A man of prodigious fortune, coming to add his opinion to some light discussion that was going on casually at his table, began precisely thus: "It can only be a liar or an ignoramus who will say otherwise than," and so on. Pursue that philosophical point, dagger in hand.

--Michel de Montaigne, Of the art of discussion.



Stab back: cmnewman99-at-yahoo.com


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SPEAKING OF COMICS: Check this out. Extremely cool, both in concept and execution.
posted by CMN at 3:07 PM
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MCDONALD'S EXPLOITS AN OVERLOOKED MARKETING NICHE:
Get the details here.
posted by CMN at 8:08 PM
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OH CAPTAIN MY CAPTAIN:
A magnificent post by Den Beste showing the moral bankruptcy of the attacks on merit-based scholarships.
posted by CMN at 2:11 PM
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ON THE OTHER HAND...
This is the most persuasive thing I've read so far against the need for war with Iraq. If anyone knows of anything that responds to Ritter's assertions, I'd like to know. The one part of his line that I don't get is the midterm election connection. I can see how going to war on the eve of a presidential election would help the incumbent, as people might be leery of switching commander-in-chief in the middle of the conflict. But Congress doesn't run the war, and I doubt that the congressional vote on whether we should go in (assuming we have one) will break down along party lines. If I'm someone who would otherwise have voted for a Democrat, I simply don't understand why the fact that we were at war would make me inclined to vote Republican. Am I missing something?
posted by CMN at 9:04 PM
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AS BUGS WOULD SAY, "YOU REALIZE OF COURSE..."If this story checks out, it may well amount to the casus belli everyone's been waiting for. Something about it though, strikes me as almost too pat to be believable. It just seems so made to order. And then there's this passage:

With the prospect increasing of the US launching a military campaign to overthrow Saddam, however, the Iraqi dictator was keen to combine Abu Nidal's expertise with the enthusiasm of al-Qa'eda's fanatical fighters to launch a fresh wave of terror attacks. In this way, Saddam hoped to disrupt Washington's plans to overthrow him.

He's a murdering thug, yes. But is he really that stupid? Launching fresh terror attacks is going to disrupt Washington's war plans? Can anyone think of anything that would make an invasion of Iraq more certain? I would have thought that if he had half a brain he'd have spent the past few months praying that nobody pulled anything else off over here until the heat was off him. But maybe not. Maybe he is that detached from reality.

UPDATE: Perry over at Samizdata thinks this one smells too.
posted by CMN at 9:16 PM
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Update on my post below : Paola agrees with Oriana's book translator:

"The rage and the pride" versus "War and Peace"...even in Italian it was translated into "Guerra e Pace", not "La Guerra e La Pace"...I actually think that the article "the" helps define the emotions as Oriana's and connects them to the events. She is not describing the emotions abstractly, she is specifically referring to events that have aroused those very emotions in her. Those are the very emotions that she wants to instill in us. They are specific.

She's right, of course. This is a specific instantiation. I was following my ear, not my head.

As long as I'm at it, I should confess another error I realized some time ago. In the antisemitism piece. The line I translated as "In hell the Nobel prize honors he who does not receive it" should actually read more like, "To hell with the Nobel prize and praised be he who does not receive it." There was no accent over that "e", I just somehow inferred one in my mind. Luckily I didn't change the underlying meaning much--just the form of the insult.

UPDATE: After writing the above, I happened to receive the following message from an Italian reader (of the translation, not this blog):

I recently happened to read your translations as appearing in your website dated December 19, 2001, including your following messages dated April 2002.

First of all, my opninion is that your translation is far better and more comprehensible to U.S. people than the official one. You have used expressions which I can quickly recognize as typical American and do not make use of literal translations of Italian phrases and syntax, albeit giving a true rendering of the author's meaning.

Given the fact that there are many roads leading to Rome, as an old Italian "adagio" says, you have selected the best route for Americans to understand easily and fully Oriana's extraordinary book and her message to the world. Without the typical pitfalls made even by the most qualified Italian translators. It's a pity you could not complete the authorized translation of the entire book.

