It was the blogosphere that did it.

I picked up a different, though related, logic:
1. Extremists feed off partisan blogs.
2. Partisan blogs called Rubin on her Islamist jibes.
3. Left wing extremists might now kill Rubin AND WHOSE FAULT WOULD THAT BE?
I believe the philosophy term for such a position can be found in this text.

Isn’t the main problem most liberals have with Jennifer Rubin is that she’s an egregious hack?

This is obviously a partisan matter. Only left-wing extremists think hacks are bad.

Is Pexton’s nonsense any worse, logically speaking, than Brad DeLong’s glib re-titling of Matt Yglesias? (Progressive Income Redistribution Is Not the Only Business of Government) If rage is the disease of left blogistan these days, surely it’s no more virulent than self-congratulation amongst the centrist punditry.

If you were to ask me, I’d say that throwing spitwads from behind Mommy’s skirts is a pretty good way to piss a lot of people off.

I don’t think that argument even rises to the level of fallacy. The proper name for Jennifer’s post is plain ‘ol bullshit.

Daniel Nexon, @5:

The best part is where he claims that, as she started observing Shabbat around 9pm, she didn’t know that the perpetrator was more into Pamela Geller than Osama Bin Laden. Never mind that sundown was at 8.30 in Washington, so by their own timeline she was already engaged in unsanctioned blogging.

Candle lighting for DC was 8:11 pm that day. Seeing no evidence of sabbath-desecrating postings by Ms. Rubin in the previous several weeks, I think it’s extremely low to assume bad faith, and it’s difficult for me not to read into Daniel’s remark a sneering tone which I hope has little place here. The offense of posting her retraction more than an hour before tzeit hakochavim on Saturday is actually much more severe (scholarly citations upon request), but in turn is far less grave than the offense Daniel (if a Jew) commits by shaming her publicly for it. A critic from within the pale of decent Jewish thought would be dan l’khaf zahut (inclined to read charitably) at least to the extent of assuming that her (perhaps improperly) hasty retraction was motivated by a considered, or even anguished, judgment of the competing and equally core Jewish values of motzi shem ra (slander) avoidance and sabbath keeping.

Surely it’s enough that she’s a raving hateful wingnut deserving of public calumny: must we chase her into her home? I’d like to believe that Crooked Timber can be a safe place to post even for the minority who might have to leave it unwatched for 25 hours or so.

“the dangerous kind of armed group is the kind that’s in communication with a much bigger social movement hinterland”

The dangerous kind of armed group is called, er, Army. Also, speaking of Italy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_1980_Bologna_bombing

hasty retraction

Such as it was, and indeed it was churlish at best. Going back to her Saturday update, I found it sad that even a bigot and a baiter could aim for an apology and miss that badly.

Notwithstanding and on the facts presented, anyone who piles on to the halakhic angle, whether to scorn her for being a day late or an hour early, is trying to pick a fight with a people rather than with a person. It’s not a good place to stand while allegedly calling out a hater.

10: how about reading the ombudsmen’s “she’s Jewish” defense so that you don’t make yourself look like a fools.

“What compounded Rubin’s error is that she let her 5 p.m. Friday post remain uncorrected for more than 24 hours. She wrote four other unrelated blog posts that night, through about 9 p.m. Police officials in Norway at 8:33 p.m. Washington time had made their first statement that the suspect had no connection to international terrorism or Muslims. Rubin should have rechecked the facts before signing off, and Post editors should have thought about editing her post more that night.

But Rubin has a good defense. She is Jewish. She generally observes the Sabbath from sundown Friday until sundown Saturday; she doesn’t blog, doesn’t tweet, doesn’t respond to reader e-mails.”

To J.W. Burton @14:
I think her religious observance or lack thereof is beside the point, and as someone who routinely “desecrates” (your verb) the Sabbath I couldn’t care less. If Sabbath- keeping is indeed “a core Jewish value,” as you say at #10 above, then it is a value I reject (at least for myself). If Judaism has an equivalent of excommunication, which I believe it may although I don’t know what it’s called, you probably should pronounce the sentence upon me forthwith. (My parents are deceased, as is the rabbi who officiated at my bar mitzvah, so no one will mind.)

all this to-do because someone got called on their BS? my goodness. any wonder why there is partisan/extremism on the blogosphere.

if lies and pandering go unquestioned or unchallenged, extremism is the result. which is what America is today. all the Far Right BS from Fox and whomever has gone on for so long and polluted the well that used to be common. The left is not blameless, the left is also not as extreme or as well funded in the ability to manufacture the 30 years of right wing BS.

Now someone is called on their BS and they call it “hurtful and vitriolic”? the seeds of discord have gone unchallenged for so long, i find the lack of “courtesy” unsurprising.

that of course, does not excuse or warrant harm or the calling for harm to anyone.

this is such a manufactured to do. to avoid the ownership of being full of it. and taking responsibility to own up for one’s own lies. Where does it start? the ownership of responsibility? When will those who outright lie or even casually utter falsehood ever be held accountable.

Accountability for one’s own actions seems only to be for the certain select and few. and there is any wonder the country is divided! oh please, this lady jumped to conclusions that were obviously wrong, and doesn’t want to be held accountable! just say, ” I was wrong.” instead i hear a lot of “defensiveness” and “you can’t say that about me.”

oh please! this kind of evasiveness only encourages such bile and “partisan” hate filled rants. The pot calling the kettle black in my opinion. just don’t ever question anyone, and everything will be okay, right? after all we know Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction. YOU dare to question me?

Henry writes…
“…There is no effective contact between e.g. MoveOn or the Daily Kos on the one hand, and the various subgroups and splinters who are more enthusiastic about violence on the other. When the latter try to influence the former, they get mobbed and repelled. The right is a quite different matter – there are dense social ties between online partisans and anti-Muslim bigots and crazies claiming that universal dhimmidom is right around the corner…”

I think there’s some truth to Henry’s assertion’s claim about the differences between the online left’s response to overt calls to violence, and those from the right. However, part of the tolerance we see on the right resides in the right’s fundamental philosophical stance, both on second amendment rights and on the rights of the individual versus government. Online posturing is another component. I’m curious about Henry’s claim about “dense, social ties” linking the regular right with the crazies. This sort of claim would seem to require some evidence. There’s no question tribalism is operating. But it operates virulently on the left, as much as it does the right. 9/11 truthers enjoy enormous support from the online left community, so much so that they had to be banned from DKOS and other sites. These nuts are not, of course, calling for armed insurrection. They share with the extreme right, however, a paranoid vision of government conspiracies of all kinds. I’ve written plenty of anti-right polemics in the past. But online voices are just that, a particular tone for a particular audience.

I’m not at all convinced that the right-wing noise machine does anything more than mirror and give form to existing prejudices in some sort of unhealthy feedback loop. Reading the NYT and leftwing blogs exclusively serves a similar purpose. Taking pot-shots at Rubin is fine. She’s a partisan and a much better read than most partisans, with the exception of Glenn Greenwald and company.

The rhetorical double-standards on display here and elsewhere are instructive. Evidently it’s fine to characterize political opponents as terrorists who, in the words of Margaret Carlson, “strap bombs” to Congress. The ninety odd victims in Norway are political fodder for the left and the right. The failure of the progressive left to protect those most at risk deteriorates into attacks on right-wing pundits. Sad doesn’t quite cover it.

but she also says she was WORKING on OTHER POSTS until about 9pm

With the sabbath crowding her, she kept typing until about 50 minutes after candle lighting — still within the Rabeinu Tam’s lenient minority opinion on which hundreds of delayed airline travelers reluctantly rely each Friday — and missed the Norwegian update in those hectic borrowed minutes. Whether she was rushed by imperfectly expressed religious conscience or by arriving guests, she paid a heavy and public price for her imprudent erev shabbat sprint. She was neither the first nor the worst of Jews so caught that week, or any other.

She then somehow discovered her gruesome folly while unplugged, and was sufficiently moved, whether by fairness, vanity or mere discomfort, to jump the gun by an hour on Saturday night, a temptation for which no similar leniency exists. Again, I have seen many observant Jews do likewise, in less pressing causes: when wonderful news broke on a Saturday morning twenty years ago, I saw a whole country hopping on one foot like a schoolboy with no bathroom pass, waiting to turn on the TV.

Nothing about this is implausible or reprehensible from a perspective of Jewish law at anything near the vulgar and prurient threshold of lashon hara that is crossed by calling her on it. As the ombudsman says (and contra LFC @18), the timing, while it excuses none of the shameful speculation in Ms. Rubin’s original post, is very much to the point in understanding the slowness of her (again, stingy and inadequate) update.

