Tapping the international moral compass

… and finding it skewed.

Uganda.

Witch doctors in Uganda have admitted their part in human sacrifice amid concerns that the practice is spreading in the African country.

One man said he had clients who had captured children and taken their blood and body parts to his shrine, while another confessed to killing at least 70 people including his own son. [...]

“They go and capture other people’s children. They bring the heart and the blood directly here to take to the spirits,” he said. [...]

“We also have about 120 children and adults reported missing whose fate we have not traced,” he added. “From the experience of those whom we recovered, we cannot rule out that they may be victims of human sacrifice.”

Now what on earth could possibly elicit greater international outrage than blood-letting and heart extraction from children and adults?

Yes, of course. Silly me.

Early Avatar Reviews

For those of you that are as excited as I am about James Cameron’s upcoming epic blockbuster: Rotten Tomatoes has posted some early reviews.

I’m not Listening to Barack Obama

So the president is on TV to talk about his plans for Afghanistan (plans that had, I thought, already been unveiled).  Well, I’ve had enough.  He has been on prime time television a lot since the inauguration.  I’m interested in his plan, but I don’t feel like listening to another speech.  I think I’ll just read it instead.

Besides, Christmas Vacation is on.

Blogs v. The Legacy Media

Occasionally the question comes up as to why I get my news from blogs instead of conventional big media news sources. Blogs are written by amateurs, they’re full of unsourced opinions, they’re poorly edited. Journalists writing for the legacy media are trained professionals following relatively strict codes of conduct, with layers of editing and access to vast amounts of well-sourced information. All true.

For an up-to-the-minute example of why blogs are superior to, for example, big newspapers, look no further than one of the least reputable of my favourite American blogs, Ace of Spades HQ: ClimateGate gets real legs – London Times reports on CRU’s thrown away raw data:

Their data ditching is actually old, high profile coverage of it and its implications, not so old.

Exactly my point. I read about the data loss weeks before the CRU email scandal broke. People relying on the London Times are only reading about this today.

Trust, But Verify

The key lesson to take away from the CRU email scandal is: trust, but verify. It’s an old expression, but it’s the key to why the “deniers” are looking prescient while the true believers look like dupes. Expert opinions are valuable for assessing many aspects of the world we live in. However, when the methods and data sources used to bolster these opinions are shrouded in secrecy this should be taken as a warning sign that something is amiss.

Peer review cuts both ways: it is a valuable tool for weeding out inappropriately formed opinions, but in the wrong hands it can just as easily be used to keep a poorly constructed “concensus” insulated from the kind of rigorous intellectual debate that a subject of this importance deserves.

With any topic of public debate, we should never trust without question opinions formed in a black box, no matter how much we otherwise trust and admire the source.

(Thanks to Instapundit, Ace of Spades, Mark Steyn and The Volokh Conspiracy)

MTV and the Celebrity of Teen Pregnancy

Permit me a bit of nepotism.  My boss’s daughter has been published in National Post, writing about MTV’s horrendous show, 16 and Pregnant.  Lacking any subtlety, the title tells us all we really need to know about the show.  MTV parades pregnant teenagers in front of their cameras, turning a life-changing event into hollow entertainment.

The MTV-as-Nero, fiddling while North America burns, meme is nothing new; people have been hollering about it for quite a while.  What struck me about this commentary was not just its reasonableness, but the fact that it was written by a teenager – someone so young that she probably doesn’t even qualify as part of the MTV Generation, but has been fully immersed in their pop culture.  Her experience, and her friend’s, brings fresh insight to this old argument.

In the piece, Chantala Forgie writes:

As much as we teenagers would like to deny it, the media has an immense influence on our attitudes. Media may not be able to tell us what to think, but they do tell us what to think about. Throughout the 60’s, for instance, the idea of femininity took a sudden shift from a voluptuous Marilyn Monroe to a skeletal Twiggy. As stick-thin celebrities and models appeared with increasing frequency throughout the media, the previously unfamiliar disorder of anorexia became epidemic. A show like 16 and Pregnant risks setting off a similarly disturbing pattern.

Sometimes, I worry there is not much to be done to correct so many of the errors and extravagances of our society.  Sometimes, an unassuming freshmen will tell me that, maybe, I’m wrong.  Thanks Chantala.

Gregory Craig Steps Down

The New York Times reports that Gregory B. Craig, father of the Obama administration’s Guantanamo Bay closure policy, has stepped down as the President’s chief attorney in the White House. While interesting in itself, what caught my eye was this graf:

Mr. Craig took considerable criticism for those decisions and for not doing more to build consensus within the administration or prepare the political ground in Congress. The prospect of closing Guantanamo in the first year of Mr. Obama’s presidency is now almost certain not to happen.

In particular, I was struck by the use of the word “prospect” in the second sentence. A synonym for prospect is “hope” (a very Obamaian word, to be sure). But wait – if I recall correctly, one of the President’s first acts upon taking office was signing the order authorizing the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. Aren’t we well past the prospect stage for closing Gitmo? Wasn’t that a done deal?

