator where groups can restrict speech to their liking, as long as enough violence is employed. If every aggrieved group used such tactics, speech would become little more than a recitation of numbers, because anything beyond that is sure to anger somebody.

I am surprised that in all of the coverage of the riots in the Islamic world following the publication of cartoons depicting Muhammad that I have heard on NPR (and I am a regular listener) that no one has mentioned the vile posters (regularly visible in network TV and cable news broadcasts) that plaster walls in cities throughout the Muslim world. Surely it is an important bit of the context of these riots that they occur in societies whose citizens seem to be utterly untroubled by posters that resemble anti-Semitic propaganda in 1930s Germany.

Jim Coonan

It shows the utter hypocricy of the situation. On the one hand, we’re supposed to ignore beheadings, “honor” killings of gang rape victims, cities where by law only Muslims may tread, and—relatively low on the list—any insult lodged at the religions of the West, yet we’re supposed to bend over backwards to avoid inflaming the insane sensitivity of those who have no trouble murdering others over relatively tame speech. Is that the kind of world you want to live in?

The sensitive souls running NPR seem to think so. And their decision does nothing but help cement in place the veto-by-murder that the Islamic world now holds over our speech.

16 February 2006 @ 1:10AM >> The quote of the day, from Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the Secretary General of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, on the 12 Danish cartoons depicting the Muslim prophet Mohammed:

Unfortunately, people in the Muslim world feel that this is a new 9/11 against themselves.

Hmmm...flying planes into buildings...publishing cartoons. Yep, that’s about the same.

Update: The Pub Philosopher writes:

Of course, he is right. In the 9/11 attacks, Muslim fanatics killed people and in the Cartoon Wars, Muslim fanatics killed people. Somehow though, I don’t think that’s what he meant.

15 February 2006 @ 8:58PM >> The Iranian government is upset over a new cartoon published in the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel.

Shown in the cartoon are four soccer players with “Iran” on their uniforms standing field-level in a stadium. The soccer players also have explosives wrapped around their midsections. According to a statement from the Iranian embassy in Berlin, the cartoon has incited “outrage among the Iranian people.” (Uh oh! That doesn’t sound good!) And Manuchehr Sandi, a leader from the Iranian Press Association, called on Germany to give an “appropriate reaction” to the cartoon. (If you’re in the Iranian press, I guess it’s natural to assume that all governments are responsible for the content of their nation’s media.)

While we wait to see how many people are killed and buildings torched as a result of this cartoon, here’s some unsolicited advice for the Iranian government:

If you spent as much time denouncing suicide bombing as you spend denouncing cartoons, perhaps there’d be fewer cartoons mocking you as terrorists.

Just a thought.

15 February 2006 @ 4:09PM >> In response to “Sharia Law Comes West,” reader D. L. Cameron e-mails:

I agree with your entire article until the end when you said, “Our media has just proven that fear will cause them to cover up anything that might ‘offend’ the mobs of Islamic arsonists.”

The media revels in covering and endlessly reporting on anything and everything that will offend mobs of Islamic arsonists and murders - as long as the resulting riots and murders are aimed at the American Government, our military, private citizens, children, women, etc...it’s when the Islamic rage is directed at THEM - that’s when they run like scared rabbits.

Good point!

13 February 2006 @ 3:44PM >> In the London Sunday Times, Andrew Sullivan wonders why the “Islamo-bullies get a free ride from the West”:

You’d think, wouldn’t you, it might be helpful to view the actual cartoons so you can see what on earth this entire fuss is about. But the British and American media have decided that it is not their job to help you understand this story. In fact it is their job to prevent you from fully understanding this story. As of this writing no major newspaper in Britain has published the cartoons; the BBC has shown them only fleetingly and other networks have shied away. All have decided not to give you this critical information, without which no intelligent person can construct an informed and intelligent position on the matter. You’re on your own.

The reasons given are conventional enough: the press doesn’t want to inflame matters further; the cartoons are indeed offensive, and no editor has to publish images that would appal readers; reprinting would merely play into the hands of extremists, and so on.

The one argument you haven’t heard is the one you hear off-camera. Many editors simply don’t want to put their staffs at risk of physical danger. They have “offended” Muslims in the past and learnt to regret it. In New York the editors of a free alternative paper, the New York Press, decided they wanted to run the cartoons so their readers could have a grasp of what this huge story is about. The owner refused. The staff quit en masse. The editor claims the owner gave him a simple explanation: “I’m not putting lives in danger. We’re not getting things blown up.”