I don't know what "official" translation he's talking about, as I never saw one of the article. I certainly hope the book translation doesn't suffer from the pitfalls he's talking about, and am pretty confident that it won't. It's not like this is the first book of hers to be published in English.
posted by CMN at 12:39 PM
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IDIOTARIANS, LEFT AND RIGHT:
If anyone among the tiny number of people who visit this site still doesn't read Lileks regularly, here's another example of why you should.


Having read Shirer more recently than Jim though, I do feel obliged to acknowledge that (as he is no doubt being instructed in scads of righteous emails) many German industrialists did in fact give Hitler financial support well before the time was reached when refusal was not an option. Not all of them, by any means. But many. They figured he was more likely to keep unions in check than the parties of the left, and they were right. Under Nazi rule, the workers became essentially serfs. And the industrialists did by and large keep their property and profits, but as Lileks correctly notes, only to the extent that they turned over golden eggs on demand to keep their necks from being wrung. The point is that they were not, by any stretch of the imagination, calling the shots--a number of them wound up in concentration camps themselves. Thus the claim of Lileks' interlocutor that a definition of fascism is "complete sellout to corporate interests" is exactly backwards. It was the German businessmen who sold out to Nazism, and most of them lived to regret it.


This trope about the "complete sellout to corporate interests" is too vague to be useful, anyway. There are lots of corporations out there with lots of different interests, many (though not all, obviously) of which actually coincide with the interests of consumers. Whether a government act that serves the interest of some corporations (no act is good for all of them) is desirable or not depends entirely on which interests you're talking about. In fact if you want the classic example of selling out to big business, read Gabriel Kolko's book on the rise of "progressive" legislation. (Love that label. Who could possibly be against progress? Well, someone driving toward a cliff perhaps...) There you have what I'd call "bad" corporate interests being served behind a facade of lip service to "popular" interests. But I'll wager the image of TR and LaFollette in jackboots doesn't present itself to the fevered imagination of Lileks' pen pal with quite the same facility as that of ol' W.
posted by CMN at 6:26 PM
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WELL I KNEW BILL HAD BROAD TASTES, BUT...
Here's a translation (courtesy MEMRI) of a column from an "Egyptian Opposition Weekly" fulminating against the influence of evil women in American government.

"The American president Bill Clinton, with the most famous scandal regarding women, was in love with the childish Jewess Madeleine Albright, the secretary of state. He would make no decision without getting the approval of this woman, who became notorious for her short garments that often caused embarrassment when she met political dignitaries. She too, in the end, followed the same path, describing the Palestinian resistance as terror, and she spared no efforts in her support for Israel!"

Madeleine Albright in a miniskirt. So that's why they hate us. I'm starting to understand now.


posted by CMN at 2:24 PM
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According to this test, I'm the Visionary Philosopher type. Well, duh!

I was a little confused by this revelation, though:

"Visionary Philosophers love chocolate. 57% of them reach for it when a food craving strikes."

This suggests an alternate version one might write of Monty Python's Philosophers Song ("Socrates himself ate tons of Hershey's kisses..."), but I really haven't the time.

So having been given this priceless peep into the workings of my psyche, the question now is whether I want to shell out $14.95 for the 15-page IQ report with charts, graphs, and insight from certified staff PhDs. Hmm, let me think about that one for a while.

