This Week on the Web (April 14 – April 20)
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Quote of the Week:
I realize that CBS has the right to fire any employee for making racist statements and that this is not a violation of their freedom of speech. Only the state can abridge our freedom of speech. Only state action is censorship in the full meaning of the word. The problem is that in our mixed economy, with the FCC regulating broadcasters, we have to ask: did CBS fire Imus because they feared state action? Did the FCC factor into their thinking at all? And if it did, is not censorship from fear of regulatory action in fact censorship?
- Myrhaf
Editorial Cartoon of the Week:
Cox and Forkum
COMMENTARY
Suffering in Silence: Rachel Carson's ideas are still popular, with deadly effect.
Katherine Mangu-Ward, Opinion Journal
At the time of the controversy, DDT was used widely as an insecticide on
Some of Carson's star anecdotes about DDT's carcinogenic qualities turned out to be flawed: Her tale of "a housewife who abhorred spiders" spraying her basement in August and winding up dead of "acute leukemia" by October seems absurd to the modern reader, as does the man who winds up hemorrhaging in the hospital due to a "severe depression of the bone marrow" just "a short time" after spraying for roaches. Neither cancer could have been caused by DDT in so short a time.
Partly as a result of
The convention contains a tightly circumscribed exception for continued public health use, but even that exception almost didn't make it into the final document. Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund and more than 300 other environmental groups fought tooth and nail against it. In recent years, many such groups tried to get a complete ban on all DDT uses by 2007--in time for
To what effect? The World Health Organization now estimates that there are between 300 and 500 million cases of malaria annually, causing approximately one million deaths. About 80% of those are young children, millions of whom could have been saved over the years with the regular application of DDT to their environments.
Frank Gaffney, Jewish World Review
It was so, well, Soviet. This weekend's news clips showed Russian goon squads charging courageous opponents of an authoritarian Kremlin, truncheons flailing, roughing up the dissenters and arresting their leaders. One of those detained on Saturday was Garry Kasparov, the long-time World Chess Champion and a world-class champion of freedom.
Although Kasparov was subsequently released, his forcible detention is a sign of the extent of Vladimir Putin's repression and the master of the Kremlin's confidence that the Free World will not protest, let alone punish, the Russian government's ever-more aggressive behavior at home and abroad. If the Kremlin can move with impunity against the most visible, widely admired and gutsy of its critics, no one in
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As it happens, others who are Freedom's Champions are being badly treated closer to home. In this space last week, I reported that a film about what was happening to courageous anti-Islamist Muslims in the
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Matters have been made worse by the replacement of our film in PBS' "America at a Crossroads" line-up this week by a film produced by the series' host, Robert MacNeil, as part of a sweetheart deal with PBS and its Washington flagship, WETA. MacNeil's documentary is entitled "The Muslim Americans." It is an appalling, politically correct but disinforming paean to organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim Student Association (MSA) and others who are part of the Islamist problem in this country, not the solution.
It is time to choose. Do we stand with those who have the courage to risk everything to oppose the totalitarians and their ideologies? Or do we stand with their oppressors, in the vain hope that the latter will treat us better?
Only Egalitarian Racist Speech Allowed
Myrhaf
The shock jock can exist only in a free society. Tyrants do not like being laughed at. In the
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What is the difference between Tom Joyner’s racism and Imus’s? In our egalitarian, altruist culture, one can joke about the powerful, but not about the weak and oppressed. Some collectivism is respected, some collectivism will get you fired from CBS. If media corporations were to fire all buffoons who make collectivist statements, then all buffoons would be fired. Indeed, some broadcasters who are not considered buffoons, such as Tom Joyner, would be fired. Imus was attacked and fired not because he was collectivist, but because he was inegalitarian.
The New Left is multiculturalist -- a crude, racist vision of the world that views people not primarily as individuals, but as members of a racial group. Imus, a white male, attacked African-Americans, a class of victims, and this speech is forbidden. As altruism demands, the strong must sacrifice for the weak. White males must not make racist statements about African-Americans.
Racism is a terrible evil, a form of collectivism as Ayn Rand wrote, but the left only views racism by the strong as racism. Egalitarian racism, or multiculturalism, is one of the pillars of the New Left. As egalitarian racists, today's liberals are the most predominant racists in American history. They are also the most dangerous racists in American history. Not only is egalitarian racism (multiculturalism) not reviled, it is idealized throughout our culture and indoctrinated into students. The New Left is transforming
Other links
Web Logs
Principles in Practice– Principled commentary on cultural matters and current events from “The Objective Standard”
Cox and Forkum – Political cartoons and commentary
The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid – Donald Luskin
Dollars and Crosses – CapitalismMagazine.com
Rule of Reason – The Center for the Advancement of Capitalism
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