And, according to an editorial in the Boston Phoenix, Sullivan is right. The Phoenix admits that one of the reasons they won’t run the cartoons is “[o]ut of fear of retaliation from the international brotherhood of radical and bloodthirsty Islamists who seek to impose their will on those who do not believe as they do.”

This is, frankly, our primary reason for not publishing any of the images in question. Simply stated, we are being terrorized, and as deeply as we believe in the principles of free speech and a free press, we could not in good conscience place the men and women who work at the Phoenix and its related companies in physical jeopardy. As we feel forced, literally, to bend to maniacal pressure, this may be the darkest moment in our 40-year publishing history.

In other words, after just a few days of rioting, the media has already bent over, surrendered, and accepted Sharia law as the arbiter of its editorial decisions.

Our media has just taught a valuable lesson to the various interest groups of the world: if you want to control how your group is covered, be as threatening and violent as possible.

Sullivan notes that online media—not the establishment media—is now the only source for full coverage of this story:

The fundamental job of journalists is to give you as much information as possible to make sense of the world around you. And in this story, where the entire controversy revolves around drawings, the press is suddenly coy. You can see Saddam Hussein in his underwear and members of the royal family in compromising positions. You can see Andres Serrano’s famously blasphemous photograph of a crucifix in urine, called Piss Christ. But a political cartoon that deals with Islam? Not our job, guv. Move right along. Nothing to see here.

[...]

And so we have two media now in the world. We have the mainstream media whose job is increasingly not actually to disseminate information but to act as a moral steward for what is fit to print, to become an arbiter of sensitivity, good taste and political correctness. And we have web pages like Wikipedia or the blogosphere to disseminate actual facts, data, images and opinions that readers can judge with the benefit of all the facts, not just some of them.

Take a look at the cartoons. Sure, they obviously offend some people, but they’re not outrageous, certainly not in the context of a free society. Other groups have managed to bear similar offenses or worse without resorting to uncontained rampages of violence. And in those cases, the media didn’t worry much about who might be offended.

The fact that the cartoons are so mild is a huge part of the story. After all, if people are threatening death over these cartoons, what else will set them into a murderous rage? Wouldn’t this information be helpful?

Apparently not, in the view of our media. It is quite easy to stand up as a noble defender of press freedoms when the only people on the other side are finger-wagging octogenarian letter writers complaining about an errant nipple during a Superbowl half-time show. But the pitiful reaction of the press in this instance shows that they are nothing more than bloviating pushovers who will hand over their freedoms as readily as the French in 1940 the first minute they’re faced with anything more dangerous than a pile of letters to the editor. But they’re worse than just being cowards, because they’ve just reinforced the only lesson that radical Islamists seem to understand: the best way to achieve their goals is through mob violence.

Will we ever see stories that are as critical of Islamofascism as they are of, say, the American government? I wouldn’t hold my breath. Our media has just proven that fear will cause them to cover up anything that might “offend” the mobs of Islamic arsonists. (This isn’t exactly new territory for the establishment media, either.)

Who knew that the first major surrender in the War on Terror would come so easily? I didn’t. But I can’t say I’m surprised to see that it’s our media selling us out.

10 February 2006 @ 12:08AM >> Shortly after September 11th, when President Bush said Islamic terrorists “hate freedom,” critics derided his statement as a simplistic dodge. Freedom couldn’t be the problem, it must be U.S. foreign policy. It must be arrogant American imperialism. It must be anything that places the blame on us and absolves the terrorists of responsibility. After all, no rational person could hate freedom, right? Well, take a look around. To a frighteningly large number of people on this planet, freedom is the enemy.

8 February 2006 @ 3:23AM >> The recent discussion on the ideology of Hollywood has been generating a ton of e-mail. Here’s a sample. (And thanks to everyone who took the time to write!)

From Brian:

[You say:] “Yep. Increasingly, Hollywood is making films that Hollywood wants to consume, not necessarily what the rest of America does.”

I’m fairly skeptical about these sorts of claims, especially the “increasing” part. In so much as the movies you’re speaking of are lefty polemics rather than, say, The Island, we’ve seen remarkably few of these movies in comparison to the 90’s. Hollywood’s obviously a lefty town, and every year you’ll see the occasional Syriana, or Crash (or Brokeback Mountain which has more lefty street cred than politics), but that number’s gone down quite a bit in recent years, outnumbered a few thousand to one by comic book movies and big franchises.

