House of Eratosthenes

It’s been a few days since this testy exchange on Bill O’Reilly’s show, and it seems a consensus has set in: Kelly 1, O’Reilly 0. Oh, this makes me so happy, assuming I’m right about that. It’s not that I’ve got it in for Bill, or that Megyn is better looking, it’s the substance of her argument and the lack of substance in his. At the tail end of the video clip — “It’s the way you do it.” Really Bill, that’s it, that’s the hitch in the giddyap?

Unless you’ve been living in a cave this whole week, you know O’Reilly is not alone. We’ve recently suffered under a huge crushing wave of these “loud crowd” types, proffering a boring, repetitious argument that has no form or bearing to it, something about “Oh yes, free speech, totally BUT then again…” Their opposition, recognizing an all-or-nothing proposition when they see one, reply with an inquiry about where exactly the line should be drawn. And of course there is no answer. Kelly really nailed it with this thing about “edges,” that is where the point of disagreement is — should this freedom-of-expression thing be defended most emphatically at the periphery, or rather at the center where the content is uncontentious. Just let those fringe-kooky, out-of-the-mainstream, and therefore “expendable” edges go.

I’m liking that this happened. Sorry about that one guard’s ankle, and it isn’t cool at all that innocents were put in harm’s way. The blessing is in all the stuff that’s still going to matter months & years down the road: that people who are thoughtless, trying to look more thoughtful than everybody else while remaining thoughtless, actually look thoughtless and they look that way to everybody watching, far and wide. They look like what they are, people who should sit down and shut up for a little while, people with loud opinions who haven’t thought it through, aren’t inclined to do so without motivation from without, and just enjoy having loud opinions. Perception about the thoughtful & thoughtless, this time, IS reality. This isn’t something that happens often these days, not nearly often enough.

The First Amendment, she said, isn’t meant to protect popular speech; it’s meant to protect “the most outrageous, offensive, incendiary speech.”

O’Reilly countered, “It’s always cause and effect… This is what happens when you light the fuse, you get violence.” Kelly was surprised to hear that, telling O’Reilly he sounds like he’s “attacking the event itself.”

When O’Reilly said he would “do it another way,” Kelly got really fired up and said this:

“You know what else the jihadis don’t like? They hate Jews. Should we get rid of all Jews? That’s the path we’re gonna go down if we stop catering to the jihadis.”

I’m sure O’Reilly doesn’t want to go that far. But that’s kind of, you know, the whole point. It keeps coming back to the line. Where’s it drawn?

As far as we’ve been able to see, no one is able to answer the question. Not here, or here, or here. Or here either.

These “opinions,” such as they are, are muck. They’re slime. I’m not saying that because I disagree with them; I’m saying that because of their low grade. Obviously there are people who do agree with them, are willing to say them, even write them in ink with their own names over them as bylines. But really now, thinking on it realistically — a year down the road, would they like to point back at these words and say “Yup that there is some award-quality writing I did”?

Sometimes I get singled out for positive recognition for the things I write, and it gives me a funny bittersweet feeling. Like “Really, that? That’s not my best. I cringe when I go back and read that.” Is that similar to the feeling they’d get if they were singled out for what they wrote? Except the difference is, with my stuff it actually did happen, which tells me my prose must have some value, regardless of whether the writer can see it. Someone thought it was deserving of praise. This isn’t going to happen with O’Reilly’s sentiments about “absolutely, totally get the free speech angle BUT blah blah blah.” It isn’t good phrasing because it doesn’t make a good point. Doesn’t make any point at all. It’s just highbrow, anesthetic buzz.

As Ace points out in his critique of all this mush, including O’Reilly’s:

I do wish to not overly attack people I like and genuinely respect; but when I read, for example, Jamie Kirchick, a normally dependable guy and someone I’ve met slightly, and like well enough, spending 700 words of an 800 word column talking up how base he thinks Pam Gellar is in a column allegedly defending her right to free speech, instead of, you know, actually defending her right to free speech, I become despairing, because if this is all the defense the alleged defenders of Free Speech can muster, then we have no right to free speech.

Exactly. Precisely. Bulls-eye. You “totally get the free-speech thing but” types do NOT “totally get” it at all, you don’t even partially get it. You aren’t even speaking the same lingo.

You know who completely does get it? Professor Mondo gets it.
Bows and Depos

QotD: Arguments in Short Skirts Edition

I think it’s fair to say we all hate Illinois Nazis…Indeed, we may find ourselves cheering Jake and Elwood as they drive the Nazis into the drink…[But] when the Illinois Nazis don’t get to do their thing, and particularly when they’re physically silenced, we can’t excuse that. Period. Full stop.

It doesn’t matter that they’re Illinois Nazis. It doesn’t matter that they’re NAMBLA. It doesn’t matter that they’re people who want to tear down the puppy orphanage and replace it with a baby-punching factory. If all they’re doing is expressing a viewpoint, there is no justification for stopping them that couldn’t eventually be used against anyone.

That’s why I find the arguments I’ve seen recently regarding Charlie Hebdo and the Garland, TX shooting utterly repulsive. Claims that the targeted victims were essentially “asking for it” by being deliberately provocative are not acceptable, because one day, someone may decide that what you’re saying is provocative.

“But they were punching d–”

Doesn’t matter.

“But Pamela Geller is a horr–”

Doesn’t matter.
:
“But what if someone slandered what you hol–”

Doesn’t matter. And that brings us to the QotD, from attorney Marc J. Randazza in an opinion piece at CNN:

[T]he day that we say that there is one idea that we cannot mock, that is the day that we lose much more than a life, and much more than a debate.

