Letters to the Editor
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If you are the left's equivalent of Ann Coulter then ...
... I expect Time to feature you on the cover, like they did Ann, with a fawning article. I expect to see you on the cable TV news shows at least once a week for the next 10 years, just like they do for her.
Seriously, one must consider that while the elite media pretends to offer "balance" in their reviews the left and the right, the facts is that the right wing extremists are welcome guests in the media household while the left wingers are shunned.
Coulter and Limbaugh have no trouble getting lots of TV face time, and when they do they are treated with respect. You won't find Krugman or Moore on TV a lot. The media begrudingly gave Moore a few interviews when F/911 came out -- but every interview was a string of hostile questions challenging him. And much of the time the interview was followed by a negative, fact-free "review" of his movie.
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Mike Sulzer
Is that worse than asserting there are no terrorists, only 'militants' or worse, 'activists'? Is that worse than asserting that if 'those people over there' have interesting yet quaint and brutal traditions that it's not our business to interfere? This bland bizarre 'everything is everything' point of view that sets out to say there's no such thing as right or wrong, only the west's shame and guilt about it.
I see this all the time in England which has gone into multiculturalism in a rabid way. Everyone is a hyphenated national, everyone's cultural norms, whatever those are, are to be respected no matter how insane they are. And in the end all it does is wind up alienating people from one another as they become obsessed with the differences between their little ghetto world view and everyone else's.
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This has been going on longer than the Bushies
Hi Glenn,
Hey, they trashed my book when it came out too, with a lot of the similar blather (Wild to the Last: Environmental Conflict in the Clearwater Country, WSU Press, 1998). My book was about the beginnings of the latest round of forest preservation after the go-go logging years of the '80s. It also profiled the people who stopped the big corporations and the Forest Service-- basically dirt bags, people who appeared to be powerless, yet shut the USFS down.
That was just too much to bear for many mainstream reviewers-- the notion that the upper classes weren't in charge.
In the end, I compared the logging of our last forests with the Holocaust-- not so much in the sense of human catastrophe, but the cultural mechanisms of destruction. The fact is that Jewish people are educated, and have written a body of work about organized destruction that does not exist on any other subject, and when you read Andrew Goldhagen, he's telling all of us something about ourselves-- not just about the Nazis. And to ignore those lessons is to live in peril of repeating them.
This unglued quite a few reviewers, who then decided that my book was not a 'serious' book. I got the same kind of crap, on a smaller scale, as you are getting now. What many do not realize is that the country I wrote about, in Idaho, was a big part of the intellectual spawning ground of the current cretinous culture warriors.
10 years later, everything that I wrote in my book, predictively, has come true. In certain circles, the book is now considered a prophetic history and reflection on many things that have come to pass.
What you are doing is vital. You are shattering walls, breaking down the idiot complacency of the obvious, respected fools. Through all of this, the assholes will kick you, abuse you, and tell you that you don't matter. That MUST be expected.
But I can tell you, as an old warrior, you are one of the very best- better than I ever was. And I don't write you as another helpless person looking for you to save me, or this country. I haven't given up on my political causes. But I'm damn proud to keep company with you. You make me think that there might be enough of us to beat back the bastards.
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Who was it
that defined a liberal as "someone too fair-minded to take his own side in a fight"?
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@ bees
When we think of right and wrong, it isn't you we think of. You have no knees. (That's a fancy liberal way of referring to your lack of standing as a moral philosopher.)
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ondelette
It's all a data mining issue now. Everyone please do believe that there are ways to digest that much data, regardless of articles that circulate saying otherwise. And please do believe that they are doing much more than looking at just header information.
Seriously.. Why should I care?
I already have to let my employer examine my very bodily fluids in order to get or keep a decent job.
Why should looking at what I do or what I write deserve any more protection from intrusion than my bodily fluids?
Despite a little lip service to the contrary I really don't think anyone here is all that disturbed by having to piss in a cup.
The ship of protecting our privacy from unwarranted intrusion sailed a long time ago and most of you didn't give a fuck then.
Why should I care about your issues now?
Give me one really good reason..
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The Imbalance of Balance
I first noticed the imbalance of "balance" in the 90's surround the abortion issue. The "sensible" position was to find a "middle ground" between the two extremes.
One extreme wanted to ban all abortions for everyone, everywhere, forever. This extreme should have been called "anti-abortion" since that is the most accurate reflection of their position, but they were universally called "pro-life," even though, as a rule they didn't care about a person's life after they were born up to their death, at which point they started caring again.
The other "extreme" wanted abortions to be safe, legal, and affordable for any woman who wanted one. This "extreme" was called "pro-choice" which is a fairly accurate summary of the position.
Now if you think about it, the extreme opposite of the anti-abortion position would be a "pro-abortion" position: forced abortions for all pregnant women, in which case the pro-choice position is the real middle ground.
But because no one - not even in China - advocated such a position, the pro-choice position was that of the "extreme left" and so "serious," "reasonable" people set about finding a "middle ground" which was to restrict abortions for some people (the poor, minorities, foreigners, service-women overseas, teenagers) but not others (white, affluent, middle-class, the insured).
The result framing the debate thus is that the "middle ground" continually tacks to the right as the old middle ground becomes the new "extreme left."
Nowadays the salients issues revolve around things like torture, where one extreme says that the president to do whatever he wants, to anyway he wants in a time of war - and don't ya know, we're currently in the middle of righteous Forever War. The other "extreme" says that torture is wrong, people, war or no war. So obviously, "balanced" and "thoughtful" folk are hard at work finding a "middle ground": Torture for some (muslims (citizen or not) and assorted darkies) but no one else - yet.