I have not been able to make much sense out of the Invisible Children video about Joseph Kony, except that it seems to have become a huge sensation. I had known before about Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army and their appalling treatment of whoever happens to cross their paths but was not quite sure what to make of this viral video, which I have not seen.
So I pass along without comment this commentary on the phenomenon by Charlie Brooker.
Boing Boing has more.
I have noticed something that is becoming increasingly common. After a politician says something pandering to appeal to some constituency, and is then quoted those words back and asked to explain it to a different constituency that may not share the same sympathies, the politician simply says that the quoted words had been “taken out of context”. [Read more…]
Jonathan Turley points to an interesting case. The New York Times ran an ad from the Freedom From Religion Foundation that called upon liberal Catholics to leave their church, but refused to run another ad that made the same appeal to Muslims, apparently because “The fallout from running this ad now could put U.S. troops and/or civilians in the [Afghan] region in danger.”
I agree with Turley (who has not yet seen the anti-Islam ad) when he says:
I am not sure that we should start to restrict speech on the basis of content in fear of a response of extremists in other countries. That would appear to reward the violence and anti-speech conduct of such extremists. It is precisely what occurred after 2005 when a Danish newspaper published cartoons mocking the prophet Muhammad. The result were worldwide protests in which Muslims reportedly killed more than 100 people — a curious way to demonstrate religious tolerance. However, while newspapers swore allegiance to free press values, there was an obvious level of self-censorship to avoid pictures and cartoons of Muhammad and Islam in general. Even academic institutions like Yale University Press exhibited the same response.
The editors in this case promised that they would consider publishing the ad in a few months because “we publish this type of advertising, even those we disagree with, because we believe in the First Amendment.” However, that does not explain why they will yield to extremists in the interim.
For too long, some Muslims have been allowed to use the threat of violence to impose censorship on others. This has to end and major media institutions should be taking the lead on this and not leaving it to small and vulnerable media institutions.
There is an interesting case working its way through the European Court of Human Rights. It concerns whether Christians have the right to wear crucifixes to work. Two British women, one who worked for British Airways and the other a nurse, were told by their employers that their crosses did not conform to the uniforms that their professions required. The British government supports their employers, saying that wearing crosses is not a ‘requirement’ of the Christian faith, unlike the Sikh turban or the Muslim hijab, which have apparently been granted exemptions on those grounds. [Read more…]
The Daily Show on Mitt Romney’s peculiar and awkward attempts at pandering.
(This clip appeared on March 12, 2012. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post.)
Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill has been following the case of a Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye who uncovered a story in which a US air attack in 2009 in that country killed 14 women and 21 children. His story ran contrary to the US government’s usual bland assertion that the victims were ‘al Qaeda militants’, which was then dutifully repeated by the mainstream US media. [Read more…]
Once in a while, a furious debate flares up about the proper tone that people should use in exchanges with one another on the internet. This occurs within the skeptic community as well, the most prominent division being between the groups now referred to as accommodationists and the new atheists. The most common charge laid against the latter is that they sometimes use intemperate language in criticizing both religion and the accommodationist position. [Read more…]
Greg Smith, a senior executive at investment bank Goldman Sachs, has resigned and fired off a salvo at what he describes as the “toxic and destructive” environment of that institution, where they routinely disparage their clients as ‘muppets’ while ripping them off. [Read more…]
