Hollywood reaffirms its commitment to tolerance.

Relapsed Catholic follows up the explanation with the issue. Apparently, NBC aired a recent episode of its soon to be trashed sitcom "Committed", which featured the desecration of the Body of Christ as the source of zany humor. Michelle Malkin offers a number of links to the posts on the subject, including this one by The Anchoress who observes:

Donoghue is correct when he says this is outrageous - but I think he weakens his argument when he brings in the "...homosexuals (or some other protected group)," suggests the "please the boss" conspiracy and says this is "Catholic bashing". That just makes him sound like he's unhinged and bitter. Of COURSE there are "protected groups," but that doesn't matter. The left is immune to charges that they indulge in double standards. It doesn't phase them. They need to be finally be called what they are: out and out bigots towards Christians in general and Catholics in particular.

This is nothing so minimal as "Catholic bashing." This is an affront to what we believe is the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. I can think of only one being who would be served or pleased by such a thing.

I didn't see this episode or, for that matter, any episode of Committed. It looks like one of the many series destined for an early demise.

But I did see One Night at McCool's with John Goodman, Paul Reiser, Michael Douglas and Matt Dillon. Here is a plot synopsis to this fairly repulsive movie. There was one scene in the movie where John Goodman is chatting with a priest about his experience with the mysterious woman who is the focus of the movie. The priest wants a quick pop of booze. He looks around for something to pour the booze into but all he can find is a eucharistic chalice.

So, what the heck, he throws out whatever is in the chalice, gives it a quick wipedown and pours a shot into the chalice.

Honestly, I was fairly shocked with the whole scene. It was obviously played for laughs - ha ha ha, see the priest is so captivated by the story, and he needs a drink so bad, that he takes this supposedly sacred chalice, which everyone knows (wink, wink) is a load of hooey that no one not even a priest could believe in, so why not use it for a shot of bourbon. Besides it is cute and challenging to jape at the Catholic rituals and sacraments.

But, for anyone with any knowledge of the subject, it was jarring and incredible.

I can only imagine that for any faithful Catholic watching the "humor" of Committed, it was like slow torture.

Update: Here is the Church of the Masses post on the subject.

C of E objects to televising of Charles' second marriage.

Faute de Mieux posts on a Times article reporting that the "The royal wedding may be the first in modern times not to be televised after objections from Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury."

How quaint.

How odd. I would have thought that in an England where the mildest expression of religious sentiment by Tony Blair is met with reservations and disgust, the views of the Archbishop of Canterbury would have no traction with the BBC.

Also, Charles is no longer divorced; he's a widower since his wife is dead. There shouldn't be any religious impediment to his remarriage. Perhaps the impediment lies with Parker-Bowles?

Incidentally, this post doesn't change my traditional Irish Republican distaste for all things "royal," but this strange recurrence of concern for "scandal" by the C of E seems to come out of left field.

Peggy Noonan proposes a patron saint of the internet.

From her terrific column:

Why is St. Joseph Cupertino the obvious patron saint of the Internet? Because he flew through the air, lifted by truth. Because no establishment could keep him down. Because he empowered common people. Because they in fact saw his power before the elites of the time did. And because it could not be an accident that the center of the invention of the Internet, ground zero of Silicon Valley, is Cupertino, Calif., named for the saint centuries ago.

Was God in this? Of course. Does God do such things for no reason? He does not. Has the church recognized St. Joseph Cupertino as patron saint of the Internet? No. But the church was always slow to give him his due. If you want to tell the pope that St. Joseph should be patron saint, you can reach him at john_paul_II@vatican.va.

The whole column - ranging from Hunter S. Thompson to St. Joseph Cuptertino - is worth reading.

Fresno - The pulsing heart of high culture.

I spotted in the Fresno Bee that Leonard Nimoy will be in Fresno on March 5 and 6 to "narrate" Stravinsky for the Fresno Philharmonic. I've never heard of "narrating" a symphony, but, then, I'm culture deficient. The Philharmonic site explains:

Kodaly Dances of Galanta
Beethoven Incidental Music from Egmont
Stravinsky L'Histoire du Soldat
Mendelssohn Symphony No. 4, Italian

Mr. Nimoy will do narration for Beethoven’s Incidental Music from Egmont and Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat (The Soldier's Tale).