You've gotta love this. A marketing ploy that simultaneously panders to and insults your intelligence.
posted by CMN at 10:38 AM
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Well, the instaspike is definitely over. Oriana's back down in the 2000 range. I wonder how many preorders we managed to instigate.
posted by CMN at 8:29 AM
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RAPE AND MULTICULTURALISM:
Here's a great piece by Mark Steyn that reminded me of a passage in Oriana's book where she attacks "feminists" who spend more energy attacking the West than countries where women are treated like...well, read it.
posted by CMN at 4:24 PM
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WHAT'S IN A NAME?
Aziz has posted a little missive I wrote in response to his announcement that use of the new coinage "transnational progressivism" (as defined in
this article by John Fonte) is henceforth to render one's arguments devoid of value. Perhaps Fonte's enumerated principles are caricatures. But I've only heard conclusory assertions that this is the case. I think it would really advance the ball if someone who thinks so would go through the principles one by one and state exactly how each distorts or exaggerates, and what qualifications you'd have to make for it to be a fair description of views actually held. I don't think it's true, as has been suggested, that TP is simply equivalent to "the left." I know people, for example, whose views I'd characterize as "progressive" but not "transnational". So if TP is a badly formed concept, a straw man, a "package deal" as Rand would say, fine--explain how. Is it a null set--i.e., no-one actually holds all those views? Or is it simply that you hold some of the principles but not others, and don't want to be associated with those you do not hold? If you regard TP as a pejorative caricature, this would seem to imply that you regard some of the principles as articulated by Fonte to be obviously untenable. If so, it would help to say which ones. As I see it, the goal of all this is to clarify the terms of debate so that we can talk to each other constructively. This is what I perceived Den Beste to be attempting to do by embracing the terminology.
posted by CMN at 12:06 PM
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Up to 256.
posted by CMN at 10:32 PM
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STILL CLIMBING: 345.

I wrote to Dennis Prager, figuring he'd want to plug the book on his show after he read practically her whole antisemitism article on the air. I wonder if he did.
posted by CMN at 4:10 PM
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And now she's at 481.


Well, it's sure more fun than watching the Dow.
posted by CMN at 12:19 PM
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INSTAPOWER AT WORK:
As of this moment, Oriana's at 980.
posted by CMN at 9:33 AM
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FINALLY....!!!

I hope the translation does her justice. All I can see now is the title, and I already have issues. I can see "rage" for "rabbia" --it's a more powerful word (though I did have specific reasons for using "anger" based on the way it plays in the opening lines) -- but I'm not sure I get why they used the articles. In Italian you use articles in many places where you wouldn't in English. In English we use them only when we're referring to a specific instantiation of a universal. So to me they sound stilted in the title, and I'm not sure what they add in the way of meaning. I mean, think of War and Peace. Fear and Trembling. (On the other hand, I suppose there's The Sorrow and The Pity.) You know, I can see already that I'm going to have to chill. I've got a quasi-authorial investment in this, even though I have absolutely no right to. That's what happens when you spend that much time and energy engaged in a translation. Even though I'm sure I made mistakes and there are numerous ways what I did could be improved upon. So I'm just going to have to trust that they got someone who knows what they're doing, and that Oriana will have made sure that it reads the way she wants it to. And if it's not the way I think it should read, that just shows that I was injecting too much of myself into my translation. Right now it's at 4,275 on amazon, and it's not available yet. They're taking pre-orders. I think I'll send a message to Instapundit and see what happens to that number when he posts about it.


posted by CMN at 4:38 PM
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STAKING OUT THE LOGICAL HIGH GROUND:
Randy Andy has posted a little piece by la Paglia on the Arab-Israeli conflict. I've often enjoyed what Camille has to say, but I've found her tone and incessant offering of identity credentials ("I speak as a pagan lesbian pornographer of Italian Catholic heritage who voted for Clinton and was a member of the radical 60's generation back in the days before I surpassed Sontag . . .") increasingly offputting. I think this was the last straw for me. Here's how her present comment concludes:

Because of my own massive lifelong influence by Jewish-American culture - in the arts, media, and entertainment industry as well as law, science, and medicine - I have concluded that, for me, only one moral imperative is possible: to support Israel.

Well, that's persuasive. It sounds like a confession of what so many Arabs and Europeans already believe. You might as well announce, "Because I've been brainwashed by the Zionist puppet masters who control the U.S. media and government, I can't help but support Israel." I think Camille's gotten way too used to announcing her aesthetic and political views as gospel, and isn't bothering to distinguish between them. As though her views should command assent simply because they're her views, regardless of how she arrived at them. She needs to take a couple years off from punditry and write books that studiously avoid use of the word "I". (Like maybe that always-forthcoming second volume of Sexual Personae.) Or maybe she's been kidnapped and replaced by an Arab propaganda operative. In any case, this is not the kind of "support" Israel needs.

