Zimbabwe opposition offices raided

So reads the headline on the Yahoo news report. It then continues:

President Robert Mugabe's government raided the offices of the main opposition movement and rounded up foreign journalists Thursday in an ominous indication that he may use intimidation and violence to keep his grip on power.

Hands up, everyone who is surprised. It may be an ominous indication, but I personally am surprised that Mugabe has shown this much restraint. It's totally out of character. Power will slip out of his hands when they are cold and dead, and not a minute earlier. His use of intimidation and violence is well-documented and goes way back.

It's rather uncomfortable for journalists to document that though. Mugabe was a former media darling. It is difficult to admit mistakes, especially ones that never should have been made. To this day journalists seem incapable of summoning the moral outrage they applied (rightly, in that case) to apartheid and turning it against Mugabe. This despite the fact that he has turned his formerly prosperous country into a hellhole that most of his people would cheerfully leave for South Africa - present or past - or for old-time Rhodesia.

It is the African tragedy writ large all over again: a "liberator" who is really only interested in his own power. And a politically correct world that should be howling in outrage but doesn't. And journalists who express polite amazement at the inevitable.

I think I shall go be ill.


Technorati tags: Mugabe, Journalism, Zimbabwe

YouTube Pornography and Hypocrisy

There has been a great fuss in the blogosphere lately about Michelle Malkin's censored YouTube video. From Michelle's website:

Back in February, you may remember, I cobbled together a little mini-movie called "First, They Came" inspired by the Mohammed Cartoon riots. It's a simple slideshow highlighting the victims of Islamic violence over the years. We posted it at YouTube a while ago. No problems. Until last week, when I received this e-mail: ...

Suffice it to say that YouTube pulled the video for inappropriate content. (And no, I don't normally read Michelle and I don't know what the original video was like. That isn't really the point, as you will see.)

Now I found YouTube's action very peculiar, because a YouTube employee made it quite clear some time ago that there was no way they could police the content on their site and that they don't even try.

However, an employee of YouTube called Think & Ask following publication of "Fetish Videos Land on Family Entertainment Website YouTube" and for that individual's own protection we agreed not to publish the informant's name or gender. The company has relatively few, but tightly knit employees.

"It [pornography] was bound to happen, but we don't have the [manual] resources to control what people post here," the informant said.

"For our future business model the issue is very sticky. I'm sure upper management won't comment for that reason," the informant said.

It would appear that they have plenty of time for political censorship, but can't be bothered with sifting out porn.

"Rev." Billy Gisher of Those Bastards (The Meanest Weblog on the Web) declared war on YouTube on August 15. He was upset by the fact that about 80% of the videos on YouTube are pornographic, that they are readily viewable by any child surfing the Internet, and that YouTube refuses to do anything about it.

So Gisher started informing the advertisers (including WalMart, the Girl Guides of America, and just about any large corporation you can think of) that their ads were appearing with pornographic content. He had screen captures in hand to prove his point. A good number of advertisers started pulling ads. You can read the whole saga over on their website, although I think it only fair to warn you that it's not family viewing. He includes largish thumbnails of screen captures.

Gisher proposed a simple method to YouTube to restrict access by children, but needless to say, they haven't implemented it. He's now started to put "real reverends" on the case, concluding he just doesn't have enough clout on his own. He cites a New York Times interview with one of the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley:

Yesterday evening, I took notice of this interview published on September 30, 2006 in the New York Times. Chad Hurley, one of the founders of YouTube, spoke with their reporters and editors to answer some questions, which were excerpted to compile this story, from which I have extracted the following question and response:

Times staff: "But you said a vast majority of your stuff was user-generated and kind of wacky unpredictable stuff. Why would an advertiser want to be next to something where it might be something disgusting?"

Chad Hurley: "Well, I think it's the nature of the Internet. There's not really any safe places on the Internet. And they just want to get in front of audiences.....And I think they're just looking for new opportunities to get in front of an audience, and that's what we're providing for them."

I think that Chad Hurley's comments come as close as you possibly can to stating that he believes most major advertisers care more about getting their message in front of an audience than they do about offending their audience.

(The NYT didn't pursue this line of questioning, perhaps because they themselves advertise on YouTube. No possibility of disinterested journalism here.)

Gisher has been on this story for about two months now, contacting advertisers on a daily basis, reporting their reactions and refusing to give up on the issue. He wants this material to be made inaccessible to children and is doing everything he can to see it happen. Despite his online moniker, there is nothing reverend about him, nor about the group blog he is part of, so opponents are going to have a difficult time characterizing this as coming from some uptight religious prude.

Technorati tags: Billy Gisher, YouTube porn, YouTube, Michelle Malkin

Amnesty accuses Hezbollah

Amnesty International, after blasting Israel, is now accusing Hezbollah of war crimes because of its targetting of civilians with Katyusha rockets. Hezbollah, it will come as no surprise, does not agree and claims that they were just responding to Israeli attacks. Now, maybe my memory is fuzzy, but it seems to me that they had been lobbing Katyushas at Israel for quite some time before war broke out, so this argument seems disingenuous at best. Or, in plainer English, they're lying.