If Daniel merely meant (“the best part”) that this backstory is irrelevant in walking back her mens rea that noisy quiet day, then I hope he is now better informed. But if, as it still seems to me, he finds Ms. Rubin’s genuine religious scruples about chilul shabbat implausible on the face, then I invite him to check in more detail than I did to confirm or refute what looks like her consistent standing pattern of silence from sundown on Fridays to full darkness on Saturdays. (Or, in a more Jewish, and dare I say more Christian, spirit, to give her the benefit of the doubt and drop it.) And finally, if he means to mock her because she has such scruples, then I’d like to call, passionately, for a bit of moderation — either the self-imposed sort, or the editorial kind that ultimately defines a blog as a salon for diverse perspectives or as a soapbox for narrow intolerance.

Nothing about this is implausible or reprehensible from a perspective of Jewish law at anything near the vulgar and prurient threshold of lashon hara that is crossed by calling her on it.

What does this have to do with her original flacking? Explain in detail, since I’m just a dumb mathematician who can’t follow the logic here.

I’m sure you’ve got a good explanation ;-)

Note to self: stop commenting from an iPad. I clearly can’t use it well enough to spell properly, viz. Joshua and Rabeinu.

It is in the online forums that the cleavers come out. Hence, my interest in evidence of “dense, social ties”. I’m prepared to believe they exist, particularly in smaller religiously, ideologically, or ethnically homogeneously communities.

I’m afraid your collection of book titles and the Gellar photo-montage isn’t evidence of anything than the fact bigotry and paranoia sells and distracts.

Translation: If you can’t make me say I’m wrong then I win (and how many times do we have to go through this song and dance?)

You know, Kidneystones, I don’t think anyone greatly cares if you’re “convinced” or not.

Links with the crazies.

http://warincontext.org/2011/07/31/david-yerushalmi-the-white-supremacist-lawyer-leading-the-anti-sharia-crusade-in-the-us/

trying to make sense of what and when this confused and misinformed bitch

Joshua, don’t pretend you’re fighting for a people when you discount half of them.

when you discount half of them

I’m sorry, was “bitch” misogynistic? I don’t like her very much, but I’ll withdraw it.

sov (lovely name, btw) and nick write…

Kevin Drum looks at the infamous sh@t sandwich and discovers the unpalatable truth: so-called progressives offered no compelling arguments to convince voters to that Dems could be trusted to manage the economic crisis. The first concrete evidence of Dem failure arrived in 2010. The rest has been arriving in installments.

I found Newt Gingrich’s willingness to transform every act of lunacy into an indictment of his political opponents profoundly loathsome. Dem willingness to sell-out the poor to the public service unions is the most illuminating example of Dem special interest politics. Hurling invective at the right hasn’t worked. Nor will it, I suspect, given the evidence of recent elections. Grayson ramped up the Taliban Dan rhetoric and torpedoed his own campaign. Imagining the left to be conscientious and noble at a time when the Dem peace-prize president is waging three wars and selling out the poor is self-deception at the deepest level, as Glenn Greenwald has repeatedly pointed out.

The term “social” is Henry’s, Nick. By which, I offered two examples. Racist bigot Rahm Emmanuel’s father is inside the Dem/AIPAC tent as much as Pam is. Reagan dined with Will in his home. There are real historical links connecting right-wing terrorism with “respectable” Democratic political organizations. Robert Byrd is one recent example. Dem politicians in Boston rely, in part, on Irish communities that still view the British presence in Ireland as an illegal occupation.

Calling out Rubin seems entirely unreasonable given the scurrilous accusations of “terrorism” being leveled at people I happen to disagree with. They’re wrong, they’re not evil. Their success, as Kevin Drum points out, is concrete evidence of progressive failure, not of libertarian success.

Can’t help you with the dumb mathematician part, sorry. For what it’s worth, I’m a smart particle physicist, and ceteris paribus that would put us roughly eye to eye.

Btw, this puts you somewhat beneath me. Two words: String Theory ;-)

And whether or not her accuser is “just as bad”, it still doesn’t change the fact that her behaviour has been appalling – especially for so ineptly trying to play the religious card.

Well, that’s just it, isn’t it? The “religious card” here might be a ruse, played by the ombudsman who on this reading should at least change his job title to “apologist” if not to “sock puppet.” But then we have to explain why months of prior archived postings support the ruse. On the Occam hand, my simpler theory that she was completely out of the loop from minutes after Norwegian authorities proved her a fool until minutes before she leapt ineptly to her own defense . . . is completely consistent with everything we know, and adds up to a nightmare gaffe that will make most observant Jews cringe with empathy, remembering similar fiascoes or near misses — be the rest ever so appalling.

Daniel thinks, either in ignorance of halakhic nuance or in gleeful “gotcha” contempt of same, that he has a Perry Mason answer to where Jennifer was on the night of July 22nd. He’s wrong, but if it were me caught against the stopwatch in her place, I’d be pretty embarrassed. Not embarrassing people in this way is a very big thing in halakha, and if I’m going to comment at all then Lev 19:17 sets the proper tone. Tu quoque is no answer to valid thoughtful rebuke, but it is the perfect riposte to a hypocrite who misuses a law he neither follows nor respects to humilate someone who, whatever her other faults, appears to be trying to live under its yoke.

Dem politicians in Boston rely, in part, on Irish communities that still view the British presence in Ireland as an illegal occupation.

I think you mean ‘Republican politicians in New York’. But we’ve established at least, amid the spatterdash, that you’re working from a definition of ‘social’ that requires supping at table and sitting on a porch, as opposed to attending political gatherings, forming political organisations and conducting political activities together in physical and online environments. How quaint.

nick s writes….

Actually, I do mean Dem constituencies in Boston, but I’ll happily acknowledge Republican links to terrorism in Ireland and Latin America. Unlike you, I’m not a drum-beater for either party. I don’t want to appear rude, another difference separating us I fear, but you’ve just now pointed out the fairly obvious distinctions between what most people might consider to be “social” relationships and those based exclusively on political affiliation and interest. Congratulations, I suppose, are in order and I’d offer mine had you made your argument rather my own. Thank you, though.

Still waiting for evidence of the “dense social ties” binding advocates of violence and the larger conservative community. Not holding my breath however.

“a hypocrite who misuses a law he neither follows nor respects ”

That is a pretty good description of Rubin.

Who by the way attacked american jews for being to intellectual – that is in antisemitic terms – because they couldn’t see the glory of Sarah Palin.

Nobody aside you gives a damn about her Sabbath observance. She is a polititical hack, not a charming person in aWalter Scott novel. If she really wants to stop writing on friday evening, perhaps she just should stop writing.
But no, her two gods – hate and war – needed a sacrifice.

Now we know: If her assumed religion – she hates being jewish anyway, wanting to be a true full blooded american like Palin instead – and the interests of the military-industrial complex clash, the MIC wins. That the dozens of dead from a terrorist attack are just fodder for the propaganda needs of the military-industrial complex is just the dressing.

Because the world needed her comment friday evening, when not much was known anyway and not a day later?

That is what I said. But you wanted to misinterpret it.

We need a law of the excluded muddle to get rid of compulsive centrist disorder. “Shape of the earth? Opinions vary.” The left isn’t denying evolution or climate change or simple budget arithmetic or claiming an existential threat from poor Middle Eastern countries or thundering about an impending end to civilization due to immigration or the prospect of universal health care or Bibles being taken away or Christmas made illegal or marriage destroyed. The right wing, however, is in lockstep insisting on each and every one of such insane propositions.

The left is of course angry that hard-won gains and precious opportunities are being lost. It’s true that both sides are angry, but adults are expected to understand that there are better strategies than equalizing tantrums. Of course, if our opinion leaders understood that, we’d have fought fewer wars and mightn’t be in such a sad state right now.

Piglet – there are two main readings of the Italian “years of lead”. One (whose advocates have included Philip Willan, Guy Debord, Sergio Flamigni and ex-Red Brigadist Alberto Franceschini) has it that it was mainly a matter of parapolitics & false-flag operations with a fringe of more or less deluded genuine activists. The other (whose advocates include most historians of the period and most activists who were around at the time, notably ex-Red Brigadist Renato Curcio) says that it was a genuine social movement phenomenon which the secret state meddled in & tried to use for their own ends.