The concert should sell out.

Eat your heart out, Clovis.

Shades of that horrible Disney entry into science fiction.

I think it was "Black Hole" which featured Maximilllian Schell and a dive through a black hole into what looked like Hell. Anyhow, Catholic apologist Jimmy Akins posts on a mindwarping discovery of a "starless galaxy" featuring "dark matter."

And isn't reality weird. Because, as every lawyer knows, truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to be plausible.

I was going to post on this anyway because it fits the occaional oddball science/science fiction interest of this eclectic blog. But when the Ombudsgod pointed out that there were only two entities in the entire Google-explored blogoverse, I reckoned my opportunity to stake a claim to a slice of the action was definitely too much to pass up.

Lawsuit filed to invalidate Stem Cell Initiative.

Usually, I'm against these kinds of suits because they contradict democracy, but the $3 Billion (!!!) Stem Cell Initiative is such a bad idea that I'm hoping this one wins, which it probably won't.

Anyhow, here is a link to the article. The article says that the suit alleges that exempting California Institute for Regenerative Medicine members from some government conflict-of-interest laws is illegal. I like the response by the CIRG:

"Nearly 60 percent of the voters agreed and felt comfortable that there was ample oversight and accountability built into the initiative," institute spokeswoman Julie Buckner said. "The voters have every right to expect the work of this institute to proceed and it's critically important that the work of the institute does move forward to meet the mandate of the voters of California to find treatments and cures for disease."

Because, obviously, the voters actually read the initiative and pondered whether the oversight and accountability structures in the initiative were adequate.

I'd be interested in seeing a poll of how many voters actually read something other than the title.

Amazing, but they support the troops.

Best of the Web (scroll down to "Spot the Idiot") links to this New York Post article about a class of 6th Graders in New York who wrote demoralizing letters to an American soldier in Korea. To wit:

In an accompanying letter to Jacobs, Kunhardt (ed. note - the teacher) had written that the students "come from a variety of backgrounds and political beliefs, but unanimously support the bravery and sacrifice of American soldiers around the world."

"Support" was not the word that came to Jacobs' mind when he read the letters.

One girl wrote that she believes Jacobs is "being forced to kill innocent people" and challenged him to name an Iraqi terrorist, concluding, "I know I can't."

Another girl wrote, "I strongly feel this war is pointless," while a classmate predicted that because Bush was re-elected, "only 50 or 100 [soldiers] will survive."

But, certainly, one can "support the troops" while telling them that they've been duped by an idiot into killing innocent civilians in a war in which they will all die?

Isn't it amazing how "supporting the troops" looks like the propoganda that enemy nations pay good money to disseminate?

"Go long on tinfoil."

That is the advice from Just One Minute concerning the fevered conspiracy theorizing being generated on the blogleft with respect to the "James Guckert/Jeff Gannon" imbroglio.

The Guckert/Gannon matter seems to fit the knitting of the left blowing a gasket over the threat to its traditional monopoly control over the media. Gannon/Guckert is a small fry "journalist" who asked one question, which was loaded as far anti-leftward as traditional journalists load their questions anti-rightward. This breach of etiquette prompted a witch hunt that outed Guckert/Gannon as, inter alia, being gay, posing for gay pornography and being a gay escort. Maureen Dowd, who is a leading indicator of every fashionable idea from 1995, has a column devoted to the Guckert/Gannon kerfuffle.

And don't you love the people who fastidiously draw a line between private lives and public lives, when it comes to our highest elected official, who had a history of trading on the power of his elected office for sex with subordinates, blurring that line when it involves private citizens? If it is an issue of whether a president is leveraging the power imbalance of his elected office to have sexual congress in the White House, that's a purely private matter; on the other hand, it it's a gay conservative, hey, go ahead and disseminate the pictures far and wide.

Of course, gay baiting is an honored tradition on the left. For example, check out the comments to Cathy Siepps' post on the Estrich/Kinsley trainwreck where the thread is hijacked by David Ehrenstein into an extended spiral into the perfidy of Guckert/Gannon and a self-congratulatory post about how he was the one responsible for "outing" Andrew Sullivan's sexual preferences because Sullivan had the temerity to be gay and a conservative.