What’s more is that, despite the doom-and-gloom rhetoric about Hollywood ignoring the masses, these small, left-ish films tend to end up with a tidy profit, and sometimes more - American Beauty, if I recall, took in well over a hundred million. I’m fairly certain that none of the Oscar nominees that have caused such a ruckus will end up losing money. Aside from bad conservative press (which, let’s face it, would happen anyway - it’s a sweet political schtick to milk), there just doesn’t seem to be much of a downside to the concept of a few little lefty films a year for a Hollywood executive.

My perception is that Hollywood is increasing the political content in its films. I don’t have hard data to back this up, but until 2004, I don’t think we ever saw a major movie release whose goal was to change the outcome of a U.S. presidential election (Fahrenheit 9/11). We also never before had a major movie studio dedicated to advancing left-wing politics (Participant Productions, creators of the George Clooney films Syriana and Good Night and Good Luck). It is also a fairly recent phenomenon that people now expect the Academy Awards to be used as political podiums by the Hollywood elite. So, to me, it does seem like Hollywood is becoming politicized to an unprecedented degree.

But even if my perception of this is wrong, the real issue isn’t the fact that Hollywood puts political messages in films or releases overtly-political films, the issue is that of the films with recognizable political content, that content almost invariably represents a left-of-center worldview. This is bad business.

Why? Well, for one, it serves to underscore the leftism of the more outspoken Hollywood pseudo-politicos. And that alienates potential customers who happen to have vastly divergent opinions. I know a lot of people who will never watch the Academy Awards because they don’t want to endure four hours of having their beliefs trashed by Hollywood’s condescending know-it-alls. That same frustration keeps people away from theaters, too.

Can left-wing films still turn a profit? Sure. But the fact that the only political films happen to be left-wing indicates that a huge market is going unserved. On talk radio, cable news and the best-seller lists, conservative perspectives do quite well in the marketplace. But with film, demand for this type of content is not being fulfilled because of—I believe—the political views of the gatekeepers.

From a business standpoint, it seems obvious that there is a downside to Hollywood’s current practices. Unfortunately, it’s hard to calculate the gross receipts of films that haven’t been made, so Hollywood has no way of knowing just how much money it is leaving left on the table. The market has to be proven for Hollywood to wake up. And for that to happen, some insider needs to take a chance, or technology will eventually render the current business model obsolete.

---

At Slate, Mickey Kaus says:

Matt Yglesias points out to me [video link] it’s not simply Hollywood’s films that skew “left.” Hollywood’s audience—largely young people, in cities—skews left also. There’s less of a mismatch there than Hollywood critics like Ben Stein and Evan Coyne Maloney like to claim. But this natural congruence also means a film can succeed at the box office without changing many minds in Bush country.

This factoid could just as easily prove my point as disprove it.

Let’s assume it’s true that Hollywood’s audience does skew to the left. Is that a cause or an effect? Does Hollywood churn out left-wing political films because they see their audience as left-of-center? Or are the audiences more left-leaning because conservatives see Hollywood’s output and decide that there are better uses of their time and money?

I wonder, have moviegoing audiences historically been left-of-center? Was it that way during the 1940s and 50s when Frank Capra and Orson Welles were kings? If not, why has the audience shifted left today?

---

Jeff God writes:

Passion of the Christ and Narnia have mopped up with the rest of America. I think a better explanation is that Hollywood, as any business, will make what people want. But Hollywood, as a political action committee, will reward the kind of movies that appeal to the members of the Hollywood PAC.

Remember that both The Passion and Narnia were created and distributed by people who are seen as fringe players by the rest of the industry. Sure, Mel Gibson was famous before The Passion, as an actor, but when it came time to find industry support for the film, he was locked out of Hollywood’s inner circle. Similarly, Walden Media, responsible for Narnia, is a bit of a renegade outfit. Walden was formed specifically out of a belief that Hollywood wasn’t making certain types of films.

---

Jeanne B. writes:

In reading the self-centered comments from the Hollywood gliteratti, I am flabbergasted at their total cluelessness.

Most striking is their seemingly universal conviction that the rest of us aren’t having a dialogue...aren’t paying attention. They think we’re oblivious to being “set adrift” by our government. If they can just yell loud enough and long enough, suddenly the masses will wake up to “the truth” and embrace Hollywood and its views. More, they think we’ll forever be in their debt for saving us!