Both sides agree that both elements existed – it ultimately comes down to which end you want to start at. While I’ve got a lot of respect for the people in the first list, I think it’s a really good idea to start at the social movement end. That goes for the Right, too – neo-fascist street-fighting was a substantial social movement in Italy in the mid-70s. (One of the less remarked-upon things that happened in the late 70s was that they were driven off the streets.)

(Note that it was the ombudsman who asserted religious privilege to excuse Rubin’s tardy and tendentious acquiescence to reality. The problem isn’t that in this case it’s rather lame, it’s that it’s no excuse at all. )

The problem isn’t that in this case it’s rather lame, it’s that it’s no excuse at all.

Could you elaborate on this a bit? Stipulating arguendo that she was truly ignorant of both world news and the response to her stupid posting until she saw the morning paper, or even for the whole of shabbat, as any observant Jew (whose Friday dinner and Saturday lunch companions are not political junkies) would be routinely likely to be — or that, aware of it, she felt ritually obligated to hold off until evening — what would you recommend?

That her acquiescence to reality was tendentious and grudging, who can deny? But do you truly consider its tardiness unexcused, or do you conclude the ombudsman is lying? And if the latter, then where is all her prior sabbath-breaking writing to support the charge?

Phil, I am of course discussing the United States, where, unfortunately, diversity itself is demonized by one side and considered a source of strength by the other. Maps of election results, church membership, histories of slavery, state policies on taxation, education and contraception, and for that matter even diabetes incidence, are nearly indistinguishable.

Joshua, my points are that the ombudsman made that defense, not Rubin, and that I don’t have to respect any religious excuse. “God ate her homework” simply does not deserve to be taken seriously.

Apart from that, I have no concerns about hers or any observance of the Sabbath. I’m of the opinion that the oft-quoted line from Hamlet, that a particular custom was more honored in its breach than its observance, meant that it was actually preferable that a cannonade not accompany the king’s carouse, not merely noting that it was seldom observed.

““forceful and unrepentant, yet not unreasonable.”

In the circumstances, that is a very strange definition of ‘not unreasonable’.

Re: Pam Geller.
British Activist and former Ambassador Craig Murray asks who funded Breivik, and his comments catch Pam Geller scrubbing stuff (like quite suggestive letter from Norway) from her website: http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2011/07/who-funded-breivik/
Ms. Rubin? meh.

I assume that Pexton’s NYT equivalent is already typing up his bipartisan moderate centrist take on Joe Nocera’s column today.

I don’t want to appear rude, another difference separating us I fear

Well, bless your heart.

There is no effective contact between e.g. MoveOn or the Daily Kos on the one hand, and the various subgroups and splinters who are more enthusiastic about violence on the other. When the latter try to influence the former, they get mobbed and repelled. The right is a quite different matter – there are dense social ties between online partisans and anti-Muslim bigots and crazies claiming that universal dhimmidom is right around the corner.

What’s the evidence for this general claim? As for the specific issue, so far as I can tell, Anders Breivik had no more involvement with anti-Muslim websites than James Lee did with Al Gore.

But I think the whole episode says a great deal about how she manages the intersection of her religious and secular priorities.

Daniel, are you saying that imperfectly punctilious observance — the kind that can get caught up in work for a half hour past shkiah, once — is inconsistent with “unplugging” as a factual matter (nobody lives that way, so she must be lying) or are you saying that the juxtaposition is possible but “ridiculous” (if she lives that way, she deserves to have her observance publicly laughed at, when it leads to a bad outcome)?

If the former, I can point you here to start; the Sabbath bride has many suitors outside the shtetl, as anyone who has made contact with “the reform tradition” might know. If the latter, I will say again that the etiquette problem itself rises to a halakhic matter of some gravity, and that on the ordinary humane level you might think about cutting a Jew the slack you would cut a person. (“See, she stopped off to go to early Mass and missed her plane, but — here’s the best part, see — it turns out that making up a skipped Mass on Monday morning, according to Archbishop X, isn’t even allowed.”)

Her beliefs and practices, whatever you think of them (and whatever bad Jim and others above think of hers, yours and mine) seem, as a factual matter, to explain her 23-hour silence as very likely oblivious rather than stubborn. Especially if her level of observance doesn’t live up to her own ideals, she may be shy to bring it up, but Pexton, standing as ombudsman near her desk and far from her sabbath table, finds it convincing and worth mentioning. Please, just leave it there and confine your contempt to the aspects of Ms. Rubin’s work and life that are in fact contemptible. They’re not hard to find.

Walt writes:

If anything, the fact that she was immediately unavailable makes it worse. If you’re going to make an unfounded accusation, you shouldn’t do it right before you become unavailable to revise or retract it.

With this, I heartily agree. But it’s a lesson of prudence, much more than of decency.

Joshua – as is the responsible thing to do, I’ll blame myself for your conintued misunderstanding of the nature of my criticisms. She was working on her computer until about 9pm. She was blogging until about 9pm. Yet she apparently never once, after 8.30, bothered to check headline news developments? Her latest Obama-is-a-lameo missive was important enough for her to stretch her “day” but during that same time an unfolding terrorist attack–one she considered important enough to drive our defense and security policy–deserved not ten seconds of her time? It isn’t that I don’t believe her. I do. But it is precisely because I believe her that I condemn her.

If you think this amounts to an undignified attack on her religiosity, then all I can say to you is “chill out.”

I had a bit of an explosive conniption about that Pexton piece yesterday. I won’t quote it since it is full of that uncivil language and vitriol that is apparently responsible for all the ills of the world, but (and apologies in advance if my HTML is messed up – the Preview seems to be messed up) here are some links. Anyways here’s the main things that enraged me about that piece:

1. Hasty conclusions. Teh hasty conclusions that left-wing bloogers jumped to was that Rubin is a racist and sociopathic hack who thinks all terrorists are Muslims and cares less about the dozens of dead and injured than about cuts to defense spending. Teh hasty conclusions that Rubin (and Pexton as well) jumped too was that the Utoya massacre must have been the work of Muslims (since all terrorists are Muslim). Who do you think has an easier set of conclusions to justify?

2. The obscenely horrendous nature of Rubin’s (and Pexton’s) conclusion. I mean, it could not be moar wrong. It wasn’t Islamic terror – it was Anti-Islamic terror. Plus – it is part of the whole “Islam is Evil” narrative required for the right-wing mass murderer to maintain his Holy War delusions.

3. The obscenely horrendous nature of this whole left-right equivalence nonsense. Seriously. The victims of the massacre were leftist socialists. It was a leadership camp for the Norwegian Labour Party. So a right-wing psycho shoots up a bunch of left-wing kids – doesn’t that make this the worst possible time to try and peddle a “both sides do it” narrative.

4. Where is this “both sides do it” when the Wash Post has negative stories about left-wingers? When the derisory editorials about anti-war protests were covering every single op-ed page on the planet, how many of them derided “both sides”? When covering anti-globalisation protests, where are the balancing statements about right-wing activists?

5. “Both sides”? Really? Go ahead and name some incidents of left-wing extremism. Think up the worst ones you possibly can and then compare them with what happened two weeks ago. Example, the G20 protest in my hometown – zero fatalities and the overwhelming majority of injuries were to protestors (some of whom were victims of excessive police force). Nevermind the difference between simple partisan name-calling and serious extremist activity – there is a fundamental difference between left-wing activism and right-wing activism.

6. Pexton claims that the high degree of partisanship means that left and right “don’t talk to each other”. Kinda rich to be making that observation while defending Jennifer Rubin’s column – one that even he acknowledges as being offensive to the left-leaning. funny how change never seems to start with the publisher in the mirror.

7. This is apparently from the Washington Post’s ombudsman. I’m starting to think that the Washington Post doesn’t know what “ombudsman” means.

mds, @79:

Especially when it allowed the ombudsman to turn it all into “How dare you criticize the tardiness of her correction, you anti-semites,” rather than acknowledging that her follow up was no genuine correction at all, but a doubling-down on her vicious thuggery.

No, he clearly (if rather limply) acknowledged it. “When she went online at 8 p.m. Saturday, her mea culpa post on Norway was the first thing she posted, although its tone also hurt her, particularly this sentence, which struck many readers as borderline racist . . . .”

And his review of the sunset vs. news wire chronology is exactly the sort of fact finding for which an ombudsman is needed. “Rubin should have rechecked the facts before signing off, and Post editors should have thought about editing her post more that night.” In other words, there is blame here, and some of it accrues to our masthead rather than to an employee who has certain Title VII rights to reasonable accommodation.