Ultimately, the fact that this silly, trivial and mean stuff captures the attention of the blogleft speaks volumes about the marginalization of left in general, and may explain why a Democrat on her party's "short-list" for the Supreme Court can sound like an eerie echo of Glenn Close.

Update: Wizbang and Protein Wisdom follow-up on the "tolerant liberals who despise judgmental conservatives but resort to the tactics of personal destruction" theme.

Per Wizbang:

It is only acceptable to use ones sexuality against someone if you are a liberal. A liberal can bash someone for being gay but if a conservative has the temerity to say that a family with a mother and a father is the best environment in which to raise a child, they are evil, bigoted hate-mongers. Doesn't everyone know the rules by now?

Per Protein Wisdom:

For the record, I think JD Guckert is probably being less than truthful to himself when he says that “he did not use a pseudonym to hide his past but because his real last name is hard to spell and pronounce.” Instead, I suspect he decided to use a pseudonymn to avoid the kind of thing we’re seeing now—the very public airing of his unusual past should he ever gain notoriety as a journalist. The irony, of course, is that the people who have publically outed him are the supposed champions of gay rights, which (and I’m no expert here, but I am nothing if not observant) evidently don’t extend to the rights of gays not to have their sexual preferences and peccadillos made public (or pictures of their *****(Ed. note - word omitted) released to news organizations)—and especially to the rights of gays to disagree with the official gay rights platform as decided upon by self-appointed gay-rights leaders and activists who feel that the legalization of same-sex marriage is not a debatable policy issue, but is instead a right that cannot be questioned. Yknow—because of the HYPOCRISY.

(Edited to remove a word that would attract the wrong sorts.)

Great moments in Liberalism, indeed.

Is there anything more fearsome than a grammarian on a mission from God?

I thought that the comments to this Grammar Whores post were particularly amusing. Although the idea of a "Harry Potter themed wedding" certainly does raise issues beyond syntax and spelling, such as why whether wedding licenses should be issued after a basic intelligence test.

Why Free Speech is worth defending.

Because it let's us shine the light on the inhabitants of the fever swamp fringe, like this Sacramento couple who hanged an American soldier in effigy on their house. And who also express their deep hatred of a number of groups, such as the police and Israel.

Holmes said that the antidote to "bad" speech is more speech.

So bring it on.

So for Lent I decided to give up the use of the left side of my face.

Actually, Ash Wednesday I developed a slight case of Bell's Palsy, which is viral inflamation of one of the nerves that run the facial muscles. It is more annoying than anything else; it's an experience not unlike the after-effects of a visit to the dentist for a shot of novacaine. I was inclined to use my standard approach to medical issues - i.e., ignore it and it should self-correct - but the web site I looked at used the dire words "residual effects," which it said could be minimized through anti-virals and steroids. So, I burned a favor and had a client set up an appointment with a neurologist, who confirmed my secretaries diagnosis of "Bell's Palsy" and prescribed the drugs.

The palsy appears to be clearing up, but it does underscore the fact that we all eventually reach an age when we find that our body parts are randomly either falling off or not working.

But how about those anti-virals? A product of our "Manhattan project" approach to the AIDS crisis, antivirals impede the generation of new viruses, rather than wiping them out in place like anti-bacterial drugs.

And as long as we're on subjects medical, Ith has been touting the new medical show "House" (Tuesdays, 9 pm, Fox). I caught it a few weeks ago and I was impressed with the show and, more particularly, with Hugh Laurie's performance as a grizzled, middle-aged, quirky physician, which comes off as a surprise inasmuch as I previously associated him with the dimbulb aristocrat Bertie Wooster. (Sigh. It appears that the grizzled, middle-aged Hugh Laurie is two months older than me.) Nonetheless, House seems to be worth watching.

Batten down the hatches, the Da Vinci Code storm is coming.

Get Religion predicts a major storm of controversy about the upcoming movie and suggests that the media will boil the controversy into the conventional theme of progressive artists attacked by small minded religious zealots.

Hunter S. Thompson is dead.

Steve Sailer has a link. According to the Washington Post, Thompson died in an "apparent" suicide.

I guess that Thompson's real celebrity comes from the Doonesbury character "Uncle Duke." I understand that Thompson was not pleased with his incorporation into the Doonesbury universe; on one occasion it was reported that Thompson said that if he ever caught up with Gary Trudeau he would "rip his lungs out."

