Comments on: How true that is

By: sym

sym — Sat, 13 Sep 2003 21:45:31 +0000

The best part was his first post about the Wyclef song. Without knowing what language the song was in, Sully quoted the line “yo pa respekte Israel”, then basically accused Dean of hating Jews. It’s a reggae song. Of course it’s pro-Israel. When he posted the translation of the song, he did not mention how it completely contradicted his earlier take, or apologized for smearing Dean. Great self-correcting mechanism my ass.

By: Karmakin

Karmakin — Sat, 13 Sep 2003 17:06:21 +0000

Steve is right. Mainstream analysis sucks. There is a little bit that’s good. A tiny bit. People accuse the blogosphere of being an “echo chamber”. Well what does that make the mainstream media? A whole bunch of screaming inside one big ugly head? Read This It comes from the Rittenhouse Review, that is to the left, but it puts it succinctly. The blogosphere gives you a whole bunch of truly independent views, for the most part done with a degree of intelligence that is completely missed by anybody who is creating for mass consumption. I agree completly. I’ll read the speeches and the reports myself, thank you very much. The mainstream media DOES have a place. It’s to tell us what where and when. Not how and why anymore.

By: Eric

Eric — Sat, 13 Sep 2003 16:52:59 +0000

Of course there is a link between 9/11 & Iraq: the fighters that could had intercepted the attack were all over in Iraq.

By: david`

david` — Sat, 13 Sep 2003 04:05:01 +0000

Why do people keep saying Sully is smart, if he keeps saying stupid things? The stupidest, to my mind, was the religion bit in the NYT magazine after September 11. The fact that everyone bit on that idiocy reflects on everyone.

By: Sully the hack

Sully the hack — Sat, 13 Sep 2003 01:22:12 +0000

Hey give me a break. I only had a few minutes to think of a way of smearing Dean. And by the way, renowned constitutional scholar Ann Coulter agrees with me about 9-11: “On the basis of their recent pronouncements, the position of the Democratic Party seems to be that Saddam Hussein did not hit us on 9-11, but Halliburton did.” http://www.anncoulter.org/columns/2003/091003e.htm So there!

By: neil

neil — Fri, 12 Sep 2003 23:41:38 +0000

I just read through the lyrics while listening to the song again (it’s one of my favorite songs, but I couldn’t pick up most of the lyrics, only knowing French), and I think that even for Sullivan it’s spectacular how much he doesn’t get the song at all. To me, the message sent by the song is similar to the message being sent by MEChA—be proud of your culture, don’t respond to pressure to cast it off in favor of your adopted country (pressure, as we see here, from people like Sullivan). There’s clearly nothing against non-Haitians in the song, and thus nothing against assimilation. Wyclef makes this point quite clearly: “You’re scared to say Haitian girls are beautiful / Beautiful girls are beautiful.” The tendency of repressed ethnic groups in America to be sexually attracted only to women of the dominant ethnic group has been documented by Alex Haley, among others. Is there anything “anti-assimilation” about criticizing that? If Andrew continues arguing this point, then he is basically defining “assimilation” as submission to the dominant race. I don’t think this is actually what he believes, though. The thing is, I don’t think Andrew is necessarily misinterpreting this song. It seems with all the pointed references to Israel, the lyrics should be striking a familiar chord with him. (I somehow doubt he objects to Israeli identity politics.) I think that, as with those in an uproar over MEChA, he is threatened by immigrants and the contributions they might make to the American melting pot. This is an especially unfortunate example of present-day conservative ideology actively working against what has long been regarded an American point of pride.

By: neil

neil — Fri, 12 Sep 2003 23:14:05 +0000

I didn’t realize Andrew Sullivan was such a PC prude. But then again, that does seem to be the norm among the Republican standard-bearers these days, doesn’t it?

By: Ophelia Benson

Ophelia Benson — Fri, 12 Sep 2003 22:38:03 +0000

Gosh, yeah, why can’t the Democrats see how it’s all connected? Huh? Why? All it takes is some Marines to spell it out for them, so why are they so like clueless?

By: Steve Laniel

Steve Laniel — Fri, 12 Sep 2003 22:25:40 +0000

I think blogs are turning into a really great fact-checking mechanism, at least the portion of the blogging world that Crooked Timber, Volokh, Mark Kleiman, Dan Drezner, Brad DeLong et al. inhabit. These are all tremendously smart people, all of whom do a really good job pointing out the fallacies in mainstream media—of which there are many. Mainstream media might still be good for actual initial-fact demonstration (event E happened in place P at time T), but they’re terrible for news analysis. I find myself skipping the commentary part of most news articles nowadays (the “what does this event MEAN” portion), and only reading the factual part. And for many of the factual parts, I now find that I don’t even need to read what a reporter writes—I can go on the net and find the actual text of Bush’s speech, and I don’t need to know what the reporter thinks is significant about that speech; I’ll make up my own mind about that, thank you very much. I doubt that mainstream media are all that reliable. Whom do you trust more on drug policy: some journalism-school graduate with no scientific training, or Mark Kleiman? When discussing law, whom do you trust more: a non-lawyer, or Eugene Volokh? (If you think Volokh too partisan, try any number of other law professors with blogs. Jack Balkin, say.) The mainstream media are slowly losing sectors in which they dominate. These days, I’m much more likely to check the New York Times headline, see that Bush delivered a speech, find the text of the speech, form my own opinions, then check various learned folks to see what they thought about it. The Times becomes a pointer to actual interesting content, rather than the provider of that content—kind of like how I’ll get recommendations from Amazon, then go to the Harvard Book Store to actually buy the book. All right, that was my long ramble. I hope it went somewhere interesting.

By: Ophelia Benson

Ophelia Benson — Fri, 12 Sep 2003 20:19:28 +0000

Interesting. There are 18 digits in the URL for that link. So Sullivan has posted, what, a trillion trillion times? Busy guy.

By: jb

jb — Fri, 12 Sep 2003 20:01:17 +0000

Yeah, I like Sully, and read him regularly, but that particular post was just silly. Which, I suppose, might be how he meant it.

By: Andrew Reeves

Andrew Reeves — Fri, 12 Sep 2003 19:35:09 +0000

Therein lies the key weakness of (solo) blogging: When you have no editor, no need to actually have some print organ publish, no accountability (and no, blogs of left and right persuasion sniping at each other doesn’t really count), then quality suffers since you can just churn out whatever comes to mind without really being called on it. With no corrective mechanisms, that which is shrill becomes even moreso and next thing you know, you’ve been taken by the Brain Eater.