Apparently not, at least according to The New York Times. No, when this President takes concrete action that was always ill-conceived and now proven untenable, and he is forced to backtrack, his mistakes disappear in a puff of smoke. Back to the happy land of hope ‘n’ change that they sprang from.

In the words of Joni Mitchell, “That was just a dream some of us had.”

Via Ace of Spades

All Extortion is Local, Broadcast Television Edition

Anyone else irritated by the fight that broadcast television companies have brought against cable providers?  For those who haven’t been introduced to their little campaign, here is the raison d’etre of Local TV Matters:

Local TV Matters is a campaign launched by local Canadian television broadcasters with a focus on the protection and preservation of local television for viewers across Canada. Members include CTV, /A\, Global, CBC, CHEK NEWS, V and NTV, with thousands of supporters across the country. The campaign encourages all Canadians to share their voice and support local television.

Their beef seems pretty straight forward.  They send their signal out for free, cable companies pick it up, bundle it with their other offerings and sell it all to us lowly consumers.  We pay the cable companies, but none of that money sees its way back to the local broadcast stations.  Seems pretty legitimate.

Ahh, if only ’twere so.

The broadcast giants are not looking to merely sell their product to cable providers; they are seeking a government agency to force cable providers to buy their product.  This isn’t about a free exchange of goods and services; this isn’t about proper remuneration for a service provided; this is about getting the government to bully your competition into giving you money.

Local TV Matters Media giants like CTV and CBC cry foul over the increase in revenues that cable providers have earned in recent years.  Understandably, they want their piece, but they seem unwilling to earn this windfall.  Cable providers have begun offering consumers greater selection of channels, more robust packages, time shifting and HD.  Broadcasters have offered consumers… umm… Little Mosque on the Prairie?

In response to the bullying, cable providers have set up their own little action committee, Stop the TV Tax.  They’re working hard to frame this issue as broadcasters asking the government to make consumers pay more for the service they are currently receiving.  Granted, this probably doesn’t equate, exactly, to a tax.  The organization should probably be called, Stop the TV Wealth Re-distribution, but their point is valid.  Broadcasters claim they are not asking for added fees to be levied against customers; they just want the government to force cable companies to give them money.  The fact that increasing the costs of cable service will exert a natural upward pressure on the price of the service seems lost on them.  Though, if they had a better grounding in issues regarding costs, revenues and profits, there’d be little need to run to the CRTC for a hand out.

Amusingly, their economic illiteracy is on full display on their web site:

Negotiation for Value (“NFV”) is a term used to describe a free market negotiation between cable and satellite companies and local television stations to establish the appropriate compensation to be paid by the cable or satellite company for the distribution of the local television station’s signal.  At present, your cable and satellite provider collects money from you each month for our service, but pays nothing to local television stations for the signals we provide.  This is not the same as “fee-for-carriage”, which is a term used to describe a regulated rate to be set by the CRTC for the distribution of local television signals.

I guess I forgot that bringing the weight of the government down on your competition is merely “free market negotiation”.  Silly me.

The whole ruse underpinning Local TV Matters is absurd:

You demand local TV, and local choice, and we want to continue to deliver it for you. It’s time to stop cable and satellite companies from charging you more for the local TV you’re already paying for.

It’s nice of broadcasters to have our best interests at heart, though it seems completely lost on them that if we really do “demand local TV”, there’d be no need to run to the regulator.  I have no doubt that the existing business model for local broadcast television is no longer viable, however, in most every other industry, companies are forced to change a failing business model lest they cease to exist.  Apparently, if you dabble in local broadcast television, you’re immune to such market realities.  It certainly takes some gall to seek out this form of corportatism and parade it about in the guise of the free market.

It takes even more gall to force an artificial increase to the costs your competitors must incur and then imply that they are simply being greedy for raising their prices.

Alright, so far it probably sounds like I’m advocating some form of digital free riding – that I think cable providers should just be able to take someone else’s service and re-sell it without passing along any of the revenue.  Such an analysis would be correct but for one annoying little fact: the government is forcing cable companies to offer broadcast television.  So Rogers and Shaw and Cogecco have no choice but to provide this service.  And, let’s not forgot, broadcasters have never passed along any of the increased ad revenue that they receive as a result of their increased audience to the cable providers who are responsible for the increased audience.

There is a pretty easy solution to all this.  Don’t let cable providers transmit broadcast television for free.  I’ll watch NBC, Fox, CNN, the Discovery Channel, Teletoon, the NFL Network, the History Channel, etc on cable, and then if I feel like watching CBOT, CJOH or ‘A’ Channel, I’ll pull out the ol’ rabbit ears.  Seems fair.

Maybe Charles Anthony was right.  Maybe the simplest solution is to just dissolve the CRTC.