A noble sentiment and certainly words to remember him by.

Susan Estrich is losing her mind (again).

This is almost a piece with the famous liberal meltdowns of the last year, including Lawrence ("You're a creepy liar")O'Donnell and Tom ("Shut up") Shales. In this case Susan Estrich - last seen suggesting in a published column that the Democrats should base their campaign on the possibility that George Bush might "fall off the wagon" - takes prominent liberal Michael Kinsley to task for not having enough women columnists at the L.A. Times. Except that what set her off was a column by a women writer on the subject of the marginalization of women writers because of their obsession with feminism. So what Estrich really means is that she wants more "women" writers - i.e., writers who share her agenda whatever their sex.

Kinsley's response is priceless:

What seems to have popped her cork, however, is an article by a woman that we did run. I'm sorry that she has "never heard of" Charlotte Allen, but I think it may be possible to be a woman even if Susan Estrich has never heard of you. Even a member of the Independent Women's Forum can nevertheless be a woman, perhaps.

Incidentally, here is a link to Charlotte Allen's follow-up posts on the IWF blog. Apparently, Estrich raised Kinsley's ire by bringign his health into the discussion' Kinsley is fighting Parkinson's Disease. Here is the link to the Washington Examiner's publication of their e-mail exchange because (a) who doesn't like a good flame war and (b) we all need to be reminded that e-mails are forever and can be published anywhere.

You have to admire those compassionate and tolerant liberals who are so very committed to helping the poor, the minorities and the disabled, so long as they recognize who their patrons are and stay on the reservation.

By the way, Estrich was touted as a possible Supreme Court appointment in the hypothetical Gore or Kerry administration, and for that matter in any future Democrat administration.

Something to keep in mind during the next election.

Update: Cathy Seipp - another "non-women" women IWF/NRO writer - offers her take on the Estrich kerfuffle. Unfortunately, she offers this observation, which bids fair to distract my attention from anything that I hear Estrich say in the future, so I think the image should be spread as far and as wide as possible. Siepp writes:

My friend Lewis is angry that I just hung up on him to finish this entry, and as everyone knows, I never like to offend men. So to placate him, here's his crack about Susan Estrich, from when he watched the election at my house:
He was disturbed by the sound of Susan Estrich's voice on Fox News: "Turn her down!" he yelled.

"It's interesting and kind of a shame," he added thoughtfully, "that for all the many opportunities open to a woman of such accomplishment and background -- editor of the Harvard Law Journal, TV pundit, etc. -- that one is forever closed to her: Phone sex operator."

There, if that doesn't ruin her gravitas and auctoritas as a political commentator on Fox, I don't know what would.

I know it's an image I'd need therapy to sublimate.

Savant, Philosopher and Apostle of Tolerance offers that "Christians have a neurological disorder.

[Via Relapsed Catholic.]

Bill Maher went on a full blown rant on Scarborough Country during which he shared his view that religious belief was tantamount to believing in fairy tales, that Christians had a neurological disorder and that he was ashamed of being an American in a country which had been "taken over" by Evangelicals who did not believe in science or rationality.

I saw this episode and my chief thought was how boring and cliched Maher was. Certainly, he prides himself on being "daring" and "politically incorrect" but this is shallow stuff that most of go through when we're about 17 years old. Likewise, Maher's entire career at this point requires him to stake out positions like this so that he can merit the protection and support of the evangelical bashers who have influence in the media.

As for rationality, I rather doubt that Maher could spell Thomas Aquinas if you spotted him every letter but the "q." Clearly, he's never sullied his vision by reading Augustine, Aquinas or any of the pillars of Western Civilization whose commitment to rationality and logic provided the foundations for the science he so prizes and which emerged only out of a Christian society.

From the "Truly Weird Stuff" Department.

[Via Jane Galt.]

Black Boxes predict the future.

And isn't it weird that these "random event generators" have the same pop-celebrity/Western-centric bias that the researchers have?

Earth will not end tomorrow; women, minorities suffer most.

A Voyage to Arcturus posts on a gamma ray burst from SGR 1806-20 that will not extinguish Life As We Know It because it is a safe distance away. But he points out that there are more than enough stars lurking close enough to keep us wondering What Is Out There.

