Good news from the U.S. of A.!

It's not all doom and gloom, folks! Freedom marches on!

Good news from the U.S. of A.!

It's not all doom and gloom, folks! Freedom marches on!

Random gloats

Spent the morning fighting with Bill Needle and struggling to understand bits and pieces of Drupal — lost both battles, but what the hell.

Later, I hied myself to Duffering Grove Park, having pulled out the manuscript of the infamous novel and shoved it into my backpack. Found a mostly shady bench and proceeded to dig into my prose.

Not a happy experience. The bastard doesn't need editing, it more or less needs a complete re-write. Maybe the 140 pages will be better. (Pleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease ...)

Also, was accosted by a young man carrying an armload of water-bottles.

"Excuse me sir," he said, "Would you like some water."

I was distracted by my bad prose and kind of grunted, only half-aware of his presence. "Huh?"

"Would you like some water?"

"Oh. No than you, I'm fine."

He nodded, turned and sauntered off, making a beeline for a couple of women sitting against a small, fence-off area (why it is fenced off, I have no idea). He wore a vest with a big red cross painted on the back and I realized he wasn't selling water, he was giving bottles of it away.

It's extremely hot today — has a heat emergency been declared? I considered running after him to find out just what the deal was but, well, it was too hot. Presumably the city is paying for it, and good for them.

I only managed to fall asleep last night this morning after another 24 hours in row spent awake. Was awoken by drilling outside a mere six hours later. Am very tired.

Oh hell ... More intellectual courage in defence of freedom of speech

I'd really rather not promote the moral idiot Christopher Hitchen, an "intellectual" who shamefully broke with his own alleged principles when George W. Bush decided it would be fun and profitable to invade Iraq, but when he's right, he's right.

See, Yale University Press is publishing a book called Cartoons That Shook the World, which "tells the story of the lurid and preplanned campaign of 'protest' and boycott that was orchestrated in late 2005 after the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten ran a competition for cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed." As you may recall, lives were lost during the subsequent riots and, while the subject was covered extensively in the Western press, the vast majority of our newspapers and magazines refused to permit their readers to actuall see what the fuss was about (if anyone's interested, my own reaction shortly thereafter is online here).

Nearly four years later, that short-sighted moral and intellectual pusillanimity is still going strong. Hitchens writes,

So here's another depressing thing: Neither the "experts in the intelligence, national security, law enforcement, and diplomatic fields, as well as leading scholars in Islamic studies and Middle East studies" who were allegedly consulted, nor the spokespeople for the press of one of our leading universities, understand the meaning of the plain and common and useful word instigate. If you instigate something, it means that you wish and intend it to happen. If it's a riot, then by instigating it, you have yourself fomented it. If it's a murder, then by instigating it, you have yourself colluded in it. There is no other usage given for the word in any dictionary, with the possible exception of the word provoke, which does have a passive connotation. After all, there are people who argue that women who won't wear the veil have "provoked" those who rape or disfigure them … and now Yale has adopted that "logic" as its own.

The full article is online at Slate.com (though it's interesting to note that, while Hitchens proivides a link to the cartoons, none of them appear alongside the article itself.

A problem with permissions, or is Slate refusing to practice what Hitchens is preaching?

(Cross-posted from Edifice Rex Online.)

Oh hell ... More intellectual courage in defence of freedom of speech

I'd really rather not promote the moral idiot Christopher Hitchen, an "intellectual" who shamefully broke with his own alleged principles when George W. Bush decided it would be fun and profitable to invade Iraq, but when he's right, he's right.

See, Yale University Press is publishing a book called Cartoons That Shook the World, which "tells the story of the lurid and preplanned campaign of 'protest' and boycott that was orchestrated in late 2005 after the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten ran a competition for cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed." As you may recall, lives were lost during the subsequent riots and, while the subject was covered extensively in the Western press, the vast majority of our newspapers and magazines refused to permit their readers to actuall see what the fuss was about (if anyone's interested, my own reaction shortly thereafter is online here).

Nearly four years later, that short-sighted moral and intellectual pusillanimity is still going strong. Hitchens writes,

So here's another depressing thing: Neither the "experts in the intelligence, national security, law enforcement, and diplomatic fields, as well as leading scholars in Islamic studies and Middle East studies" who were allegedly consulted, nor the spokespeople for the press of one of our leading universities, understand the meaning of the plain and common and useful word instigate. If you instigate something, it means that you wish and intend it to happen. If it's a riot, then by instigating it, you have yourself fomented it. If it's a murder, then by instigating it, you have yourself colluded in it. There is no other usage given for the word in any dictionary, with the possible exception of the word provoke, which does have a passive connotation. After all, there are people who argue that women who won't wear the veil have "provoked" those who rape or disfigure them … and now Yale has adopted that "logic" as its own.

The full article is online at Slate.com (though it's interesting to note that, while Hitchens proivides a link to the cartoons, none of them appear alongside the article itself.

A problem with permissions, or is Slate refusing to practice what Hitchens is preaching?

(Cross-posted from Edifice Rex Online.)