Ezra Klein: Yes. Bad People Are Indeed Bad.

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February 06, 2006

Yes. Bad People Are Indeed Bad.

Post like this are so stupid. Yes, I think it's bad that religious fundamentalists overseas are having conniptions about a set of cartoons. I think it bad when religious fanatics anywhere get all fanatical about perceived provocations in the media. I think it bad when Christians cancel TV shows and declare a counteroffensive against the made-up war on Christmas. I think fanatics are bad. And while various folks will unleash spittle-flecked tirades for the perceived equivalence I'm drawing, so be it. I tend to think fanatics are fanatics and my readers are smart enough to draw their own conclusions when nutcases attack. That I haven't dedicated 60 outraged posts to it isn't confirmation that I think it unimportant, but that I think my opinion on it derivative.

Meanwhile, I ran a quick search on Tigerhawk's blog. Two years of archives and not one mention of the word "uninsured." Now, using his methods, that means he doesn't care about the 46 million Americans lacking access to basic medical care. That, or he just doesn't focus on health issues.

I am not The New York Times. I have no obligation to "all the news that's fit to print." My guiding light is "something interesting to say." That religious fanatics freaking out over cartoons is undesirable didn't make the grade. Indeed, my only worthwhile comment on the situation is that I wish all the righties grasping for their oxygen masks over this outrage were a tenth as annoyed when domestic religious movements trip out in reaction to perceived insults. As it is, the same kids currently condemning the rioting extremists overseas tend to side with the screaming theocrats around the corner.

So there's my position: consistency. And yes, I think the Muslim rioters are worse than the Christian press hounds, but I think attempts force culture to conform to dogma should be opposed universally.

February 6, 2006 | Permalink

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» No Blood for Ink from Parenthetical Ellipses Redux
Ezra Klein, whom I really should read regularly, responds to charges from Right Blogistan that citizens of Left Blogistan have been ignoring the violent protests resultant from a Danish newspaper publishing offensive cartoons of Muhammed. My blogread... [Read More]

Tracked on Feb 7, 2006 9:41:00 AM

Comments

I tend to think fanatics are fanatics

Very true, and their actions are not determined by race or religion, but by the level of perceived alienation from the dominant culture and its decision-making processes.

Americans - and to a lesser extent Europeans - are able to spend quite a bit of their lives without thinking of most of the world's countries. The reverse is not true. The USA, and to a greater extent every day, Europe, is pretty much on the minds of everyone else in the world every day. For the Muslim world, America's influence and presence is often felt and seen in the form of sanctions, bombs, invasions, and propped-up dictatorships like Saudi Arabia, Saddam whom we supplied and supported in the 1980's and the Taliban for whom we did the same. You see, even though we forget what we have done, other countries are not so absent-minded.

The Mohammed cartoons are seen, then, as an attack by the dominant Western, Christian culture against Islam and Eastern Culture. Remember, even though Americans like to portray Europe as ultra-secular, many nations still have a state Christian Church; Denmark is one of those. Since Muslims feel alienated from this dominant culture, their response is going to be much more vigorous than the response from Concerned Women for America or Focus on the Family.

Those who have bombed abortion clinics and murdered doctors are examples of the growing sense of alienation among some of America's religious fanatics. Fred Phelps and his brood are another example, though they are more circus/carnivalesque than anything else. However, if the Westboro Baptist Church survives the current generation, look for them to go underground and become violent.

And, when this country finally breaks free of the religous right and they cease to be able to cancel those TV shows or elect their candidates or have Bill O'Reilly channel their mental pathologies for them, they will become violent as well. Not all of them, certainly, but then not every Muslim is violent. But for every one of the American Christian fanatics who does become violent, there will be two who tut-tut in public while privately supporting them, even to the point of providing aid. This much we should know from every such conflict in the world, from the current Muslim problems to the Irish not so long ago.

Posted by: Stephen | Feb 6, 2006 1:45:08 AM

The Syrian fanatics were not alienated from Syrian society but rather employed by the Syrian government.

I will defend to the death the right of misled abortion protesters to protest legal abortion. I will defend with words only the right of Islamic nutbags to burn Danish flags. I heartily condemn the burning of embassies. I will eat Danish cheese. I will drink even more Danish beer.