Cue Twilight Zone theme.

Science explains the mysteries of the universe.

Science Daily News reports that alcohol drinkers are three times as likely to die from injuries.

I understand they are hard at work on the dispositive federal study on the drinking/getting pregnant connection.

Iraq Election Results.

Quicker, more informative and without having to guess at the buried bias, Patrick Ruffini provides an analysis on Iraq's election results.

Quick summary: it looks like democracy.

America is better than Canada "in many ways."

[Via Kathy Shaidle.]

Michael Coren takes Canadians to task for their condescending attitude about their neighbor.

Professionalism and Credentials.

Eason Jordan has obviously been harboring a dark view of the American military for a long time. At Davos he let it slip among people he assumed would share his view of things. He was largely correct; the commentator shut down the discussion purportedly because there was no spokesman to defend the American military, but probably so that Jordan couldn't plant a few more rounds in his foot. Jordan was allowed to have his biases, but they couldn't go public.

Of course, those biased played out in the real world. Mithridate at the Ombudsgod highlights all the stories that Eason allowed to be "spiked."

The story the media should be pursuing is the complete disfunction in the media, and in particular one media outlet that distorted the news in order to protect access.

And, yet, the story the media is pursuing is the "trophy hunting aspect" of the blogosphere.

Blogging as Therapy.

I Hate My Flatmate has a fairly comprehensible list of reasons that the anonymous blogger with an unrevealed gender hates his/her flatmate.

One of the stranger contributions to the web, but it seems to attract a fair amount of traffic and comment.

Because back before blogging, this kind of lie actually stuck.

Heck, I remember the '80s and the claim that former Secretary of the Interior James Watts purportedly claimed that he was in favor of depleting natural resources because the "Second Coming of Jesus Christ was imminent." This story was repeated explicitly or implicitly by the mainstream media for years before a minor samizdat blowback developed to the effect that that wasn't what Watts had said.

Consider the difference today. Bill Moyers reinjects this lie into public discussion, probably because he - like me - remembers it from the first time around. Incidentally, Moyers column is completely ignorant bigotry shotgunned against Evangelicals. Since I am not an Evangelical, the fact that I'm pointing that out should be some evidence that it's "over the top" and Evangelicals have a right to complain about Moyers and the Star Tribune, which published this "Protocols of the Elders of Oklahoma."

Powerline gets a phone call from Watts and distributes it to world. Kaithy Shaidle at Recovering Liberal provides a post-mortem on how "a fictional acencdote leaped from the internet to the media.

Powerline reports that Moyers called Watt and "apologized profusely."

What a difference from the 80s.

UCLAW Photoblogging.

Check out this entry from Professor Bainbridge.

As a former law student at UCLA, I can't begin to describe how satisfying this is.

A Definitive History of the Cole-Goldberg Diatribe.

A Little Reason provides a very reasoned and thoughtful deconstruction of the recent dialogue between Jonah Goldberg and Juan Cole on whatever their arguing about - which is frankly unclear due to Cole's reframing the debate as being whether Jonah Goldberg is a chicken-hawk killer.

Incidentally, the term "diatribe" is used in a non-pejorative sense. While "diatribe" currently carries with it a sense of "fulmination" or "acrimony," originally it meant "a learned discussion."

And while I'm on a "word wonk" binge, I've been seeing more people refer to "no nothings." My understanding is that this is a reference to "know nothing," a political party which was current in the early Nineteenth Century.

Oh, for Heaven's Sake.

No wonder the historically illiterate who couldn't place the 30 Years War in the right century if you spotted them a "1" and a "6" feel free to lecture me on their eclectic knowledge of Giordano Bruno. The Science Channel documentary on the Search for Alien Planets just recounted in graphic detail - complete with an actor being gagged and tied to a pyre - a story about how Giordano Bruno, a "philosopher," was burned at the stake for speculating that all other stars had planets and those planets had life. The voice of Jonathon Frakes solemny intoned something to the effect that "pull on one thread and the Catholic church would be threatened. Would the other planets have their Jesus?"

This is all sheer nonsense. There is no historical evidence that establishes why Bruno was burned. If I were a betting person, I'd wager it had something to do with his writing anti-Catholic tracts in Tudor England before he left or was ejected from that haven for "speculating" about reincarnation, and for saying obnoxious things about Oxford scholars.

