Horror in southern Russia

And lets not forget Darfur either!

At last. Predictably, it took Chris’ voice to break the embarrassing silence. When I logged on this morning I could find three separate posts on Tariq Ramadan’s refused visa (for the record, he shouldn’t have been refused) but not a single one on Beslan. CT’s world is a place where hostage-takings, decapitations, busses and planes blowing up and various massacres across three continents are entirely off the intellectual radar. Unless they can be fashioned into a homily on Islamophobia. There is never any forest in CT’s trees.

antoni –

The news is that there was an agreement with the terrorists to remove the bodies of hostages already murdered. When the ambulance approached there was an explosion and some of the hostages tried to escape, for which they were shot in the back by the terrorists and the Russians had no choice.

Jimbo,

I don’t understand your anger. Surely you understand that blogs are largely opinion sites, and that major, indisputably tragic events can be difficult to blog about. No one should look to opinion outlets as their primary source of news, and the failure to blog about an event, especially something like a massacre, should not be taken as proof that a blogger thinks that it’s unimportant.

I had been struggling with a post about the school for a while before Henry posted. It’s hard to find the words. Give us a break, will you?

The key to Jimbo’s anger may be the phrase “a homily on Islamophobia.” A lot of people seem to feel that there is something rather inhuman about exploring the circumstances which give rise to horrors like this. The idea seems to be that any attempt at explanation is some kind of excuse.

As to Islamophobia, is there any harm in pointing out that the recent massacre in Burundi was not carried out by Muslims? Could it be, Jimbo, that the forest you want us to look at has a variety of trees?

Gordon, may I interrupt your conversation with Ted to ask a couple of questions:

1) Not being an academic, could you explain to me what the chuff you mean by “patent purblindness”?

2) Since the first news of this horror story appear in Western media two days ago, what the hell do you mean by “very late”?

3) What criterion might CT use to decide which stories we have to comment on whether or not we have anything to add, which might meet with your approval?

4) Just out of interest, could you confirm which other prominent academic blogs you have also addressed your comment to; as far as I can tell, the Volokh Conspiracy have so far posted nothing on the subject, nor has Mark Kleiman and Instapundit only posted a few hours ago?

5) Finally, and most importantly, why don’t you just go and fuck yourself?

Following Ophelia’s line, I see

A) Large hostage events in Russia and Chechnya
B) Kidnappings and Israel-style suicide bombings in Iraq
C) High profile bombings on US targets, Turkey, SA, Pakistan? India?

Is this variation in tactics significant enough to be important? If it simply shows different leadership, that one cell does not copycat another show a level of cooperation?

I have said, tho it feels lousy to say it today, that if Osama wanted America to go crazy his best bet would be to get three groups of Native-American Muslims to take Kalishnikovs into three Des Moines grade schools.

If we were to have a moral obligation to talk about Beslan on political blogs (which I don’t agree with, but assuming we did) – then wouldn’t we have an even greater moral obligation to talk about the even greater numbers of children being killed by easily preventable diseases around the world?

Are those children somehow less worthy of protection, somehow discountable, compared to the Beslan children?

I’ll stop there.

The “War on Terror” is a true fiction; it’s like calling any armed conflict a “War Against the Bad Guys”.
Or maybe the “War Against People So Desperate They’ve Resorted To Terror”.
The viewing public, in between being urged to buy large gas-consuming vehicles, is shown images of what the bad guys are doing, horrible things to innocent people.
But nothing of their motives, as though there’s no back-story, no motives or causes. Just bad people doing bad things, making nice people feel terrible.
Why are they doing those bad things? Because they’re bad people. Why are they bad people? Because of those bad things they do.
There’s no human justification for the slaughter of children.
There’s no human justification for the conditions and events that cause the despair that results in terrorism either.

The Guardian story earlier reported that children were seen gulping water after they escaped – I found that detail slightly overpowering, for some reason.

I saw the live pictures on CNNi: the most overpowering detail was that the children fled the school half-naked, having stripped themselves down to their underclothes to cope with the unbearable temperatures in the gym where they were being held.

“There’s no human justification for the conditions and events that cause the despair that results in terrorism either.”

Kudos to vernaculo for being extraordinarily quick on the draw in identifying the “cycle of violence”. It usually takes a few days for that tacit justification of terrorist atrocities to be trotted out. Now we must round out the analysis by investigating the “root causes” and finding the two sides to be equally morally culpable.

What’s worse, Jimbo — not talking about this tragedy, or exploiting it to try to score political points? You decide.

What’s worse, Janet, is not talking about this tragedy because there aren’t any political points to be scored. That’s my point. No more and no less.