That is when we lose freedom itself.

So draw. Mock. Point and laugh. If you do it to me, I will not draw a gun. Because my beliefs are strong enough that they can withstand the power of a cartoon. Are yours?

If you try to silence someone, then you’re admitting that you can’t withstand the mouth noises (or drawings, or songs, or whatever) that someone else is making.

And really, who wants to admit that they’ve been shown up by Illinois Nazis?

That’s it in a nutshell. But lately, we have been rather inundated with a sort of tribal thinking, strictly binary “I’m for it or else I’m not” type of thinking. Our First Amendment comes with a spirit behind it, a sense and sensibility, a societal code that is irreducibly simple and yet too profound for words.

It cannot co-exist with this binary, tribal thinking, and the binary, tribal thinking cannot co-exist with it. They are utterly incompatible. We cannot suffer, in this realm, the foolishness of “But if I’m caught defending that, people might think I agree with all of it.”

Mondo, addressing those who might disagree with Pamela Geller’s message, seems to strike closest to the bulls-eye of the whole thing. And I’m saying that even though I don’t find anything disagreeable about Geller’s message at all. OR her actions. Yeah, there, I said it. Don’t tell the AP, whatever you do.

Drawing incendiary pictures of Mohammad might be a base form of expression, but that’s also why anyone anywhere in the world should be able to do it without worrying about getting their head cut off. Of course that’s not the case, but the reason why it’s not the case isn’t that dastardly provocateurs just won’t stop drawing pictures; it’s that Islam has encouraged large swaths of people to react like mindless barbarians to an image on a piece of paper.

It seems kind of odd that when someone is killed by police I’m not allowed to ponder whether their life of crime may have led to the altercation, but when a cartoonist is murdered everyone seems to ask, “well, what was he drawing that caused that to happen?”

Maybe it should be flipped around to put the positive emphasis on the right.

“That’s not something I would have said or done, BUT they have the right to do it.”

or

“That’s not the way I’d’ve gone about it, BUT they have the right to do it.”

or

“They’re f*cking idiots to do it that way, BUT they have a right to do it that way.”

See, it doesn’t come off as putting a caveat on their expressive rights, and you still get to criticize what was done.

But in no case should anyone get shot over it.
- philmon | 05/09/2015 @ 06:45
Or…leave the “agree with” thing entirely uncommented-upon. That’s why I like Mondo’s take best of all, I have no idea, none whatsoever, what his feelings are about what Ms. Geller did.

And he said it better than anyone, about that, too: “It doesn’t matter.”
- mkfreeberg | 05/09/2015 @ 06:47
It’s actually kind of funny, watching the Left get hoist on their own petard. Honestly, Free Speech was not something people held as the Highest Good (See how quickly Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR were able to silence people) until the Left needed some cover for their treasonous activities on behalf of the Soviet Union. Whoops!
- Robert Mitchell Jr. | 05/09/2015 @ 07:58
“If you try to silence someone, then you’re admitting that you can’t withstand the mouth noises (or drawings, or songs, or whatever) that someone else is making.”

I seem to recall an old story similar to this. An American man was visiting China where he and his Chinese friend saw a pair of Chinese men in a very heated argument on the street. The American commented that he was surprised that no blows had been struck and wondered why. His Chinese companion stated simply, “Because the man who strikes first has admitted his ideas have run out.”
- Wamphyr | 05/09/2015 @ 11:54
Days like this, I really think that lots of people in this country have brain damage. Sorry to be so reductive, but hopping Mohammed on a moped, y’all — “she was asking for it?”

Say that about Pam Geller re: Free Speech, and you’re a hero to the O’Reilly types. Say that about any other woman re: Wandering around a bad part of town shitfaced at 3 am, and you’d have SlutWalks on five continents protesting the horror of it all. (I assume this is what Professor Mondo is referring to by titling his piece “arguments in short skirts”).

“I get the free speech angle, but”…. hey, wasn’t dissent the highest form of patriotism from Feb 2000 – November 6, 2008? Seems I heard that once or twice back then, and I’d bet the national debt you’d find that very phrase in the writings of just about everyone on the Left who is now claiming Geller was asking for it. In that case, though, it probably literally is brain damage — if I tried to change my mind that fast on a fundamental freedom, I’d lose a lobe.
- Severian | 05/10/2015 @ 06:35
People slander Christianity and its several varieties on a depressingly regular basis. Few to none of those people have to worry about being killed or maimed for it. That’s not because most Christians agree with the attacks, or because they like being attacked. They don’t. They’ve just come to understand that whether or not the state ruled violence an unacceptable reaction to ridicule of their religion, God certainly
did. If God as some Muslims understand him said otherwise, either they’re deficient in understanding him, or they’re listening to somebody else and understanding him perfectly well.
- Rich Fader | 05/11/2015 @ 14:20
“Maybe it should be flipped around to put the positive emphasis on the right.”

That’s the way I try to think of it. “I find Charlie Hebdo’s humour disgusting, BUT….” “I consider Andres Serrano’s ‘Piss Christ’ a blasphemous insult to me and my faith, BUT….” “I think these people are being @$$holes, BUT….” All of which is true.

The tricky bit, as always, comes when you try to be complicated not about what others have the right to say but what they have the right to make you pay for. Serrano should be totally free to dunk a crucifix in his own urine if he wants, and I should be totally free to specify my tax dollars not go to support showing it.
- Stephen J. | 05/12/2015 @ 07:29

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The Word “But” Simply Doesn’t ApplySaturday, May 9th, 2015

The Word “But” Simply Doesn’t Apply
Saturday, May 9th, 2015