I think it’s easy to say what Pexton said (or hey, even everything I have said here and above) without playing the anti-semitism card. But by all means, keep a close eye on it if you are worried that the trump play will beat your hand.

I think it’s easy to say what Pexton said (or hey, even everything I have said here and above) without playing the anti-semitism card.

What anti-semitism has been demonstrated thus far?

Further clarification on #7.

I don’t mean to cloud the main point with all the highlighting of Pexton’s blatant hypocrisy. Yes, the accusations he throws at Rubin’s critics are just as valid if not moar so when levelled at both he and Rubin. That’s an important thing to notice. BUT moar importantly:

The ombudsman of the Washington Post just used the offensiveness of Jennifer Rubin’s posts as a justification for them being wrong.

Here’s his words:
If your politics are liberal and you don’t generally read Rubin, but you read her Norway posts, you probably would be pretty offended. But if you are a conservative, or someone who reads Rubin regularly, you’ll know that this is what she does and who she is.

Slightly Shorter Patrick B. Pexton:
If Jennifer Rubin has offended you, well that is a feature and not a bug. And as the representative of the Washington Post’s readership I have to say that you are all very mean and little people for complaining about it. Besides the real monsters in this whole scenario aren’t the folks at the Washington Post for supporting the notion that “all terrorists are Muslims (even when they aren’t – because Islam is Evil)”. It isn’t even the deranged psychotic Knight Justiciar living in his delusional world of Holy War against the Evil that is Islam. It’s the readers of the Washington Post. Especially the uncivil ones.

Substance McGravitas, @88:

What anti-semitism has been demonstrated thus far?

None, and none has been insinuated. I’m puzzled that “mds” even brought it up, unless the subject is much on his mind.

I did clearly mark off (@33, 51) some wrong turns that would quickly take the discussion into that swamp, but so far everyone has avoided them.

Uncle Kvetch complains,

There’s some sloppy thinking going on here, unc. DU, DKOS, and associated sites are run as private fiefs, not democracies. The reason management had to act, in the case of DKOS, is because the community did not. The majority of commenters/diarists may well have refudiated the troofers, but that didn’t stop a whole bunch of diaries dedicated to “exploring the question” from cropping up on a daily basis. And if the metric for “dense, social links” is cross-posting, then I can assure you that there are plenty of 9/11 troofers who are currently posting at DKOS and also at sites that tolerate the swill.

Smear them all for the actions of a few? Why not? To be fair, it is entirely possible that you simply don’t read and are, therefore, unaware of the fact that there are currently about six featured op-eds railing about tea-party jihadis from the NYT and other bastions of balance and fair-play. Check out RCP or the Huffpo, I’m sure you’ll find the offending headlines.

I’m fine, btw, with all the name-calling and the sarcasm. It just doesn’t seem to be winning progressives many battles. But don’t let that stop you.

Bingo! Do I win a prize?

Cute.

And let me add that I think there were good reasons for leaning toward a jihadist motivation for the attack. For months the terror-watch literature has worried about cells planning to launch small-arms attacks in Europe. Rubin’s “sin” was to take this wager and elevate it into a left-baiting call to buy more F-35s.

Would this be a bad time to make a joke along the lines of ‘she should get a shabbat goy blogger’? ’cause that was the first thing that came to my mind when I read Pexton’s piece.

Also too, this argument about whether Rubin was justified in leaving her factually incorrect piece of tripe uncorrected for so long is besides the point. This is her correction:

That the suspect here is a blond Norwegian does not support the proposition that we can rest easy with regard to the panoply of threats we face or that homeland security, intelligence and traditional military can be pruned back. To the contrary, the world remains very dangerous because very bad people will do horrendous things. There are many more jihadists than blond Norwegians out to kill Americans, and we should keep our eye on the systemic and far more potent threats that stem from an ideological war with the West.

LOL! Factually wrong (and as factually wrong as she could possibly be) but still right. Because:
1. Defense spending is moar important than the dozens of dead and injured. Who cares what actually happened when there’s a possibility of cuts to the Pentagon!
2. Islam is Evil. Maybe not the only Evil, but at a minimum – moar evil than Anders Breivik.

The fact that she’s an observant Jew and therefore had some cooling off time* before posting her update kinda makes it worse.

* I thought that a full day of introspection might have alerted Rubin to the fact that perhaps it was a little too soon to be analyzing a mass murder from the perspective of budget negotiations. Guess that shows how wrnog I can be.

Daniel Nexon @ 96,

To steal a phrase, Sadly, No!

The actual report (a 7MB pdf). Three Islamic terror attacks in 2010:

1. A cartoonist had to lock himself in his panic room when attacked by one guy. No casualties.
2. A toilet bomb (set by one guy) exploded pre-maturely. No casualties.
3. Two explosions ten minutes apart, set back one guy. One fatality. That same guy.

OMG! Al Qaeda! Al Qaeda! Or whomever the current Islamic Terror Boogeyman is!

I’m a bit confused as to how I’m using Rubin’s own scruples against her.

You aren’t, unless (as was, for a while, unclear) you were saying, not even that people shouldn’t keep shabbat, but that people who keep shabbat imperfectly lose the privilege.

I agree, and have repeatedly averred above, that talking when she’s done listening is journalistic bad form and speaks to character, and that (because any sabbath observer has been caught in this trap now and then) Friday afternoon is a good time to err on the side of prudence, which she emphatically did not. (The ombudsman cuts through the religious excuse and dings her for this, in fact.) I think you can play fast and loose with these constraints for a long time without catching a bad break of this magnitude, but that’s high-stakes pool for you. My ire is chiefly (mis?)directed at the proposition, which you also reject if I now understand you, that it would be poor judgment and ego overtaken by bad luck at 8:11 by the Chabad calendar, but it’s mere hypocritical sanctimony at 9:03.

Henri Vieuxtemps, @98:

Would this be a bad time to make a joke along the lines of ‘she should get a shabbat goy blogger’? ‘cause that was the first thing that came to my mind when I read Pexton’s piece.

No joke. Failure to cover this foreseeable need, whether at her expense or the Post’s, is what spreads the blame to the editorial level, as Pexton correctly notes.

@107

I should apologize. I did understand your point – that Rubin took Joscelyn’s hypothetical1 as a given and then used it to flog her own agenda. Yeah, that’s pretty horrible.

What I did, was to take your point and use it to flog my own agenda – poutrage at society’s identification of Terroism with Islam (and apparently the Washington Post bears no responsibility in that). That things which are factually incorrect are also taken as given if they support the idea that Islamoterror is waiting around every corner. Of course there’s a serious Islamic terror threat to Norway! All three 2010 European Islamoterror events happened in Denmark and Sweden!

fn1: Someone had a killer line about this – about citing Joscelyn as an expert on terrorism is like citing David Duke as an expert on race relations. Wish I could find the link.

Joshua W. Burton 08.02.11 at 8:43 am
” Could you elaborate on this a bit? Stipulating arguendo that she was truly ignorant of both world news and the response to her stupid posting until she saw the morning paper, or even for the whole of shabbat, as any observant Jew (whose Friday dinner and Saturday lunch companions are not political junkies) would be routinely likely to be—or that, aware of it, she felt ritually obligated to hold off until evening—what would you recommend?

That her acquiescence to reality was tendentious and grudging, who can deny? But do you truly consider its tardiness unexcused, or do you conclude the ombudsman is lying? And if the latter, then where is all her prior sabbath-breaking writing to support the charge?”

First, she shouldn’t post with no evidence at all on a major breaking news story minutes before she can’t update for 24 hourse.

Second, that she refrain from flat-out lying, which is what her post was – an assertion that a terrorist attack means that we need to spend vast additional sums of money on high-tech conventional war tools.

Third, that she refrains from quoting an intellectual brothel like AEI (unless they’ve apologized for their Iraq War propaganda, and have fired all responsible, which hasn’t happened yet).

Back in the hazy, distant past (@22), kidneystones wrote:
9/11 truthers enjoy enormous support from the online left community, so much so that they had to be banned from DKOS and other sites.

Which looks to me like a nice example of a self-refuting assertion.

To be as fair as I can manage, kidneystones has attempted to explain this, and not being familiar with DKos, I can’t say he/she is wrong on the facts reported. I will say that setting up a bunch of diaries on DKos – to the point of getting banned – is the kind of obsessive activity I’d expect out of the 9/11 troofies. And my own reading of the left blogosphere over the past 7-8 years has turned up practically zero support for the troofies when they do pop up.