Such ego. They don’t think we disagree with them. We’re just ill informed and too stupid to recognize how right they are. They really think they’re doing it for our good! Such gobsmacking elitism.

Well, maybe they do have a point. Perhaps one day I will evolve enough, become wise enough to take my political cues from the likes of Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon. Until then, I guess my ignorance makes me deserve their constant scorn.

7 February 2006 @ 2:33PM >> Maybe we can accelerate global warming in time to counteract this coming disaster.

(It’s like deja vu all over again!)

5 February 2006 @ 1:53PM >> An e-mailer responds to “Hollywood to Continue Slow-Motion Suicide?“:

What also struck me about the Hollywood Reporter article was the myopic self-centeredness of the filmmakers cited, their inability to look outside their tiny enclave of culture elitism.

The Crash co-writer says, “People want films that have something to say; they’re tired of fluff.”

Crash director Paul Haggis: “It’s great for the films and great for the nation. It says people are embracing these issues, that they don’t want to go to the theater to forget. They want to be involved, to participate.”

Which “people” are they referring to? Who are “they”? Certainly not the American public.

Look at these box office figures. The average box office for the Best Picture nominees this year is less than $38 million. The highest-grossing nominee was Crash, with $53 million. It was the 48th highest-grossing movie of 2005.

Think about that. The highest-grossing Best Picture nominee earned less than 47 other movies released last year.

If Crash wins, it would be the lowest-grossing Best Picture since 1987. (In non-adjusted dollars: If you adjust for inflation, I suspect it would be the lowest-grossing Best Picture of all time.) And Crash is, thus far, the most successful of the nominated movies. (Granted, Brokeback is still in the theatres and is likely soon to surpass Crash, but not by enough to affect my underlying point.)

Then there’s Spielberg, who says: “Some of it is due to our own insecurity about the voices representing us in government right now.”

Uh, Steven, who do you think more accurately represents the American public — you in your Malibu bunker, or politicians who’ve won actual elections?

So when Haggis, Spielberg, et al. say “people,” they really mean “our kind” of people. Just look at the movies they make these days. They are increasingly turning the cameras on each other, on themselves, on issues that matter only to the Hollywood elite. And the more they do this, the fewer Americans will turn out to see their stuff.

Yep. Increasingly, Hollywood is making films that Hollywood wants to consume, not necessarily what the rest of America does. Hollywood needs to decide whether it wants to be a political party or whether it wants to entertain. They can continue to entertain themselves, but then they will continue to lose audience. There are simply too many other options vying for the attention of the people that Hollywood shuns.

Ultimately, I’m optimistic. There have to be a few people left in Hollywood who recognize that they’re in business, and that there’s money to be made by satisfying markets that are currently being ignored. The folks behind the Liberty Film Festival and the American Film Renaissance recognize this. There is a huge audience of people who are not being served by Hollywood, and eventually, enough breakthrough films will somehow slip through filter of the Hollywood left that this market will be proven. Either that, or technology will route around the current gatekeepers who are preventing alternative content from being distributed, and those gatekeepers will lose relevance.

Nature and capitalism abhor a vacuum. It won’t last forever...

4 February 2006 @ 2:38PM >> A little historical perspective:

President Lincoln had to try five different commanders before settling on Ulysses Grant, and even Grant stumbled many times on the way to victory. The Union Army suffered 390,000 dead in four years, with fully 29 percent of the men who served being killed or wounded in what some critics claimed was “an unnecessary war.”

World War II was a serial bloodbath. Battles like Iwo Jima, Anzio, Ardennes, and Okinawa each killed, in a matter of days and weeks, several times the number of soldiers we have lost in Iraq. Intelligence was wrong. Planning failed. Brutal collateral damage was done to civilian non-combatants. Soldiers were killed by friendly fire. POWs were sometimes executed. Military and civilian leaders miscalculated repeatedly. During WWII, 7 percent of our G.I.s were killed or wounded.

Korea was first lost before it could be re-taken, at great cost, and thanks to political interference the war ended in a fruitless stalemate. Fully 8 percent of the American soldiers who fought on the Korean peninsula were killed or wounded.

The Cold War spawned by President Roosevelt’s expedient alliance with Stalin and other communists brought totalitarian bleakness and death to millions, endless proxy wars that consumed hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of American and allied lives, and a near-nuclear exchange during President Kennedy’s watch.