Since I’ve been accused of being a “troll”, presumably of the right wing variety, let me make a few things clear. Not that it should matter, but my politics are probably to the left of most people here. I’m a an old socialist, as was my mother and her parents before her. For the last 14 years I’ve been lucky to be able to vote for the only socialist representative in Congress. I was against the war in Iraq, and even demonstrated my opposition in the street. Not because I didn’t think Hussein worth getting rid of–that should have happened in 1991–but because I did not trust the current Bush gang to do anything that didn’t advance their selfish political goals. So it’s no surprise to find myself agreeing with 90% of the political positions taken by CT posters. Where we part company is over (some posters on) CT’s tacit avoidance of uncomfortable truths, e.g. that the insurgents in Iraq are not glorious resisters but murderous thugs. On this I applaud the opinion provocatively expressed by Italian journalist Riccardo Barenghi, former editor of the communist daily Il Manifesto, in that paper on August 28: “Between an Iraq liberated by severed heads and one occupied by Americans, I choose the second hypothesis.” Among recent Iraq-related events, I could find no consideration on CT of the kidnapping of two French journalists and its consequences on the anti-hijab law. Not mentioned either, but especially abhorrent, was the slaughter, by the Ansar al-Sunna Army, of a dozen Nepalese cooks and cleaners, impoverished men whose only crime was to to seek work in Iraq to support their families. And so on. CT isn’t a news service and isn’t expected to to note or comment on each fresh atrocity, but it is a bit unseemly to see Sadr and his ilk get repeated considerate hearings while their victims remain unmentioned. Similarly, I am repelled by the pooh-poohing of Islamism in many CT posts, a position adopted apparently because all anti-Islamists are deemed to be anti-progressive as well. Sorry, but one doesn’t have to be Richard Pipes to consider militant Islamism a dangerous political scourge. Since when has it become “right wing” to oppose religious fascists? We may disagree about how best to combat it, but I reject any attempt to minimize its menace. (We needn’t have waited for Juan Cole’s imprimatur to call Qaradawi what he so obviously is.) Etc.

What I am saying is not that some CTers take positions I disagree with (of course some do), but that they avoid discussing certain subjects — because the facts don’t fit neatly into their scheme of things. Call it hypocrisy, call it self-censorship, call it a failure of responsibility and imagination. And if some people are offended by such suggestions, too bad: I am offended by the alternative.

Since when has it become “right wing” to oppose religious fascists?

Since when has criticism of the right wing become support for religious fascists?

Since when has failing to reiterate the obvious – terrorists are cruel murderous bastards since they cruelly murder people – become sympathy for terrorists?

On the other hand, what does all this holier-than-thou race to see who first reiterates that obvious – that murder is murder, terror is terror, torturing children and blowing up buses is horrifying – aim to achieve? Do you not think it is the obvious default reaction for any decent human being with decent human feelings, to be horrified by such events? what is there to add, before the events are even over?

What bitter view of the world is it, when you demand that the emotional and moral disgust is spelt out, otherwise you assume there’s indifference? Isn’t it a tad hypocrite, to use those dead bodies for polemical purposes while preaching about the hypocrisy in others?

The only thing to comment upon in a political weblog is the political aspects of those situations, and that’s a step further from instant, instintively horrified reactions. It takes a bit more cold-headed reflection. Everyone has their preferences in terms of commentary, but I for one actually appreciate it a lot more when more complex political analysis is *not* made in real time, at the push of a button, while horrible events are still unfolding.

You turn on the tv and everyone on the news is already giving you their strategical vision and scenarios before anyone has even had a chance to understand what the fuck went on. Here’s a crying mother over a 12 year old corpse – here’s our correspondent’s all-knowing predictions about possible responses, which will turn out to be clueless, but we have to fill the time between ads and the sports news. It can get really disturbing, the way tv news can milk the pain of victims of such tragedies for the sake of bragging about who’s got the best coverage. I prefer weblogs, who are unpaid and unsponsored, to not be a replica of that kind of 24/7 treatment of news you get on tv channels, but if you have a different preference, jimbo, here’s an idea: find other weblogs to read, sites that talk of things you want them to talk about in exactly the way you want them to be talked about, or better still, open your own. Just don’t complain if one of your commenters start accusing you of failure to denounce terrorism when you fail to record in real time on your weblog your obvious disgust for a terrorist attack on ordinary people like you. If you go around assuming everyone who doesn’t make their feelings of shock public at the very moment they feel them is an insensitive hypocrite bastard blinded by a political agenda, one day that generous view of mankind might come back and bite you.

‘Islamism’ is a politically convenient but fictional construct drawn up by people who want to drag their own pet Middle Eastern issue into the fight against Al-Quaeda

It took a while, but we all knew that, sooner or later, for Dsquared it would come down to this: “Islamism” was wholly invented by the Zionists.

On this I applaud the opinion provocatively expressed by Italian journalist Riccardo Barenghi, former editor of the communist daily Il Manifesto, in that paper on August 28: “Between an Iraq liberated by severed heads and one occupied by Americans, I choose the second hypothesis.”

That’s one “provocative” opinion alright: apparently there are two, and only two, possibilities in Iraq. It’s us or the thugs. We’re going to be there for a hell of a long time if our “mission” has now metastasized from protecting us from Saddam into protecting the Iraqis from themselves.

Sounds like the provocative Mr. Barenghi, much like our own Dear Leader, “doesn’t do nuance.”

Doesn’t it seem rather pointless trying to claim I said this

It took a while, but we all knew that, sooner or later, for Dsquared it would come down to this: there’s no such thing as objective and so he is revealed as a postmodernist academic social-constructionist Foucauldian Marxist idiotarian. I shall demand my money back from CT immediately.