Where did they get all those Danish flags? Where can I get more Danish beer?

Tigerhawk has some kind of point. The Left was less responsive the the Cartoon-Jihad than the Right or even the Center. This is noteworthy. It may even be that the Left has the right tack: Ignore a pest and he or she may go away faster. Nevertheless, the difference is worth noting.

It is not at all clear to me that "Fanatics are fanatics". That is, that all fanatics are equal in some sense. Fanatics in government are different. Especially if they get their hands on nukes and seem likely to use them. GW Bush is religious and a tad loopy but not a fanatic. How does he feel about hybrid cars?

How about the absolutists who say "Attempts force culture to conform to dogma should be opposed universally".

The whole anti-cartoon movement puts Islam in a very bad light. The cartoons themselves don't insult Islam as much. I think we'd all feel better about Islamic radicals if their signs didn't say "Death to Denmark" but "Sinus Trouble to Denmark".

Posted by: Warren | Feb 6, 2006 4:05:40 AM

Nice one, Ezra. Funny how the it's always the righty bloggers playing the "you silence is deafening" games when the attentions of their own side is so selective and moving in lockstep.

As for Warren, the lefty bloggers did not spend a lot of time dwelling on this issue because, like Ezra said, it was a fairly simple story. this is not a factor of how regrettable the events are -- there are a lot of news happening every day, both here and overseas, and each individual blogger covers what he or she feels like is most interesting to him or have the most to say about. Most liberal bloggers I know blogged a little about it, and moved on. The question is really why the Right Wing blogs are so obsessed by it, to the point of blowing it up to be a "cartoon war". Is it really because they care so much more about the Danish embassy going down than liberals, or is it because this event happens to confirm their tunnel vision world view in which everything must be see in terms of good and evil, with America being the leader of the good guys, and the Islamic world being our enemy?

Posted by: battlepanda | Feb 6, 2006 4:18:41 AM

Apart from the being "stupid" part, I don't really object to anything you have written above, and my post was not meant to be an attack on you (even if it came across that way). The idea, which I think valid, is that we have here an international crisis of some significant proportion that has almost entirely pre-occupied not only the righty blogs but a lot of European blogs as well. Recognizing that I'm generalizing a bit, the lefty blogs with big traffic by and large did not say much, or even anything. Why the difference in volume over an issue that is not obviously partisan in any way shape or form? My hypothesis is that the crisis is intellectually troubling for a lot of progressives, because it puts two cherished notions in conflict -- that we need to identify with people who claim victim status, and that we need to be tolerant. What happens when people with victim status aren't tolerant? Giant matter/anti-matter explosion?

Now, it happens that I am very interested in health care, even if I am not a big fan of the word "uninsured." I don't like that word, in part because I believe that most health "insurance" is not insurance at all in the sense we normally the word, but a subsidy or benefit. Here's a post on the subject of paying for health care. You won't like it, of course, but it is one way of looking at the problem.

Posted by: TigerHawk | Feb 6, 2006 7:50:09 AM

Me, again. You might like this post on health care a bit more. There's something in it for everybody.

Posted by: TigerHawk | Feb 6, 2006 8:13:14 AM

Which sort of proves my point. X hasn't posted on Y is a poor way to go about things. And you're not a stupid dude, a quick read of your blog proves that. But that sort of post is lazy and problematic, a close relative of the old "I googled X and Y and returned 470,000 hits!" It's not that you don't care about health issues, but that you don't focus on the problem of uninsurance per se. And lefty bloggers, rather obviously, care about speech issues, but haven't focused on a foreign dispute over cartoons per se. I'm depressingly unsurprised over what's being seen abroad, but then, I've thought the whole way we approached the Arab world to be a weird combination of empty pluralistic rhetoric and naive optimism, particularly given the lessons available in our own society.