Of course, none of that would fit the conventional trope about the superstitious medieval church repressing natural philosophy.

Well, at least we know where the great resurgence of historical interest is coming from.

40 Ways to Improve Your Lent.

[Via Eve Tushnet.]

Numbers 1, 5, 11, 14 and 34 look worthwhile; Number 16 looks like a Communio activity - and we should also watch The Mission; Implementing Number 8 would pretty quickly lead to bankruptcy.

Legal Tips and Techniques: Homeowners Insurance may provide coverage for blogging-related torts.

All competent business litigation attorneys should have some knowledge that Homeowner's Insurance is like a carnival grab bag. Homeowner's policies contain all kinds of apparently useless coverages such as Yak bite coverage everywhere outside of Mongolia and Dengi fever coverage limited to Utah. As we learned from Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity these kinds of "come ons" - such as paying double for "accidental" deaths occuring on public transportation - are sales gimmick.

But every now and again they do pay off. Over Christmas I found coverage to pay for a client's legal expenses against a malicious prosecution action in a Homeowner's policy. Likewise, I hope to find coverage for a "defamation" case in an agricultural equivalent of Homeowner's policy. The trick is that Homeowner's policies provide an endorsement for "personal injury," which is operationally defined as a clutch bag of activities that bloggers can be accused of, including defamation, invasion of privacy and the other past times that keep us awake late at night turning out turgid prose. In fact, my experience with the "malicious prosecution" case from December caused me to casually ask my Homeowner's insurer to include the "personal injury" endorsement on my January renewal at the rate of $7.00 per annum, which essentially makes me street legal.

The Volokh Conspiracy points out a wrinkle in Homeowner's coverage, to wit, it's coverage intended solely for amateurs. If you have a "pay pal" feature on your site or take advertising revenues, your insurance carrier can probably decline coverage when you need it.

The perspective of history.

Victor Davis Hanson dismisses the most recent claims that the United States is about to "collapse." Check out this paragraph:

All civilizations erode, but few citizenries are as sensitive to the signs of decay as Americans, who constantly innovate, experiment, and self-critique in a fashion unknown anywhere else. When we develop a class system based on British aristocratic breeding, accent, and social paralysis, or sink into a multicultural cauldron like the endemic violence of an India or Africa, or cease believing in either God or children like an Amsterdam or Brussels, or require the state coercion of a China to maintain harmony, or become a racialist state such as Japan, then it is time to worry.

I actually read Paul Kennedy's The Decline and Fall of Great Powers and was persuaded by its description of America's impending decline from "Great Power" status. I used to argue the Kennedy line in office debates on America's future.

Of course, that was in 1988. Ironically, the Soviet Union was the "great power" that collapsed - for some reason, Kennedy missed that one - and before America emerged as the world's "hyperpower." I don't think any book has been so quickly and thoroughly refuted, albeit it remains a great read for its analysis abou the reasons for the decline of Spain in Seventeenth Century.

As a committed empiricist, I'm inclined to go with Hanson this time around.

Donnie Darko.

[Via Relapsed Catholic.]

Mark Gauvreau Judge stumbled onto the obscure flick "Donnie Darko" and became "obsessed" with its Christian symbolism. He makes some interesting points and may be right. "Donnie Darko" is certainly an oddly captivating movie. I watched it as a rental and couldn't make heads or tails of its plot line, but I found it weirdly compelling. After I listened to the director explain the movie, I think I had a better grasp of what happened in the movie but I'm not sure even the director understood what he was trying to say.

Civility and the "two-way street."

Wretchard at Belmont Club seems to be close to the inchoate idea I was gesturing at with the "'Shut up,' he argued" post, supra. The inchoate sense I had problems expressing orbited around the many occasions during this last year when liberal media types have virtually "melted down" into embarrassing name calling fits. I saw the Lawrence O'Donnell implosion, which was a tantrum that I wouldn't expect of someone over the age of 6. Likewise, the desciption of Shales yelling at Medved to "stop it" is of the same genus.

