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February 07, 2006
... they're on a roll!
Via PZ Myers, who got it from Brad Delong, who got here, Jonah Goldberg knows his history:
Goldberg: "Some say that Native Americans were great environmentalists don't know history. Some think that Indians were like a Disney movie, with Indians talking to bunnies. The great plains used to be a giant forest. The Indians burnt it to the ground to hunt buffalo.FF: Interesting. I am not entirely sure about the latter comment.
Here, "FF" is a Goldberg-sympathizing member of the audience. One wonders what Jonah would have had to have said for him to say, "Interesting. I wonder if Jonah is high, or just stupid?"
Meanwhile, at Crooked Timber, they've announced the death of satire. Again.
John Derbyshire at the the Corner wrote the following:In between our last two posts I went to Drudge to see what was happening in the world. The lead story was about a ship disaster in the Red Sea. From the headline picture, it looked like a cruise ship. I therefore assumed that some people very much like the Americans I went cruising with last year were the victims. I went to the news story. A couple of sentences in, I learned that the ship was in fact a ferry, the victims all Egyptians. I lost interest at once, and stopped reading. I don’t care about Egyptians.Compassionate conservatism anyone?
Good times all around. Meanwhile, anyone who can satisfactorily explain to me how such people get invited to give lectures at colleges will recieve one million dollars, and a pony.
A CT commenter insisted that in fairness, critics should also read this excerpt from later on that day:
---I don't care about a shipful of Egyptians anything like as much as I care about a shipful of Americans.
---I don't care about them enough to find time in a busy day to read to the end of the news story. One could, after all, fill a day several times over with nothing but reading news stories about horrible things happening to one's fellow human beings in remote places. We are selective; and those old tribal instinct drive some of our selections. Tell me anyone else is any different. Tell me you are any different.
---If I take out my concern about those drowned Egyptians and take a good look at it, it really is a pretty feeble, abstract sort of caring. It is, in my opinion, a very good thing, and a great step up for humanity, that religious and ethical teachers have trained us to give a passing thought to the sufferings of strangers in distant places. A passing thought is all we give, though, 99 percent of the time, and I seriously doubt that in this respect I am any more callous than the human average.
I'm willing to grant that he has something of a point there, but he's still comes of as an ass for his way of saying it. I wouldn't bother to read a story about a ferry full of Americans and more than I would a ferry full of any other nationality. I might be induced to read a disaster on a level like that if it were about my hometown, but I think there's a very different principle at work there. Regardless of where the Sept. 11 attacks had taken place, I would have been interested in the story for political reasons, but the fact that I know people in New York brought it a lot closer to home. But the kind of us/them breakdown Derbyshire suggests at the level of nationalities promises nothing but trouble.
A more important question is, why are people even paying attention to what's said on the Corner?
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