Motus Mentis

Here’s Eric Hoffer, writing in 1975:

After all that we have seen with our own eyes there ought not to be a grownup person who is not contemptuous of the gibberish about an ideal society and does not look for the lineaments of a commissar in the features of an idealist loudmouth.

The trouble is that the young who nowadays want to make history are not interested in history. They are unbelievably ignorant of much that has happened in this terrible century. They will follow anyone who wants to clear the ground for a new world by sweeping away all that exists.

– Before the Sabbath, p. 105

More nanny-state idiocy from the Feds. Here.

In the past few days Heather Mac Donald has posted two essays on the jarring dissonance between mainstream coverage of race and violent crime and the underlying realities thereof. We hear all the time about the need for a “frank discussion of race in America”; perhaps this will help.

Read them here and here.

The comment-box is open.

Among the people I follow on Twitter is the popular comedian and writer Andy Borowitz, winner of the first National Press Club Award for humor. He pops up all over the place: you can read him in The New Yorker, at the Huffington Post, and in syndication in many major newspapers. He’s contributed to lots of TV shows, and turns up on screen all the time. Everybody in mainstream media loves this guy.

Not like that nasty Rush Limbaugh, who went right beyond the bounds of civil discourse a few weeks ago by calling Sandra Fluke, who at the time had just petitioned Congress to compel others to subsidize her sex life, a “slut”. How dare he? That’s just beyond the pale, and there was a good deal of stern tut-tutting from the Left about what is and isn’t permissible in a decent society. The President himself, Barack Obama, even called Ms. Fluke to tell her how badly he felt for her.

Now you may have heard that Dick Cheney, former U.S. Representative, White House Chief of Staff, Secretary of Defense, and Vice President, is recovering from a heart transplant.

Here’s a tweet posted this morning by Andy Borowitz:

All kidding aside about Dick Cheney, he really is a cocksucker.

As far as I know, this hilarious observation has caused no storm of outrage. Mr. Borowitz is of course free to say whatever he likes — and I realize that he is simply an entertainer, playing to an audience, and that japes like this are how he earns a crust. (The same, of course, could be said about Rush Limbaugh.) I repost his tweet here only to make clear that what you can and can’t get away with in the nation’s media depends very much on who you are, and on whether you insult approved targets — and there is no class of people more acceptable for all levels of vile derision than conservative white male demons like Dick Cheney. Imagine, if you can, Bill O’Reilly making the same tweet about Michelle Obama on the occasion of her recovery from life-threatening surgery, and the liveliness that would ensue.

An object at rest tends to remain at rest, I’m told, and I’ve been providing experimental confirmation for the past few days. Have no fear, though: just because we haven’t been chronicling the collapse of Western civilization as attentively as usual here at waka waka waka doesn’t mean it isn’t proceeding apace.

Still swamped here, with no time for a long post. At the top of the list of topics on my mind, though, is that insane Dharun Ravi thoughtcrime trial and verdict — in which an (admittedly unlikable) young man is facing 10 years in jail, a permanent felony record, and possible deportation for committing … a nasty little prank in which he spied on his roommate, in his own dorm, for a few moments. The central charge here is that he had impermissible thoughts — and it should be plain to everyone that this is nothing more than a show trial, meant to make a public example of Mr. Ravi, and to make very clear to all just what thoughts you can and cannot harbor in this age of “tolerance”. It is creeping totalitarianism, and all of you with any understanding of history, and with any awareness of just how rare and precious our fragile freedoms really are, should be getting very edgy right about now.

There are lots of rants I could link to here, but instead I’ll direct you to two (mostly) sensible posts by Jacob Sullum at Reason. They are here and here.

In a comment to yesterday’s post on l’affaire Fluke-Limbaugh, I linked to a pair of blog posts by University of Rochester professor Steven Landsburg (sent my way by Dennis Mangan). In the first, Professor Landsburg wrote:

[W]hile Ms. Fluke herself deserves the same basic respect we owe to any human being, her position ”” which is what’s at issue here ”” deserves none whatseover. It deserves only to be ridiculed, mocked and jeered. To treat it with respect would be a travesty. I expect there are respectable arguments for subsidizing contraception (though I am skeptical that there are arguments sufficiently respectable to win me over), but Ms. Fluke made no such argument. All she said, in effect, was that she and others want contraception and they don’t want to pay for it.

To his credit, Rush stepped in to provide the requisite mockery. To his far greater credit, he did so with a spot-on analogy: If I can reasonably be required to pay for someone else’s sex life (absent any argument about externalities or other market failures), then I can reasonably demand to share in the benefits. His dense and humorless critics notwithstanding, I am 99% sure that Rush doesn’t actually advocate mandatory on-line sex videos. What he advocates is logical consistency and an appreciation for ethical symmetry. So do I. Color me jealous for not having thought of this analogy myself.

There’s one place where I part company with Rush, though: He wants to brand Ms. Fluke a “slut’ because, he says, she’s demanding to be paid for sex. There are two things wrong here. First, the word “slut’ connotes (to me at least) precisely the sort of joyous enthusiasm that would render payment superfluous. A far better word might have been “prostitute’ (or a five-letter synonym therefor), but that’s still wrong because Ms. Fluke is not in fact demanding to be paid for sex. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) She will, as I understand it, be having sex whether she gets paid or not. Her demand is to be paid. The right word for that is something much closer to “extortionist’. Or better yet, “extortionist with an overweening sense of entitlement’. Is there a single word for that?

But whether or not he chose the right word, what I just don’t get is why the pro-respect crowd is aiming all its fire at Rush. Which is more disrespectful ”” his harsh language or Sandra Fluke’s attempt to pick your pocket? That seems like a pretty clear call to me.

Our second link was to Professor Landsburg’s next post (brilliantly titled “Contraceptive Sponges — how I wish I’d thought of that one), in which he examines, quite fairly and dispassionately, I think, the arguments for and against publicly subsidized contraception. All in all, there was nothing in either of these to object to in a society that claims to value healthy debate, I think.

But in today’s Best of the Web, James Taranto informs us that the president of Rochester University, Joel Seligman, was “outraged” to read Professor Landsburg’s opinion, and expressed his anger in an official denunciation on University letterhead.

We should hardly be surprised any more (after, for example, the pillorying of Lawrence Summers for expressing a perfectly reasonable hypothesis) to see such a response from the administration of an American university these days; departures from liberal orthodoxy are clearly unwelcome. (It seems fiitting, too, that this item should come along just a day after this comment in one of our recent posts on this topic.) No big deal here, really, as far as the tenured Professor Landsburg is concerned — though, as Mr. Taranto points out, this will give untenured faculty pause next time they think about weighing in on a public controversy with a heterodox political opinion. Mr. Taranto quotes Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds, who in a post of his own wrote:

“Seligman’s statement will have, and might as well have been intended to have, a chilling effect on the speech of faculty who are less eminent than Steven Landsburg.”

Professor Landsburg responded with another post, published yesterday, in which he reposts both a statement he made to the press (apparently an academic supporting Rush in this brawl was so newsworthy that he was besieged with press inquiries) and his letter to Joel Seligman.

All in all, worthwhile reading, I think, and I applaud Professor Landsburg for his even-handed and thoughtful approach throughout, which should be a model for us all (myself included).

P.S. After writing this post I went over to Lawrence Auster’s place to see if he had responded to our One-Eyed Man’s comments, and saw that he was all over this UR story as well.