Civilized People Can Be Rude

Jonathan has provided some very engaging commentary here and here. Following up on this theme of civility and objectivity in journalistic reporting, Jonah Goldberg has an excellent piece over at National Review Online:

… American democracy has always been a hurly-burly. More important, a lot of the complaints about incivility today are really complaints from the people in power or their supporters in the media, aimed at the folks who won’t shut up and get with their program.

And there’s something distinctly undemocratic about that.

The civility caterwaulers claim that Obama’s opponents are trying to “delegitimize” the president, often suggesting that such efforts are racist. But what some see as delegitimization, others see as criticism. What strikes me as truly uncivil is the effort to demonize critics of the president with racial bullying.

In fact, I think Obama really does have a problem with dissent. In August he said: “I don’t want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking. I want them to get out of the way. . . . I don’t mind cleaning up after them, but don’t do a lot of talking.”

On health care he’s been saying the time for debating his plan is over, even though the president didn’t even have a plan to debate.

Now his White House is targeting Fox News and urging other news outlets to ostracize it. Does any serious person in America believe that if Fox News were supportive of the president’s agenda, this White House would be bemoaning the network’s lack of objectivity?

Democracy is about disagreement, arguments. Citizenship in America requires speaking your mind. Indeed, it’s worth recalling that the freedom of the press enshrined in the First Amendment always envisioned a partisan press. “Objective” journalism is a 20th-century confabulation, as alien to the Founders’ vision as transporter beams and time travel.

Civility came to mean politeness in the 16th century; before that it meant being a citizen. It seems to me that authentic civility requires some incivility.

Turning back to the interview with Conor Friedersdorf from the other thread, the following is an excerpt that raises significant questions.

Unfortunately, there is also a lot of dreck that harms public discourse. I’d never want to be the arbiter drawing a definitive boundary between folks who add to the conversation and those who take away from it. That line is impossible for anyone to consistently and reliably discern. But it is possible to identify folks whose transgressions are so frequent, blatant and influential that one must either oppose them or stay silent as they corrode our polity’s primary means of testing ideas and deciding among them. I think it is important that this opposition is grounded in substantive arguments, that it avoids ad hominem attacks, that it is rigorous, and that it is intellectually honest.

As I argue in the other thread, ad hominem argument, be it rude or funny, is often the only way to check intellectual dishonesty at the door. Often it is necessary to take a swipe at people who are unwilling to face the truth. A well placed insult forces them to challenge why what you are calling them isn’t true, to make a come back, the result being that they either face the truth and the conversation continues, no doubt robustly, or they leave—good riddance. It is individuals of genuine civility who can take a hit and keep on coming; re: Juan Williams.

I’m not arguing that conservatives benefit from “echo chambers.” Hardly! I’m making the point that in any “political discourse” there are likely to be intellectual swindlers, however polite and well-intentioned, that want to narrow the choices we face into one way, THEIR way, whatever the cost. Conservatives are seeking to provide people with “A Choice, Not An Echo” and doing so will often infuriate their opponents (Many thanks, once again, to Kathy Shaidle for the link.), as we see now with the current White House attacks on Fox news.

To engage in democratic politics, it is best if one comes with some principles, broad shoulders, a quick wit, and the capacity to laugh at oneself.

Electric Kool Aid Conservatism

Responding to a recent post of mine, Christopher links to a post by Kathy Shaidle that takes issue with a column by Conor Friedersdorf, a rising conservative journalist/writer/blogger/thinker.  (Mr. Friedersdorf is a contributor to The American Scene, The Daily Beast and True/Slant.)

At The league of Ordinary Gentlemen, Scott H. Payne has a great interview with Mr. Friedersdorf (Scott also has some good interviews with other prominent bloggers).  Here’s a tease:

In Electric Kool-Aid Conservatism, I argue a few things: a) certain conservative insights and core critiques of liberalism intrinsically resist the narrative form. b) As the right’s echo chamber grows, the ideas that reverberate weaken. Ghettoizing smart writers within rally-the-base publications is something the left can afford, given the present media landscape, while the scarcity of journalists who grasp right-of-center ideas make their isolation particularly costly. c) The right doesn’t need more activists, it needs more journalists — folks who buy into and excel at the journalistic project, rather than folks intent on trying to destroy it. Unlike the Doublethink piece, in which I am offering advice to the right, however, my criticism of talk radio hosts is grounded not in the accurate notion that they are bad for the right, but in the larger conviction that they are bad for healthy political discussion, and thus the country. Put another way, all my work is predicated on a belief that public discourse is important, that journalism properly executed improves it, and that various journalistic benefits are undervalued on the right. But I’d say that Electric Kool-Aid Conservatism and my criticism of talk radio folks are overlapping projects, not identical ones.

The entire interview is a must read for those of us on the right who participate in political discourse… actually, it’s a worthwhile read for anyone interested in honest political debate.

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