Posted 5:09 PM by Floyd

Woo-hoo! Champeen of the world!

Posted 4:33 PM by Floyd

Our Steadfast Ally

Here is an editorial published in The Daily Times of Pakistan:

We fail to see why anyone in the West should quibble with what Dr Mohammad has said. Clearly, what has caused the uproar are his remarks about the Jewish ‘control of the world’. And pray, how is he wrong on that count? Is it any secret that there is a very powerful Jewish lobby in the United States that all but controls that country’s political system? Is it a secret that without the unstinting support of the United States, Israel could not have survived and gone from strength to strength? Is it any secret that the Nixon administration resorted to the biggest airlift in Oct 1973 since the crisis over Berlin after the then Israeli premier Golda Meir rushed to Washington in the face of advancing Egyptian armour? Is it any secret that the United States has killed (or compelled members to water down) every single resolution the United Nations Security Council has tried to bring against Israel? Is it any secret that the United States has multiple joint weapons development programmes with Israel? Is it any secret that scores of American politicians have seen their political careers come to an end at the hands of the Jewish lobby and Jewish money? Is it any secret that a sizeable number of Washington’s neo-cons are Jews? Is it also any secret that they pushed the United States into a war with Iraq and the reshaping of the Middle East, an enterprise for which they had prepared a blueprint back in 1995, much before the events of September 11, 2001?

Does it make you feel better to reflect on the fact that Pakistan has nuclear weapons?

(Link courtesy of Oliver Kamm.)

Posted 3:22 PM by Floyd

Yesterday while waiting to play bridge at the Palo Alto club, I read a copy of Sports Illustrated. Something horrible happened to SI since I last read the magazine: It turned into Time! Same fonts. Same layout. Same two-page ads for middle-aged-person-relief medicine. Same cloying, simpering thirty-word letters to the editor. Here is a sample (which I quote from memory):

As a longtime admirer of SI swimsuit editions, I must say that Mia Hamm tops them all. Nomar really has something special!

What on earth motivated this person to submit this drivel?! "What shall I do today? Oh, I'll let hundreds of thousands of people know that I like Mia Hamm. And titties."

SI's decay is horrible, but it does make me less pessimistic about media concentration. Gregg Easterbrook was fired from ESPN, which is owned by Disney, which also owns Miramax, which released Kill Bill, the movie he pilloried. Lawrence Lessig opined:

But [if ESPN] fired Easterbrook because Easterbrook criticized the owner, that’s an offense to society, whatever the injustice to Easterbrook — at least when fewer and fewer control access to media. No doubt, anti-semitism has done infinitely greater harm than misused media mogul power. But if firing your critics becomes the norm in American media, then there will be much more than insensitivity to anti-semitism to worry about in the future.

Yes, it's a problem for me, the TMQ fan, when Easterbrook is canned from ESPN. But it's a bigger problem for ESPN. Easterbrook is a funny and engaging writer with a unique style; someone is sure to pick him up. My disgust with the Easterbrook affair is such that I refuse to watch ESPN, or visit their web site. Similarly, SI's degeneration into generic goo is more their problem then mine. There's plenty of smart sports writing in the world. (I wonder if people subscribe to SI solely for the swimsuit edition. Hey guys: Did you hear that there is porn on the internet?)

Posted 8:46 PM by Floyd

I spend a lot of time criticizing the San Jose Mercury News. I saw this headline on the Merc's editorial page:

Hateful words

MALAYSIAN LEADER'S COMMENTS DESERVE CONDEMNATION, NOT APPLAUSE

The hateful remarks of Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad this week dealt a breathtaking body blow to tolerance and human decency.

and was hoping that I could praise them for the editorial:

...

The hateful remarks of Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad this week dealt a breathtaking body blow to tolerance and human decency.

In saying that ``Jews rule the world,'' he repeated the kind of vile rhetoric that sparked the Holocaust.

In saying Jews invented ``communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong,'' he issued a rallying cry for the renewed persecution of Jews.

In saying ``1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews,'' he made the case for a global war against the Jewish people.

Shockingly, his hate-filled diatribe was greeted by a standing ovation by his audience of 57 leaders of Islamic nations, many of them U.S. allies.

Mahathir deserves only contempt. He should be censured in the clearest terms by the leaders of all civilized nations.

...

Everything was going fine until the last two paragraphs. I should have known that it is impossible for a liberal to criticize a member of a minority without some sort of caveat or apology:

Neither President Bush nor other Western leaders are inciting hatred against Muslims.

But when Army Lt. Gen. William ``Jerry'' Boykin, an evangelical Christian who is prone to describing the war against terror in religious terms, says of a Muslim fighter, ``I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew my God was a real God and his was an idol,'' he is insulting Islam. When the Pentagon appoints Boykin to lead the war against terror, the U.S. is sending a message to the Muslim world that it is leading a Crusade against Islam.