So, kidneystones: I would expect that “enormous support from the online left community” would translate into a significant selection of well-known bloggers who have expressed sympathy for the troofies at least and in some cases actively encourage them. Care to name a couple?

kidneystones 94, what a BS. “The reason management had to act, in the case of DKOS, is because the community did not.”

How could “the community” have acted? They majority couldn’t prevent wing-nuts from posting comments. The fact that wingnuts show up on some online forum cannot be held against the bulk of forum participants. Your posturing is quite disingenuous, to say the least.

DragonKing: something went wrong with your spell checker (moar please!)

Rubin: “There are many more jihadists than blond Norwegians out to kill Americans, and we should keep our eye on the systemic and far more potent threats that stem from an ideological war with the West.”

Since nobody mentioned this so far, notice how Rubin writes as if only American victims of terrorism count. I don’t know whether there are any “blond Norwegians out to kill Americans” but there was at least one “out to kill Norwegians” and that may be more than there are Islamic jihadists “out to kill Norwegians” (I could be wrong about that but the point is, there is no evidence to the contrary).

It is hard to say whether Rubin made that gaffe consciously, probably not, but certainly the appeal of her argument (from the point of view of her right-wing readership) rests in part on the fact that they don’t identify with *those victims*. European socialist youths are not the kind of victims *they* are concerned with, and *they* don’t care that much about *that kind* of terrorism.

What is especially annoying about the ombudsman’s column is the disingenuous blame it casts not only on the left side of the “partisanship system” but on the “blogosphere.” I find it impossible to doubt that editors know perfectly well which writers, of what genders and of which kinds of surnames or representing which opinions, as well as which kinds of human interest stories, get the nastiest responses from readers. It would be unsurprising if online responses fit exactly the same pattern snail-mail responses do. It seems irresponsible to pretend a problem of that magnitude, and involving such a risk of violence, could be resolved by having a few bloggers hang up their keyboards. It’s not as if it would be so difficult to accomplish: much easier than deporting all the undocumented immigrants in the US, or making every major city with its suburbs commutable by public transport.

What is especially annoying about the ombudsman’s column is the disingenuous blame it casts not only on the left side of the “partisanship system” but on the “blogosphere.”

Hush, there: don’t you know that trolls and flame-warriors only exist on the internets, and not as well-remunerated newspaper columnists, TV pundits or Regnery authors?

Thanks Joshua for your comments.

Uh-huh. A Fields Medal trumps testable predictions. A Fields Medal trumps falsifiability.

Not from down here, very much. But up in your rarefied world of math, I hear that Ed Witten, and his proof of Yau’s positive mass conjecture, and the Fields Medal he won for it, are really quite the thing. The brother of a dear family friend won a Fields last summer, and the whole family (more-than-smart mathematicians, all) were very excited; I’m pretty sure it’s a big deal.

Sigh. I think this adequately defines and contrasts the two of us[1]. And, uh, don’t take this the wrong way, but you don’t seem to have much of a clue as to what the Fields medal is about.

Notice to all: I did not force him to say this, or trick or trap him in any way.

Come on now, ‘fess up. Are you actually qualified to have an opinion about Witten’s work, and to speak as an intellectual equal to people who use their own names?

Now I know why I never see you over at Woit’s blog or at n-category cafe. Do you really not understand the difference between mathematics and physics? Do you really not understand the difference between mathematical theory, and misapplying mathematical theory to (incorrectly) model the real world? That a theory has to make falsifiable (testable) predictions before it can even be considered a theory? Guess not.

Oh – just in case your insulting misattribution was supposed to be something else as well: the ultraviolet catastrophe is something even undergraduate physics majors know about. You know, the one where incorrectly applying a mathematical theory of partitions incorrectly gives the result that the amount of power radiated by a canonical black body increases without limit the higher the frequency of the radiation ;-) The one that Planck fixed up with his assumption of quanta?

The fact that you think this is supposed to be some sort of test of bona fides makes you look like a “physicist” who only has a B.S. – or maybe a B.A.

Next time, don’t post such rubbish and you won’t get called on it. You know, that rot about B’s ever-so-much-more heinous activities somehow excusing A’s transgressions. Not gonna fly.

[1]The odd thing here is – quite by accident – my graduate work just happened to be in algebraic geometry with a generous side dish of topology. So yes, I do happen to know what a Calabi-Yau surface is. I also used to be a big fan of string theory a decade or so back. But – you guessed it, regular readers – there hasn’t been much in the way of testable predictions. Here’s the latest from Not Even Wrong: String Theorists Throw SUSY Under the Bus.

I feel a little bit like Marshall McLuhan being dragged into Annie Hall to testify on behalf of the narrator, but facts are facts. Speaking ex cathedra as a mathematician, I can confirm that Joshua Burton is, indeed, a physicist by the only meaningful standard; i.e., he has contributed non-trivially to literature of his field (theoretical particle physics). He also happens to have a Ph.D. (but so do many people who do not meet this higher standard). His main point, which I take to be that sensible mathematicians respect the intelligence of good physicists, does not seem to call for further comment.

Sincerely,
Michael Larsen

Iv come to think that my inability to follow SOVs posts is due to a lack of intelligence on my part, so Id genuinely be interested in an expert opinion on a question thats been playing itself over in my mind the last few days. Is he (a) a bona fide genius as outlined time and again or (b) a dips$$t.

I’m not motivated to comment here much, but it seems to me that claiming to be a physicist and giving one’s own name (…I presume…) trumps claiming to have been awarded a Fields Medal and operating under a pseudonym.

Er, you don’t you have that backwards? That is, don’t you really mean that Joshua is the one making some sort of claim? I certainly haven’t said anything about being awarded a Fields medal.

Aw, shucks. And here I was only inviting Michael to toss in a proud word for his aforementioned brother-in-law, or for his advisor who of course is also a Fields medalist.

My own advisor got her PhD without an advisor in a sexist era, and is the only living person to have correctly predicted a Standard Model parameter ahead of experiment: to my egalitarian physicist sentiment this is lineage indeed (and makes me feel unworthy of her), but perhaps there is something to be said for a more storied mathematical genealogy going back to Gauss and Leibniz as well. Unhappily, the project isn’t yet configured to trace the family tree of notable mathematicians by scent.

Michael, you seem to have me (deservedly!) beat by 1 in Erdős number, as well. That site also offers nothing for our shy friend, at least under the handle he uses here.

PS Neither SoV nor Joshua have made any claims about Fields medals. Please put it to rest.

SoV, this doesn’t contribute to the thread. Neither does the excessive discussion of the Sabbath angle of the story. I can’t believe how this thread has gone off track.

Actually, if you look up above, I stepped in when Joshua started his snark about the people calling out this excuse about Jewish observances being rather selectively applied as worse than those who were actually behaving badly.

My point was – and is – that even if it were true that calling out the bad behaviour is worse than the bad behaviour itself (Hah!), this has absolutely nothing, zero, nada, zip, with the original offense. Those comments do not magically excuse the bad behaviour we are discussing , nor does it require that the conversation must now be redirected towards those hapless malefactors who had the inexcusable bad taste to point it out.

And if you look up above, it takes Joshua a mere 300 or so words to admit that in fact there is no connection, but that yes, it does make for some dandy distraction. Look at where we’re at now.

SoV,
Your propensity to focus on (relative) trivia and mangle even those trivia is quite amazing. Joshua and Daniel had an extended exchange which appears to be finished. Anyone interested in that exchange can read it and reach his or her own judgment. We don’t need your pugnacious glosses on it, I don’t think. And speaking for myself I don’t esp. care about the Fields medal, string theory, the relative merits of mathematicians and theoretical particle physicists, etc. Give it a rest.

piglet writes….

I think you’re confusing your terms, re: wingnuts. But no matter. You’re essentially correct. I blame the left-wing epistemic environment for creating the conditions that led me to inflate my claim. When will there be some form of accountability?

On the larger question of “dense social ties”, I fear you’ve done my own argument more good than harm. Still not seeing the links. Which is actually my point. Thanks!

Your propensity to focus on (relative) trivia and mangle even those trivia is quite amazing.

Really? There’s this thing called ‘blockquotes’. Let’s run the instant replay of what Josh said:

Nothing about this is implausible or reprehensible from a perspective of Jewish law at anything near the vulgar and prurient threshold of lashon hara that is crossed by calling her on it.