Posted by: Ezra | Feb 6, 2006 8:17:03 AM

i think free speech should be used wisely...but in concert with judgement and an awareness of staying on higher ground. to make an attack like that in the form of a cartoon, at a time like this, is cruel and dangerously irresponsible.
............free speech, even in a personal relationship, goes something like this...one is always free to say whatever one likes, but just one sentence can affect and destroy a relationship forever.
....at some point, judgement and awareness of greater consequences and the greater good, and some sense of respect and tact, should weigh into the decision-making process, and in politics and print also.
...an attack such as that was an unholy and inhumane act. there is no justification for mocking fun at a sacred deity when it has the potential to unleash hatred in a part of the world already filled with hatred and rampant misunderstanding.
..there was nothing funny about that cartoon, in my opinion...and for any thinking person, it wasnt unimaginable that it could have unleashed these consequences. what is the purpose of inciting hatred instead of understanding when you have the power to affect people with wwritten words?
....more understanding. empathy, restraint amd tolerance everywhere would go very far in healing a rapidly breaking world. and certainly that goes for thoughts conveyed in print, where they last longer, and can be misinterpreted more easily.

Posted by: jacqueline | Feb 6, 2006 9:06:36 AM

My hypothesis is that the crisis is intellectually troubling for a lot of progressives, because it puts two cherished notions in conflict -- that we need to identify with people who claim victim status, and that we need to be tolerant. What happens when people with victim status aren't tolerant? Giant matter/anti-matter explosion?

If that's your hypothesis and you're studying it through reaction to these cartoons, then the evidence is inconclusive at best. If this controversy really was causing conflict between two "cherished notions", (and I don't think the first of those notions is cherished at all), then you'd see The Left (TM) blogging about it and all coming to different conclusions or no conclusions at all. Instead, the consensus seems to be that what the Muslims are doing is bad, just not as important or as bad as the people who are getting all horny about a Clash of Civilizations would like it do be. If Oliver Willis compared Muslim extremists to Pat Robertson, then maybe you feel it's insufficiently outraged, but it's obviously not complimentary.

The only way you can logically get from "they aren't writing about it" to "it disproves their central principles" is if you assume that everyone you linked to is a partisan who starts out with a side and then works to justify its positions. Some people are like that - Kos, for example, though not all his diarists - but not all are, and the same is true of the right. If someone was blogging for fun and profit or for issue advocacy and they didn't think something was very important, or just didn't seem like a good example of their issues, you'd see pretty much exactly the response you are seeing.

Look at the riots in France last summer. Reactionaries said it was the inevitable result of appeasing Islamo-fascism, et cetera, while The Left (TM) had relatively little to say about it. That could be because of the conflict you're talking about, but then, it could also have been because France has had more than five revolutions in 200 years. Assuming they're spaced out evenly, France was due. So I just didn't assume there was too much significance to which group was doing the rioting.

OT, but I also find it ridiculous that Goldstein, of all people, invokes Orwell. Here's something from "Politics and the English Language".

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

I found six different "ism"s in Goldstein's post, two of which I didn't even know what they meant. And this guy accuses his opponents of Orwellian abuse of language?

I should really start reading his blog regularly, instead of just occasionally or when I see a link to it. I only find stuff like this long after the thread has gone off-topic, if not just died.

Posted by: Cyrus | Feb 6, 2006 10:18:14 AM

The post was correct in that the left has ignored this issue until now when people such as Ezra are forced to comment on it or be painted in an undesirable fashion.

It's also true that the comparisons made are not accurate and here's the difference: If Christian radicals such as the abortion clinic bombers create violence, there is no overt support of their actions. There would be protests *against* those actions. However, in the Muslim world, there is a wink, wink, nod, nod, even from those who are not supporting the radicals.
Question: When there are no protests from the Muslims regarding this violence, are the 'extremists' really all that extreme? Perhaps the more uncomfortable position of them being closeer to mainstream Muslim belief is closer to the truth!

Posted by: Fred Jones | Feb 6, 2006 11:01:12 AM

I'm a lefty and I posted something on Friday on my blog titled Islam Takes A Step Back! Oh yeah, thats right, I'm an unrecognized, ineffectual turd.

Posted by: Adrock | Feb 6, 2006 11:37:46 AM

Oh Adrock, you're not unrecognized.

Don't be so hard on yourself.

Posted by: Stephen | Feb 6, 2006 12:03:57 PM

Sorry to have missed it Adrock -- I mostly scrolled through the excellent lefty blogs on my blogroll. If it is incomplete, I stand defenseless.