Granted, Boykin is not America's president and he made his remarks in non-official settings. But when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld defends Boykin, as he did Friday, he is merely allowing the hateful Mahathir to point the finger back at the U.S. and say ``See?''

What on Earth do Boykin's Christian beliefs have to do with a Muslim's hatred of Jews? You said Muthahir deserved only contempt and should be censured. Then stop making excuses for him.

Posted 5:15 PM by Floyd

I don't usually blog topics covered by Instapundit. But I would be remiss if I did not write about the firing of New Republic writer-cum-football analyst-cum-blogger Gregg Easterbrook.

I shall resist the temptation to make any one of a number of snarky observations: Whether Easterbrook has changed his mind about ESPN's treatment of Rush Limbaugh; whether ESPN could have found more deserving targets when combatting anti-Semitism; whether anyone should bother reading ESPN given that a writer could reasonably fear being punished for criticizing, say, the Anaheim Mighty Ducks?

Let's focus on broader and more important issues:

• The culture war -- by which I mean the battle to eradicate crudity, sex, and violence from television, movies, and music -- is officially over. It has of course been over for a long time, just as Rome was defunct long before the official expiry listed in history books. But just as the official act that ended the Roman Empire was the German king Odoacer's dismissal of his puppet Roman emperor in 476, so October 2003 will be remembered as the date when the culture war breathed its final breath.
  
  Consider: A well-known and respected political writer criticizes a movie which contains excessive gory violence, and no redeeming cultural values. ("No redeeming cultural values" is a judgement proclaimed by the movie itself; said movie's stated purpose is to recall earlier fight-porn movies while providing an order of magnitude more mayhem.) Attention is drawn to an unfortunate side note in this criticism which offends an ethnic group. But at no time is the denunciation of the movie considered worthy of comment. The people involved with the making of the movie offer no defense; this is because there is not the slightest expectation that a defense is required.
  
  
• Easterbrook's firing shows us why political correctness is destructive and immoral. Political correctness is evil not because people are punished for what they say, but because the punishment is entirely out of proportion to the offense.
  
  Easterbrook's meandering and half-hearted apology shows that he is still trying to come to grips with the idea that he has ceased to become an entertaining football writer; society now expects that if he comes near a mirror, he shall recoil like Dr. Jekyll seeing himself as Mr. Hyde in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. One can imagine his thoughts: "What on earth is going on? I'm not a Protocols-of-the-Elders-of-Zion conspiracy nut like the head of the Festive Fezzes. Wait ... not writing TMQ anymore ... just call him the Prime Minister of Malaysia."
  
  The previous politically correct lynching occurred just two weeks ago, when Rush Limbaugh said on ESPN that Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb was overrated because the media wanted to see a black quarterback do well. Note that Limbaugh did not say that McNabb could not play well because he was black. He did not say that the media was biased against whites. Limbaugh criticized the pro-McNabb media for being too well-intentioned to make a realistic appraisal of McNabb's playing abilities.
  
  Limbaugh was fired that weekend.
  
  
• Those who live by the sword, die by the sword. When Trent Lott said that America would have been better off if then-Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond had been elected president in 1948, there was an immediate cry for his head. Nowhere was this outcry louder than in the blogosphere -- and there was an unseemly campaign to get Lott fired just to demonstrate the power of the blogosphere. Okay, here's your power of the blogosphere: Easterbrook writes something unfortunate on his blog and is summarily dismissed from his ESPN gig. Are you happy now?
  
  In his penultimate TMQ column -- no link, for obvious reasons -- Easterbrook said of Ohio State running back Maurice Clarett that the NFL should "ruin him if necessary." What was Clarett's offense? Clarett did not, like Raider Bill Romanowski, punch a teammate in the eye, breaking his socket and ending his career. Unlike Raven Ray Lewis, he was not present -- and formally charged with murder -- when a man stabbed another man to death. He did not, like University of Nebraska star Lawrence Phillips, drag his girlfriend down several flights of stairs.
  
  Maurice Clarett was a star athelete who helped to generate money and fame for Ohio State. He was paid, like a medieval serf, in kind; he was given a free education, but was not allowed to receive money from the university or a third party. While perpetrating the fiction that he had any interest in college, he was caught cheating on his exams. Clarett is attempting to leave college for professional football, and has filed suit against the NFL to force them to lower their age limit.
  
  Now Clarett does not seem like a particularly nice person. But why should he be forced to participate in the sham that he has anything in common with the average college student? For his attempt to introduce some honesty in sports, a 20-year-old is to be ruined? Easterbrook is currently about halfway to ruin. He still has his New Republic gig, and I hope he keeps it -- but it would not be surprising if he were to be fired from that job too. Maybe he will think twice about casually expressing his hope for others' destruction.