Care to point out how the italicized part has any relevance to the conversation? No? I didn’t thinks so. And that was my point, ye bloody moron. Nor did I say anything about Fields medals; that’s what your boy brought up.

So frankly, LFC, I could care less what you think.

One last thing, per my regular schtick:

From my limited reading, souring on String Theory and failing to do so mostly seem to partition based on age.

I think that if you read a little bit deeper, most people who have soured on string theory started out thinking is was going to be the next Big Thing. What has happened is that after twenty or so years, string theory has yet to make a testable, falsifiable prediction. And if a theory can’t do that sort of thing, it is – at best – a completely useless theory.

Doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about physics, or evolution, or economics, or any of a 1001 different theories about human behaviour, both specific and general.

Can we all agree about this basic bit of epistemology at least? I would certainly hope so, though I have bad days where I suspect people merely pay lip service to the principle, that little hypocrisy that vice pays to virtue as Rochefoucauld would say.

Sigh. I don’t have the energy to argue with you LFC. And while you never said anything about understanding my point until your post 146, would you at least agree – vocably and visibly with my post 145?

Or is that too much to ask?

ScentOfViolets it seems like you spend a great deal of time talking about your credentials. I am sure everyone on the internet is very impressed but I am not sure this is the forum.

ScentOfViolets it seems like you spend a great deal of time talking about your credentials. I am sure everyone on the internet is very impressed but I am not sure this is the forum.

Doubtless you can quote at length where I have done so ;-)

In the natural sciences at least, I guess a useful theory generally should make testable, falsifiable predictions. So to that extent I agree w/ your 145. (But I don’t really know anything about string theory so I express no opinion on it specifically.)

What about elsewhere? Because I think that this applies to any theory. Otherwise, all you’re doing is playing is Monday morning quarterback. And all you’ve got is a bunch of people chanting their tribal tropes. That’s not going to get anything done.

How about it? Does anyone disagree with this? And if so, why? And if no one does disagree, let’s keep this in mind in any future conversations, eh?

Gee, why don’t you provide the full quote there:

Come on now, ‘fess up. Are you actually qualified to have an opinion about Witten’s work, and to speak as an intellectual equal to people who use their own names? Or are you just a thin cloud of aromatic plant metabolites, floating anonymously in the breeze until I close a window?

To which I replied (per your quote):

“my graduate work just happened to be in algebraic geometry with a generous side dish of topology”

Guess you just “forgot” to include that bit, eh? And so on and so forth with the rest of your, er, output. Oh, what’s that you say? That I never specified that it has to be to something other than a direct question?

Well, gully gee, ya got me there, MPAVictoria.

Stick a fork in the twit; she’s done. With this sort of dishonesty, there’s no point in wasting any more energy on her.

Oh someone asked you specifically what your graduate work was in? I seemed to have missed that. My apologies.

Doubling down on the venom, are we? When someone asks for you qualifications, you don’t say, I have a degree . . . in Science! You don’t even say that you have a degree in math. That’s not nearly specific enough. The man was asking about a specific topic. Well, whaddaya know, it just happens to be a topic in geometry.

But you knew the jig was up when the word “qualification” was quoted, didn’t you? All of this is just equivocating to distract from your dishonest quotes. You owe me an apology, you poisonous little thing. Not that you’re big enough to do so.

PLONK!!

What Emma said.

SoV, I’m glad you agree, as you seem to be derailing this thread. Could you take a break from commenting until Henry can make a final ruling, please?

“Aw, shucks. And here I was only inviting Michael to toss in a proud word for his aforementioned brother-in-law, or for his advisor who of course is also a Fields medalist.”

I find all this (the whole exchange, but actually, particularly this) quite extraordinary, its anyway irrelevant credentialism, embarrassing. Seriously. “Our ErdÅ‘s numbers are better”? Please…

(Fourthed)

“All this discussion of whether Rubin was wrong in speculating before signing off, or wrong in some of the words she chose, or just plain wrong, misses the point.
The key sentence of the ombudsman’s article:
Some of the e-mail she received was way over the line — ugly, obscene, vile and, worst, containing threats of physical harm.
We all agree that that behavior is way over the line, right? It goes beyond anything Rubin has ever written.”

Not to condone hate mail, but you do realize that there is an enormous difference between sending angry emails to a newspaper pundit and being a neocon propagandist, right? I mean, I’m pretty sure that “the point” of this case is not that one shouldn’t write mean emails.

John Quiggin 08.03.11 at 7:58 am

” SoV, I’m glad you agree, as you seem to be derailing this thread. Could you take a break from commenting until Henry can make a final ruling, please?”

I’m fifthing or sixthing the request, and pointing out that SoV has done this repeatedly. It’s a PITA to go through a thread where every third comment is SoV on some vendetta.

I request that SoV be put on a permanent moderation list – no comment of his goes through without approval.

Seconding Barry’s request.

Andrew F. has some good points. But I was struck[1] by the ombudsman’s use of the words “anti-matter” and “explode.” Surely metaphors of weaponry indicate a violent mindset and contribute to the coarsening of discourse and should be wiped out[2].[3]

[1] Itself a violent metaphor,

[2] Oops.

[3] Speaking as someone who thinks anti-matter is a pretty good metaphor.

helped by a trifecta of posts from theatlantic.com

A trifecta posts by a journalist, calling out Rubin not on a matter of opinion but on a matter of fact. Note how the ombudsman here implies that Fallows’ post was just another outraged liberal instead of a journalist appalled at the hackitude of a Post employee. Though why anyone should be surprised at the hackery of a Post employee is beyond me.

Joshua, as far as I can tell you were the first person in this thread to refer to yourself as “smart.” So who was doing the dick-measuring?

Oh, I think it’s perfectly easy to see the relevance of Erdos and Erdos numbers and other kinds of measurement to this topic.[1] That said, this probably is not be an appropriate place to have that discussion (and if it got to be a usual thing, I would probably stop commenting, regardless of how informative it might be).

[1] And I seem to remember SoV has upped the pressure in at least on other case where one might have seen a woman’s right or ability to participate as being in question.

After you blame the murder of 70 people on a muslim without evidence you don’t get good faith interpretations of your own intentions. Which means that you don’t get to blame your religion for a lack of follow-up. Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but assigning yourself the right to blame religion A for mass murder doesn’t give you (or your “ombudsman”) the right to blame religion B for late attempts at a (mealy-mouthed) apology. Life doesn’t work that way.

Unless you’re a worthless hack, of course.

“Our Erdős numbers are better”

My Erdős number is i. Top that.

Not all particle physics theorists believe in string theory / M-theory, either.

Also, the cheetah is the world’s fastest land animal, and I don’t like turnips.

And Jennifer Rubin still has a large, well-funded soapbox for her ideas, ideas which are odious no matter how much expert Halakhic analysis is introduced into the model as a parameter.

So hopefully more on topic and simultaneously more concrete:

We’re at a point in history where one relatively crazy person can latch on to rhetoric, work himself into a lather, and then blow up buildings in a way that endagers a couple of hundred people.

That’s bad.

We’re NEARING a point in history where one relatively crazy person with good biological training (say Unabomber level education) will be able to create a very nasty disease in his home lab which on the low side could kill millions and on the high side could endanger much of the human race.

That is going to be worse. I have no idea what the heck to do about it, but really that is what we are risking if we can’t figure something out soon.

Well, don’t push handicapped KKKers off wheelchair ramps, but, don’t let them use their handicap as an excuse for shooting people either.

Depends on the sense of the word “excuse” that is intended. We try the shooter, and we get to use powder residue on the wheelchair as evidence. But a prosecutor who says the defense doesn’t deserve to use wheelchair tracks as factual exculpatory evidence (or as mitigating evidence against premeditation) because their client has odious views? Mistrial, and talk of disbarment.

I think this is all clear by now, isn’t it? (Mr. Nexon has also conceded the secondary point that you can fall short not only in human decency but also in strictness of observance without surrendering basic Title VII rights.) Can we leave it here?

Rubin: “There are many more jihadists than blond Norwegians out to kill Americans, and we should keep our eye on the systemic and far more potent threats that stem from an ideological war with the West.”

Since nobody mentioned this so far, notice how Rubin writes as if only American victims of terrorism count. I don’t know whether there are any “blond Norwegians out to kill Americans” but there was at least one “out to kill Norwegians” and that may be more than there are Islamic jihadists “out to kill Norwegians” (I could be wrong about that but the point is, there is no evidence to the contrary).