Amnesty is preparing another report studying whether Hezbollah contributed to civilian deaths in Lebanon by hiding among civilians, Nicole Choueiry, a spokesman for Amnesty in Britain, said.

High time. The use of human shields is utterly despicable, and I can't understand why there hasn't been a greater outcry over it. Well, actually, I can, but it makes me a little ill.

Technorati tags: Amnesty International, Hezbollah

There is no such thing as absolute truth

... and I am absolutely sure of it!

Some of you find that amusing, but that's just because you're being polite. You think I'm joking, and you're flattering me with a faint smile. But I'm not joking. That is essentially the creed of the relativists and they are dead serious about it.

The irony of it, and its fatal flaw, is that the statement "there is no such thing as absolute truth" is a perfect oxymoron, being itself a statement of absolute truth. And try as I might, no matter how much I've poked at it, picked it up and shook it till it rattled, I can't get anything but an oxymoron out of it. It is a self-refuting statement.

And yet this fuzzy thinking is the new orthodoxy. There is hardly a more offensive statement you can make to relativists (and there are a LOT of them out there) than, "I have the truth." They will take issue with you for thinking there is anything like THE truth that can be found. And most especially, for claiming to have found it.

If you don't believe me, try claiming to have the Truth online somewhere. This works better than trying it face-to-face, because residual manners crumble much more easily in an online environment. Unless you make this statement on a religious (and specifically Christian, Jewish or Muslim) site, you will get attacked quite vigorously for daring to think you've found it.

Then they will undermine their own case by finding fault with the truth you have found. Consistency may be the hobgoblin of small minds, but when someone starts with a premise that is fatally flawed and then proceeds to undermine it every chance he gets, he doesn't have much to stand on. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

If there is no such thing as absolute truth, the only answer to anybody's belief is "If it makes you happy." You have surrendered the right to debate its validity. Any protestation is both heresy and hypocrisy.

If absolute truth does indeed exist, then you can argue if you like, based on objective criteria. You can argue that someone else has found lies instead of truth, or that he has misunderstood the truth. But you cannot argue that there is more than one truth. Just as only one physical body can occupy a given space at any one time, so only one absolute truth can exist. Our understanding of it may be relative and mistaken in any number of particulars, but none of that affects it. The earth remained round no matter how many medieval minds were oblivious and even hostile to that fact. Nobody ever fell off the edge, regardless of how fervently they believed in the possibility. Truth is unaltered by our opinions and beliefs.

This is, of course, another great inconsistency of those who say they don't believe in absolute truth. They apply this doctrine in a highly selective manner. I'll bet you won't find a flat-earther among them. Objective criteria for determining truth are fine when it comes to something physical and concrete. But what about magnetism? Or sub-atomic particles? Gravity? The weak force? The vast majority of us take the existence of these things on pure faith. You won't find too many relativists - if any - doubting their existence or even giving you the choice of doubting them.

If we are prepared to believe in the truth of such abstract, invisible things without taxing astrophysicists with arrogance, why do the rules suddenly undergo such a violent shift when it comes to metaphysics? If we believe there is a physical truth to be found, why not a metaphysical truth? And when someone thinks they've found it, why not examine the validity of the criteria used, rather than upbraiding them for looking at all?

Technorati tags: Truth, Absolute truth

In praise of hypocrisy

I was raised in Sunday school. I'm not supposed to be in favour of hypocrisy. And I'm not. Really truly. Who could possibly be in favour of child-molesting priests, politicians on the take, environmentalists who hide SUV's in their garages and nutritionists who scarf down chocolate bars on the sly? ("Flavonoids, my deah, the operative word is flavonoids.") OK, I admit, it's hard to get in a lather about that last one, but you know what I mean.

Given a choice between the real thing and a faker, I'll take the real thing anyday. But more and more that's not the choice I'm given. When I have to pick between the slimy pretenders and the people proudly trumpeting their vice to the world, I'll take the slimeballs.

The hypocrites are at least acknowledging that what they are covering up is wrong, or at the very least, socially unacceptable. As François de la Rochefoucauld famously said, "Hypocrisy is the homage which vice pays to virtue." There is still an operative sense of shame and a tacit acknowledgement that what they are keeping under wraps is wrong.

Contrast that, for instance, with NAMBLA and its avowed aim to "leave" children "free to determine the content of their own sexual experiences." Or with Paris Hilton and her open quest for the venal, the superficial and the narcissistic.

Somehow, they evoke in me a much deeper sense of horror. And quite apart from my own personal feelings, which really don't much matter to anyone who isn't me, there is the fact that these people serve as magnets for the like-minded and together, they enable and embolden each other. It's like removing a quarantine; the sickness spreads more easily.

Hypocrisy is indeed a vice, but in the long run it's preferable to shamelessness.

Technorati tag: Hypocrisy