So, what give? After all for decades sacrificial conservatives have been teed up on the national media to hear "the words they've spoken twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools" and I have never seen one descend into the frothing incoherence as that associated Matthews, O'Donnell or Shales. During the halcyon years of liberal dominance, conservatives would take this kind of thing as the price of getting a national platform. Witness, for example, William F. Buckley's legendary self-effacing style.

Wretchard offers this explanation vis a vis the current Jonah Goldber/Juan Cole contretremp:

In truth, the ground for civilized debate has been shrinking progressively from September 11. The sharp animosity that has sprung up between the Left and Conservatives may be a kind of emergent behavior arising from the wide-ranging changes that have taken place since that fateful day. One could hardly expect that the end of the Cold War, the decline of Europe, the ascendancy of India and China, the collapse of the UN and the advent of terrorism would leave political relations between Left and Right unchanged. But it was the declining vigor of Marxist thought coupled with new conservative ideas that poured the most fuel on the flames. Discourse between Left and Right could only remain civil for so long as Conservatives remained meek or had no counter-pulpit. The weakening of the traditional media and the stresses caused by war have created a kind of 'play' in the system which now allow unchained weights to crash about. In that sense, there is nothing surprising about Juan Cole calling Jonah Goldberg names. One gets the feeling he has been calling people names all his professional life; and I think Mr. Goldberg can handle it. What has changed is that, with the decline of the MSM, there is nothing which prevents incivility from becoming a two-way street. And I'm not sure either the Left or the total system can contain the stress.

(emphasis added.)

This explanation sounds right. Shales was authentically shocked that his opinion on The Passion was being challenged. O'Donnell was authentically shocked that the Swift Boat veterans weren't derailed by the monopoly media. To quote Justice Posner's paraphrase of John Stuart Mill:

As John Stuart Mill pointed out in On Liberty, when one's ideas are not challenged, one's ability to defend them weakens. Not being pressed to come up with arguments or evidence to support them, one forgets the arguments and fails to obtain the evidence. One's position becomes increasingly flaccid, producing the paradox of thought that is at once rigid and flabby. And thus the academic left today.

And, it would seem, the media elite left as well.

Loss of unemployment benefits for refusing to work in "sex industry."

[Via Res Publica.]

Here is the Snopes entry on the purported story about the German woman who faced the loss of unemployment benefits for refusing to go to work in a brothel. Snopes points out that the story was expanded via a "game of telephone" into a more sensationalistic story.

What is interesting, however, is that the original sources noted that such a loss of benefits was a "technical possibility under current laws." It seems like that is worth an eyebrow raise in and of itself. Moreover, it's not like we haven't seen logic and principle being used to hegemonize sentiment and morality in the past.

"Shut up," he argued.

Disputations also noted logic-impaired review of President Bush's inaugural address. He also made a passing reference to Shales hit and run critique of the Passion of the Christ, wherein he concluded that Gibson had a parking space reserved in Hell. A quick google search turned up this post by Penraker memorializing a dialogue between TV critic Tom Shales and movie critic Michael Medved on the Passion of the Christ. According to Penraker, after being countered on a specious point, Shales was reduced to telling Medved to "stop it."

The post is in May of 2004. well before the celebrated melt-downs of Lawrence O'Donnell, Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann, but the tone is similar; the sound of traditional prerogative being threatened.

Black History Month.

California Conservatives for Truth has a few historical tidbits that probably won't make their way into any PSAs.

History, truth and expertise.

Jonah Goldberg has been taken to task by Middle-eastern scholar Juan Cole, who thinks that Goldberg has no right to comment on human nature because he doesn't speak Arabic. Goldberg has a nice response and links to this Robert Conquest essay which commemorates the major dysfunctions of major Soviet experts.

The Gay Lincon Myth.

Matt Kaufman has a solid essay on why "the latest research" should be viewed with skepticism.

Sour Grapes.

Tom Shales in the Washington Post goes around the bend in the level of hit and run sneers about President Bush's State of the Union address. He's not being subtle or clever. Frankly, he sounds petulant and irrelevant.

Update: Joe's Dartblog notes Shales' nasty tone and offers a comparison with Shales' review of a Clinton State of the Union speech where Shales comes across look a swooning groupy.

Dialoguing wiht Evil.

Da Goddess dresses down a Communist.

The Perfect Nietzschian Holiday.

[Via The Corner.]

Roger Ebert calls Groundhog Day "a great movie."