It is hard to say whether Rubin made that gaffe consciously, probably not, but certainly the appeal of her argument (from the point of view of her right-wing readership) rests in part on the fact that they don’t identify with *those* victims. European socialist youths are not the kind of victims *they* are concerned with, and *they* don’t worry that much about that kind of terrorism.

Joshua, I’m trying to figure out what your argument is.

As I understand it, his “argument” is that while it’s true the Rubin initial and follow up posts are contemptible; it’s wrong to insist that her explanation for the 24 hr delay is a dodge/lie. That’s it.

I didn’t think the derailing could get any worse than the abortion tangent.

I’m going to have a go at formulating an alternate version of Joshua’s overall point (reiterated @175), with a little more nuance & detail, and yet (hopefully) in a relatively small number of words(!), and maybe its virtues will be a little more clear: If you’re going to mock the absurdities of religion, at least do it in a way that doesn’t misrepresent what the religion says. Like, don’t accuse somebody of being inconsistent if they’re not actually being inconsistent. Even if you don’t like a particular religious person, and they deserve to be mocked till kingdom come, misrepresenting people and their ideas is dishonest, and you shouldn’t do it. I agree with this in general.

But! I don’t think that point is relevant here, because even if those last 50 minutes after the sabbath begins is panic time, when there’s likelihood of breaking news about a terror attack you just weighed in on by guessing the perpetrator’s religion, that is the only thing you ought to be panicking about anymore, not some other thing you’re on a deadline to finish up. Using the sabbath as an excuse is just a distraction, and therefore insincere whether or not she was technically breaking the rules of sabbath observance by going 50 minutes over.

Also, re dense social ties, I’m not sure what the usual definitions of social are in network analysis, or whatever field the term is being borrowed from, but it seems like there’s a difference between what I think of as social, and appearing at the same speaking engagement with somebody. But I’m not sure how much that matters–if there’s dense organizational ties between the extremist right and the far right who get published, then that’s what is really relevant.

Rubin’s line “there are many more jihadists than blond Norwegians out to kill…” also implies that “a blond Norwegian” could not be a ‘jihadist’, that jihadists are all non-blond, and by implication non-white. Which is false. Remember John Walker Lindh, who fought w/ the Taliban? He may not have been blond, but he was definitely white/Caucasian.

If you’re cavalier about this, you’re simultaneously cavalier about every Jew who might be put in the same spot

That’s false.

@193 A shorter version of my point @190: the real criticism is that whatever she was working on 50 minutes into the sabbath should not have been given priority over breaking news on the Utoya attacks, so saying the sabbath is the reason she didn’t correct herself sooner is still somewhat of a dodge, thus insincere.

LFC 192: that’s correct too.

Kaveh @190:

But! I don’t think that point is relevant here, because even if those last 50 minutes after the sabbath begins is panic time, when there’s likelihood of breaking news about a terror attack you just weighed in on by guessing the perpetrator’s religion, that is the only thing you ought to be panicking about anymore, not some other thing you’re on a deadline to finish up. Using the sabbath as an excuse is just a distraction, and therefore insincere whether or not she was technically breaking the rules of sabbath observance by going 50 minutes over.

OK, here we go again. Henry Farrell, please cut me off when it’s enough; I’m not sufficiently objective any more.

Review of chronology: stupid Norway posting was about 5 pm, later stupid Obama postings were in a rush ending at 9:03, candle lighting in DC was 8:11, Rabeinu Tam most lenient time was 9:09. Norwegians released their news at 8:32. Next evening, shabbat was over at 9:10 (9:40 by Rabeinu Tam), her bad “correction” was posted about 8, and must have been written earlier.

Ordinarily, a faithfully observant Jew would have been off the net by 8:10 under most circumstances (counterexample: she was in Chicago Friday where candle lighting was later, and she had some lifesaving medical need to fly to her sick aunt in Halifax on Saturday morning). The relevance of wildly implausible counterexamples is that as a Jew I am religiously obligated to presuppose them, if by so doing I can avoid making a possibly baseless accusation of sabbath violation. And so is Daniel, and so is Kaveh if s/he’s Jewish. I was misunderstood (angrily, by the shrinking violet) when I made this tangential point before, and nothing hangs on it, but those are the ground rules.

I think Kaveh’s argument runs like this: if she had done it right, she would have been bentshing yayin (blessing the wine) at 8:45 Friday. Failing that, she should have been hanging on the news, out of an uneasy sense that she was even farther out on a limb than is usual for squirrels like herself. Failing that and self-absorbed in some other squirrel business (saving the world from Obama, etc.), she loses all absolution for not checking the news before her guests arrive at 9:15, after they leave at midnight, during shul at 9 next morning, at lunch with other friends at 12:30, during her nap from 2 to 5, and so on.

But I don’t think it should work that way, and I don’t think it’s safe for other observant Jews on CT if lots of CT readers think it should work that way. Whatever her level of observance, and however badly she manages the Friday rush, she’s still entitled to her nap, and therefore she’s entitled to the factual presumption that sometime around 7 pm Saturday, she was caught surprised and starting to rough out her contemptible hasty follow-up, rather than a night and a day into plotting her contemptible careful follow-up.

How does her being a proven liar figure into this? Well, if she were claiming she missed the fuss because she was visiting an amusement park all Saturday, I’d want to see ticket stubs. But if she’s claiming, as a factual excuse, an intrinsically blameless cultural peculiarity that is demonstrably shared by over a million strictly observant, and several million sloppily observant Jews in the US, then her past record of non-posting on shabbat is her ticket stub, and her intrinsic mendacity is overcome by Occam’s razor. And yes, this would be true even if (as is not yet proved on the evidence) she would deny the same benefit of doubt to a Muslim blogger who was too faint to respond before sunset during Ramadan. This is about our deal with fairness, not about our deal with Ms. Rubin or Ms. Rubin’s deal with anyone else.

@200. Wow. I make a lame and unfair argument. Joshua convinces me I’m wrong. I disown it. Now I come back and find out others have picked up the water. Can we just leave it at the fact that’s she’s an offensive hacktacular tool? That seems damning enough.

I apologize if that last comment was over the top. But we are not talking here about the G-d’s-eye judgment of her case. We’re talking about journalism. Readers and editors alike are perfectly in the right to demand her to do good journalism, or good partisanship, or whatever is her job. And they are perfectly in the right to complain if she cannot. There are other jobs that don’t expose her to the harsh opinions of other people. The rest of us, if we can’t reconcile conflicting demands of a job, leave that job. We don’t demand to be allowed to practice a job that involves harsh criticism while somehow being immunized against criticism in a way our peers are not.

Wow, weird formatting goof. That was a hyphen after “un” @205; please ignore the unintended strikeout from there to the hyphen in candle lighting.

This is weird. In Rubin’s defense, it’s certainly believable that she didn’t check back on news from Norway in that three to four hour window.

Oh wait, it’s not weird – I’m going to attack Rubin again for it.

It’s believable because it’s clear that she did not give a damn about the victims of the terrorist attack. She wrote about it from the perspective of budget negotiations. And a full day later, one that supposedly involves some spiritual introspection, she maintains that despite being factually wrong, the important thing is that we can’t cut defense spending.

Conclusions:
1. The Oslo and Utoya casualties are secondary to defense spending cuts, even in the days immediately following the tragedy.
2. Being factually incorrect is secondary to defense spending cuts.
3. DEFENSE SPENDING!
4. ???
5. Profit.

And this is even if we gloss over her (in Pexton’s words) borderline racist correction (like Pexton wants us to do).

I appreciate that the role of commentators and pundits is to occasionally look at things from a detached perspective – in order to provide a “big picture” analysis. She did this in the wake of a pretty horrific incidence of terrorism, so early that she didn’t have all the facts, or really any facts at all.

The delay in responding isn’t a huge problem in that there was a delay – it’s that in spite of the delay, the “correction” was so very wrnog.

The delay in responding isn’t a huge problem in that there was a delay – it’s that in spite of the delay, the “correction” was so very wrnog.

Just so (and extra style points for the typo).

It is true that by no later than 5pm credible reports identified the man as ethnically Norwegian. I believe that’s when I started making inquiries about far-right groups in Norway. So she did have a good 2 1/2 hours or so before going into religiously-inspired “rush mode” to think about whether her earlier post was such a good idea.

@200 & 205
because, as a factual matter, I’m satisfied that it’s unlikely she knew anything at 10 pm.