The real problem, of course, is this notion that the validity of one's views depends not on the reasons one marshals in their support but on the "authenticity" or "legitimacy" of one's perspective, based on group affiliation. For all her in-your-face bashing of postmodernism, Camille has bought its most basic and pernicious tenet hook, line, and fisherman.
posted by CMN at 12:15 PM
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IF IT DOESN'T FIT... The proverb, that is. The L.A. Times reports that Pasadena attorney Joe Hopkins is griping about how his high profile police beating case got pulled out from under him by Johnnie Cochran. He is quoted as saying, "Yes, it's sour grapes. But there is nothing wrong with complaining about sour grapes."

I have two responses: No, it's not. And yes, there is. Complaining that Cochran stole your client is not sour grapes. Sour grapes is when you disparage something you really desire, but are unable to obtain. You know... Aesop? High grapes? Greek fox who apparently jumps like white men? Ringing any bells here? Or, if you prefer, as in the Violent Femmes song ...

you know that i want your lovin'
but mr. logic tells me it's never gonna happen
then my defenses say i didn't want it anyway
but you know sometimes i'm a liar

Those, my friend, are sour grapes. It would be sour grapes if you went around now saying how you didn't really want to represent Jackson, that you thought he had a meritless case, that you're glad Cochran took it on. Which would be transparently dishonest. Which is why there is something wrong with complaining about sour grapes. What you're doing may be somewhat overwrought, but at least it's honest. Sympathetic even, to some degree. So don't impugn the validity of your complaint by giving it an invidious and unwarranted label! Smash those sour grapes and reveal what you're really indulging in!

A little cheese with that?
posted by CMN at 8:10 PM
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ZERO TOLERANCE
A lawsuit after my own heart. . .
posted by CMN at 1:17 PM
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Lileks has a (typically) great post today involving some impromptu comparative religious studies. This stuff is so sad. There was a time when Islamic civilization was the most progressive on earth. When innovations in Jew-hating were really a Christian specialty. (See, e.g., the Prioress's Tale in Chaucer). In fact, the vile blood libel that features so prominently today in Arab editorials and schoolbooks was actually invented by small-town Brits at a time when Jews were relatively well treated in Muslim countries. (Or so Paul Johnson informed me on my way to work this morning--books on tape are a wonderful thing.) So what happened?
posted by CMN at 9:07 PM
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MUST HAVE BEEN ABSENT THAT TERM...
Okay, this one I had to share. I'd bet that among the handful of people who visit this page there's a Kevin Smith fan or two. I like his movies as much as the next guy, and being a Daredevil fan (don't even ask how horrified I am that Affleck is playing him) was enthused to read what he'd done with the character. So I was happy to buy this and read it. And in fact, it was pretty good. Doesn't really hold a candle to the Frank Miller story he was trying to follow up, but pretty good nonetheless. At one point though, it contains a real howler. Matt Murdock, lawyer and Daredevil alter ego, is speaking in one of those internal narrative monologues that would be a voice over if it were in a movie and not a comic book:

"In law school, there's a second, less academic curriculum -- beyond the standard textbook stuff. You're taught to develop what they refer to in the profession as a "judgmental vacuum." It's the emotional void a lawyer has to find for himself in order to defend a client you feel may not be completely innocent...or just flat-out guilty. You're taught how to get beyond the self-loathing that can unravel an average person's sense of moral identity--all so even the most apparently guilty of parties can have the benefit of a fair trial. You're even taught to cherish Zantac, the ulcer medicine--because if you're lucky enough to make it though the day with your integrity intact, chances are whatever corrosion you save your soul will manifest itself in the lining of your stomach. You're prepared for an awful lot in law school ...

Okay, now. I'm even more confident that there are lawyers who read this page once in a while than I am that there are Kevin Smith fans. So somebody tell me. Am I the only one who missed that class?
posted by CMN at 8:32 PM
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