Posted by: TigerHawk | Feb 6, 2006 2:00:50 PM

This seems to be another species of the "why do you criticize X but you won't criticize Y" argument so common on the right, where X is an action of our government or society which we actually have something to do with, while Y is the action of some hated foreigner. For instance: "why are you so outraged about our military's abuses in Abu Ghraib, but not the far worse things the terrorists are doing?" It's hard to believe how often you hear this kind of facile moral reasoning. You'd think it would be perfectly obvious that, in a democracy, we have a personal responsibility for the behavior of our government and institutions, to point out the flaws so that hopefully they could be corrected. This is what the right likes to call "blaming America," or "aiding the terrorists."

Posted by: chilly | Feb 6, 2006 4:15:11 PM

By the way… burning the Danish and Norweigan embassies in Damascus is, legally speaking, an act of war against members of NATO.

In other words, we can now invade Syria whenever we feel like it, and be perfectly compliant with international law.

I'm counting the days, myself…

Posted by: Mastiff | Feb 6, 2006 6:22:02 PM

Mastiff: Fortunately or unfortunately -- depending on your point of view -- Article V of the NATO treaty applies only to attacks in Europe and North America. It applied to September 11, but did not apply to (for instance) the Cole bombing (in Aden) or Argentina's invasion of the Falklands. Yes, the burning of the Danish and Norwegian embassies is an act of war against those countries, but other NATO countries have no casus belli under the NATO treaty (assuming that was your theory).

Posted by: TigerHawk | Feb 6, 2006 9:12:12 PM

Since when does an uninsured person lack access to basic healthcare?

I guess in your world, "caring" about something justifies lying about it. Ends, means and all that.

Posted by: a | Feb 7, 2006 2:11:46 AM

I would challenge Tigerhawk's fundamental point. This issue was discussed heavily at Kos and several diaries were discussing it as well, There was a huge thread over at Kevin Drum, Obsidian Wings & Oliver Willis both addressed it. Atrios addressed it as well. for the most part, The Lefty Blogosphere has addressed it and come down on the side of freedom (to offend, to satirize) etc. And has rejected the proposition that 'blasphemy' has any meaning in a liberal society. That the lefty blogosphere is not as single mindedly obsessive over this issue says more about they than the left.

The "You have refused to denounce cat juggling in Florida, therefore your silence speaks volumes" card is played often enough, much less when it isn't even warranted.

At least he gave props to Josh Marshall, the guys at Redstate were trying to spin it as if Josh was adovating compromise with extremists.

Posted by: Dustin R. Ridgeway | Feb 7, 2006 10:36:25 AM

By the way, I was totally kidding. I'm just a software engineer who blogs, no real influence, and I have no problem with that! I think TigerHawk was right to point it out, even if it is a bit unfairly, just to spark liberal perspective on the story.

By the way, I did not know this about the paper that created the cartoon:
http://www.tpmcafe.com/node/26328

It appears the Danish could learn a little bit about acceptance as well.

Posted by: Adrock | Feb 7, 2006 10:49:24 AM

THANK YOU.

Can't tell you how many times I've heard arguments like TigerHawk's: "You feminists complain about abortion rights here, so obviously you don't care about the women in Afghanistan who are REALLY oppressed!" or "You write about the Christian right in the U.S. but not as much about oppressive regimes abroad, so therefore you think the Moral Majority is worse than the Taliban!"

Dumb, dumb arguments. And there's nothing wrong with trying to clean your own house at the same time you criticize others. Great post.

Posted by: Jill | Feb 7, 2006 10:56:56 AM

Yes, there is. These comparisons expose for all to see that the reasons given by the left are not really the reasons at all and that everything is political posturing and not "caring" at all.

Posted by: Fred Jones | Feb 7, 2006 11:38:18 AM

These comparisons expose for all to see that the reasons given by the left are not really the reasons at all and that everything is political posturing and not "caring" at all.

Project much?

Posted by: Col Bat Guano | Feb 7, 2006 4:50:06 PM

Project much?

When you actually have something to discuss, we will all be impressed (not really).

Posted by: Fred Jones | Feb 7, 2006 7:47:14 PM

Yes, Freddy-boy is very impressive by his lack of substance and his intelligence-free comments.

Posted by: The Dark Avenger | Feb 11, 2006 7:24:44 AM

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