Joshua, I think you’re getting submerged in the legal fine points and losing sight of the larger moral issue, which IMO is actually pertinent to the larger issues addressed in the original post.

The OP started out addressing the issue of what kind of public speech is connected with violence. Rubin had just published something speculative about the attacks which, if she’s right, would contribute to the public discourse on terror attacks, but which also (whether or not she’s right) might lead to revenge attacks on people with overly-brown skin or turbans, like those that happened after 9/11. I’d certainly agree that that risk is acceptable if she’s right about the religious background of the terrorist (we have to have open, honest discussions, &c.) but if she’s wrong, then she has a serious moral obligation to correct herself ASAP. Now, I get that there are specific provisions for “finishing a task”, but I don’t see how those provisions couldn’t apply equally to watching the news for developments on Utoya. Unless she just didn’t care that much about whether she might be wrong about this, because she doesn’t value those lives/doesn’t care about factual details. The best excuse/apology she might have offered under the circumstances is that she made a mistake by spending her last few minutes after candle-lighting on some Obama post rather than watching for info on Utoya. Saying “it was the sabbath” elides the choice that she made to finish writing junk about Obama and not pay attention to the news instead, or (at least) while she was doing so.

You state that she probably didn’t know anything at 10 PM (and I believe you) as if that fact were a completely neutral thing, unrelated to her values and priorities. But it isn’t (and I’m sure you didn’t mean to imply that it is, but intentionally or no, the implication, however slight, is there).

Kaveh @214: see “squirrels” @200. I think I made it pretty clear that (based on very short acquaintance, since this thread introduced her to me) I think what she was doing late Friday afternoon was generally inappropriate for a Friday afternoon, a Friday evening, or a Tuesday morning. But that’s who she is, and as we’re all in furious agreement I don’t think it needs to be belabored. Let’s all go egg her front door, I’m on it.

“What’s that funny thing on her doorpost? Hey, anyone got a fire axe?” is where it gets queasy, and I rush home to watch my own door. Saying that, whoever she is and whatever she writes, she somehow thereby has a diminished right to be ignorant at 7 pm Saturday of something she was (however culpably) ignorant of at 9 pm Friday, is a small mezuzah moment.

Just to clarify, I am saying that the original Friday 5 pm Rubin post has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, even if you alter reality to match her erroneous “facts”.

Although in Rubin’s defense (haha), I guess this means she’s right in that it doesn’t matter to her argument if the facts are wrong. Because facts have no bearing on her argument.

I wouldn’t blame Joshua for thread derailment. He made a legitimate point, Daniel backed down, and then others got involved and it got weird. Now we’re getting into discussions of thread derailment.

Sebastian made a good point about the dangers of angry people in an age where it’s getting increasingly easy to kill large numbers of civilians, but since that seems to be an insoluble problem and too depressing to think about I suggest we stick to detailed discussions of the ins and outs of Sabbath breaking.

Dragon: Her writing doesn’t actually contribute anything, I said that for sake of argument.
Joshua: I wasn’t saying she had a diminished right to be ignorant at Sat@7 of what she was ignorant of Fri@9, I’m not sure why you brought that up. Anyway, I think I made my points clearly enough and so have you, let’s not derail this further.

@220. I’m the one who bears responsibility for the whole Shabbat issue. Joshua can hardly be accused of “thread derailment” for pointing out that I was wrong on the merits. The fact that she should have noticed emerging information inconsistent with her post well before the times in question, on the other hand, is a much more important point when it comes to Pexton’s ridiculousness.

Daniel Nexon @224

Sorry for inadvertently mixing up your name with that of ombudsman Pexton’s in my post @223.

If Rubin had been paying attention to the actual news in the hours before 5PM EDT on Friday, when she made her post rather than the Weekly Standard and the AEI, she would have known there was a significant problem with the idea that “jihadis” and Al-Qaeda affiliates were involved.

The second top-level comment on http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/norway-bombing/2011/03/29/gIQAB4D3TI_blog.html“>her original post was made less than 1 hour after her post (7/22/2011 4:53:28 PM CDT — 5:53 EDT) and says:

CTV, among other sources, is reporting that the shooter, who allegedly was also seen in the area of the bombing prior to it, was Norwegian. Tall, blond and Nordic looking. If true, it is one more nail in the coffin of ethnic profiling, regardless of his ideology.

<blockquote

Barry 225, please, if he hasn’t addressed certain points, it was his choice not to address them and there’s no need to repeat what has already been said many times.

John, Daniel, please. Joshua made a legitimate point, nobody denies that, but then making the same point, with slight variations, *thirty-nine* more times? And while SoV has been rightly blamed, Joshua was clearly feeding the loop with irrelevant remarks about mathematicians vs physicists. What I am getting is a total lack of consideration on the part of some commenters, including but not limited to Joshua, for the fact that they are not alone in this thread. It’s in the internet just like in the real world: some behave as if there’s nothing else but “me” in the world and if the rest of the community doesn’t give them a hint of disapproval, they won’t ever realize.

Having said that, I’m out of here.

“I can’t remember the term for this logical fallacy (it’s of the ‘all cats have fur – all dogs have fur – therefore all cats are dogs’ variety). No doubt someone who, unlike me, took Philosophy 101, will inform me in comments within moments of publication.”

I’m either blind, or nobody posted it. The term is “syllogism”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllogism

</nerd>

SoV – this isn’t the first, nor the second time that you’ve tried your ‘I am a mathematician – therefore ipso facto I outrank you all’ stylings on this blog. You are a graduate student math instructor bullshitting on the Internet.

Sigh. No Henry. I’m not. Really.

Jim @164: Not to condone hate mail, but you do realize that there is an enormous difference between sending angry emails to a newspaper pundit and being a neocon propagandist, right? I mean, I’m pretty sure that “the point” of this case is not that one shouldn’t write mean emails.

Jim, your phrasing is tendentious. I point out that what the ombudsman thinks “brings us back to Norway” are the “obscene…vile…threats of physical harm.” These aren’t merely “mean emails” nor are they merely “angry emails.”

After elaborating on other causes for the furor over the article, he noted that because liberals and conservatives rarely read each other for anything other than ammunition, it becomes easy to quickly demonize a commentator from the other side. Once that is done, you make it easier in turn for the nutjobs to start doing things like making obscene threats of physical violence.

THAT is what I take to be the point.

piglet @185: Regardless, to suggest that those who publicly and with reason criticize a racist blogger are stoking violence – and by extension that they are the real culprits, not the racist – is pretty shameless.

I very rarely read Rubin, but I did look at the posts at issue here. I don’t think they’re racist, frankly, though I’m reading them without much knowledge of her other writing.

You’re misunderstanding the ombudsman’s point. It’s not that he’s opposed to Rubin being criticized – it’s that he found the level and tone of some of the “criticism” to be that of vitriolic hatred. The polarization and division of the political blogosphere renders it easier for that vitriolic hatred to form – makes it easier for us to dehumanize and label rather than understand and engage.

There may or may not have been private “over the top” emails but the ombudsman’s concern should be about public “over the top” blog postings. What the ombudsman here does is using unverifiable allegations tangential to the case at hand to paint the racist as the victim.

Your “case at hand” and the ombudsman’s concern are obviously different. You are concerned entirely with whether Rubin was right or wrong in her posts. The ombudsman is concerned about the level and type of reaction to Rubin’s posts.

piglet, I agree that the ombudsman’s role should be to represent and protect readers and uphold some standards, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.

His role is, apparently, to dismiss criticism from one side and amplify criticism from the other.

Consider this column about the WaPo story Michelle Obama orders 1,700-calorie meal at Shake Shack plus slights to Nancy Reagan and Barbara bush.

As expected, he says the editors should have caught the slights to Mrs. Reagan and Mrs. Bush, but on Mrs. Obama:

As for Michelle Obama and her burger and fries, the quick-hit blog post clearly went beyond the traditional boundaries for coverage of first ladies. But I see it as no great sin.

A little tabloidy, invasive and sexist? Well, yeah. But given Michelle’s child nutrition advocacy, a story not completely out of bounds.

Back to his defense of Rubin, I noticed this paragraph:

Rubin was hired by Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor of The Post, to be an opinion blogger who would appeal to conservatives and people who want to follow conservative politics. She does.

Apparently it’s her job to hold the puke funnel and we should all just shut up already. I would expect nothing else from Fred Hiatt.

Jay Rosen:

I think there’s a fundamental dichotomy there:

1) Accurate information

2) Appeal to right-wingers

Pick one.