Yet ugly as they were, each of the wars above eventually made the world a less bloody place by removing tyrants and transforming cultures. Those same goals drive our war against Middle Eastern extremism that is now centered in Iraq.

In Iraq, 4 percent of our soldiers have been killed or wounded. Those losses are lower than we suffered in nine previous wars. The Civil War, Mexican War, War of Independence, Korean War, WWI, WWII, Vietnam, and Philippine War were all half-again or more as costly as Iraq has been.

3 February 2006 @ 9:33AM >> Since the beginning of the year, both Microsoft and Google have seen self-inflicted public relations disasters stem from their decisions to censor political content deemed inconvenient by the Chinese government. Now, Microsoft has decided to make own employees over its abrupt censoring of a Chinese blogger, Microsoft Corp. has formulated a new policy to deal with requests from a government that alleges that posted material violates its laws.

The measures were detailed by Microsoft’s top lawyer, Brad Smith, at the Government Leaders Forum in Lisbon today.

Smith said Microsoft will remove blogs only when given proper legal notice. And even then, it will block access to that material only within the country where it is deemed unlawful. The site will still be viewable from outside the country, he said.

[...]

“Obviously, what we are trying to do with the kinds of principles we articulated today is ... obey the law in the countries in which we do business but also pay appropriate respect to the needs of our users, both those who put information up on a blog and those who want to read that information around the world,” Smith said.

3 February 2006 @ 1:05AM >> If you hold the “wrong” political views, you’d better keep your mouth shut at DePaul University. You wouldn’t want to be brought up on harassment charges, would you?

2 February 2006 @ 10:39AM >> Some protesters in Chicago’s Daley Plaza seem to think so. Documentarian Andrew Marcus has the video.

The patriots protesting are still calling for revolution, it seems. Wake me up when it starts.

2 February 2006 @ 10:10AM >> The film business is hurting. As more channels, websites and video games compete for a truly limited resource—people’s time—films are finding smaller and smaller audiences.

So it might not seem like the wisest business decision for the industry to become even more stridently left-wing. But, as the Hollywood Reporter notes, that’s exactly what Hollywood is doing:

Hollywood has always worn its liberal politics on its sleeve, from 1976’s “All the President’s Men” and 1979’s “Norma Rae” to 2002’s “Bowling for Columbine.” With Tuesday’s crop of Oscar contenders, though, politics have never been more front and center.

“What all these films have in common is they’re about the human condition,” said Oscar-nominated “Crash” co-writer Bobby Moresco. “The pendulum has swung back to movies about politics. People want films that have something to say; they’re tired of fluff.”

Maybe people want films that have something to say, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they want films that all say the same thing.

Steven Spielberg reminisces about the glory days of the left:

It’s been an amazing year, very much like 1968, ‘69 and ‘70, when you suddenly see all of these political movies coming out at the same time, out of the watershed of politics. Some of it is due to our own insecurity about the voices representing us in government right now. We feel like our government has set us adrift, and we’re trying to make our voices heard. We’re telling them to be worried about these things.

Maybe that’s part of what ails the film business. Are films supposed to be entertainment? Or are they platforms for expressing political opinions? Perhaps they can be both, but if so, then Hollywood should remember that most of the country does not share its politics. Where are the films for the rest of America?

George Clooney pats himself on the back for his bravery in repeating what everyone else in his industry is saying:

I haven’t shied away from political and social conversations in my life, so I don’t shy away from them in the films I make either. [...] We as a society since 9/11 have, for the first time since Watergate, sat around and had outrage, discussion, polarization and arguments from both sides of the aisle. Questions are being asked. And that is good.

But the films coming out of Hollywood aren’t part of a discussion. They aren’t representing “both sides of the aisle.” Discussions tend to have multiple perspectives presented. What Hollywood is engaged in is a monologue. It’s a lecture.

Delighted that the Academy chose to “reward people who took risks this year,” [Crash director Paul] Haggis cited “risks Steven Spielberg took, and the heat he’s getting. All the films are passion pieces that ask troubling questions. It’s the ’70s all over again. It’s great for the films and great for the nation. It says people are embracing these issues, that they don’t want to go to the theater to forget. They want to be involved, to participate.”

I repeat: it is not a risk to say what everyone around you is saying. It is not a risk to put out a film with a perspective shared by all your friends. That’s easy. What would be risky is if someone in Hollywood got behind a film that they didn’t agree with, one that they knew most of Hollywood would disagree with. That would take balls.