I don’t know how to do trackbacks, but I tried, and failed, to say something about this over on my own blog.

Elizabeth, you may have a point in your own case and that of Jimbo, but look at what Gordon’s contribution actually was. He didn’t actually contribute anything on the thread. He simply opined that CT sucked. I am entirely happy with my response to him. As I’ve mentioned on the last thread that ended up this way, CT is rather like a good pub; one doesn’t get barred for rowdy behaviour, but if one tries to start a fight, one should not expect the gentle touch.

Or to put it another way, a slightly less bad-tempered way – is that post really so outrageous that it cries out for a ‘go fuck yourself’? I wouldn’t have thought so.

Hey matthew!

Yes, you, big media yglesias! Reopen your comment section and take them back! Now!

I lost my previous post so here’s another try:

Elizabeth, I make no apologies to you. You came in here attacking a strawman that the posters at Crooked Timber were trying to find moral equivalence with the bastards who killed 200+ inncoent kids. I was merely pointing out that you would be much more comfortable with someone like Glenn “Ethnic cleansing ought to take care of the Palestinian conflict” Reynolds, whose steely eyed vision is so different from people like Chris and Kieran and D-Squared who stagger around in a fog of moral unclarity.

After all Reynolds today criticized an Yglesias post that dared express the idea that the two options facing the Russians were both bad, presumably for offering two options. A law professor who is unable to handle TWO competing ideas at the same time, now that’s the kind of academic you will find kinship with not these pointy headed girlie-men and manly-girls at CT.

And as for Jimbo, I think it is perfectly civil to ask him to go fuck himself. After all, he not only had the temerity to come to someone else’s blog and criticize topics that they were NOT covering but also decided to pass on some aspersions about their character for not covering as well. If Jimbo would like a blog that covers topics that outrage him, he can send me a list of pet peeves and a large check and I will be glad to provide entertainment. Until he refrains from the “if you don’t say child rape is bad you must be a child rapist” school of discourse, I am more than happy to ask him to go fuck himself.

I just take my cue from the second most powerful man in America :)

Yeah well take your cue from somewhere else. Someone other than Rumsfeld or Dsquared.

Dang – ‘agree with me or I’ll tell you to go fuck yourself’? That’s the new rule around here? Let’s hope not!

Exactly so, Carlos! That is why I favor the “get tough” approach to AQ, as well as incentives for Muslim extremists to abandon the terrorism insanity. To wit, AQ operatives should be captured or killed, and we should see what we can do about improving economic opportunity in the ME. With the employment, prosperity and personal liberty a liberal democracy can bring, the siren song of martyrdom may well be muted (although this is not certain; religion is a powerful force), and people can spend their time arguing over education, healthcare and sundry frivolities, as we do.

My quibble is with Vernaculo’s post, Strawman, which I consider to be a clear defense (albeit hedged) of terrorism; particularly his rejection of the characterization of terrorists as “bad guys.” And I am not prepared to accept that CT posters are “pointy headed girlie-men and manly-girls.” I certainly am not.

PS: A smile for Ophelia.

Vernaculo: Oh dear!

Strawman: My mistake. He wasn’t arguing moral equivalence for the Beslan terrorists; it was moral SUPERIORITY!

This is boring. I would encourage anyone with any patience to read the discussion at Lenin.

Jimbo,

If you are still reading this thread, please accept warm thanks from me – and from many others like me, I expect – for having ruffled some of Crooked Timber’s feathers. CT is an excellent site, a regular stop on the circuit, but it has also become smug, self-congratulatory, and politically stilted, a place where lines are quickly drawn and followed, where (some) posters can spend endless columns digging down deeper into the same holes and remain oblivious to what is happening beyond the tips of their noses. I know that they advertise it as a blog by academics, a category that includes me, but they needn’t always demonstrate why the term is so often uncomplimentary when used as an adjective.

Again, thanks.

CT is an excellent site, a regular stop on the circuit, but it has also become smug, self-congratulatory, and politically stilted, a place where lines are quickly drawn and followed, where (some) posters can spend endless columns digging down deeper into the same holes and remain oblivious to what is happening beyond the tips of their noses.

In other words, individuals with their own opinions, who tend to write about what *they* like, rather than what some whingeing bores among their readers expect.

Oh, and people who leave comments who consist solely and entirely in complaints that they are not being served the content they want in exactly the way they want it, followed by a set of ridiculous straw men, displays of ignorance, blatant misreadings, righteous indignation and moral condemnation of the lack of humanity of their hosts, are not “ruffling feathers”, they are only a waste of bandwidth, a.k.a. trolls. Some standard of political debate, that. Then again. Small minds tend to ride high horses.

an empty link above–excuse me. My username followed by the blogspot domain will do the trick as a URL.

yes, I thought the remark concerning Darfur might be intended as a conversation stopper, but the question itself is something that recurs and one I’ve asked myself in other contexts concerning other conflicts.

Seems pretty straightforward.

Indeed:

– What I am saying is not that some CTers take positions I disagree with (of course some do) –> pre-emptive disclaimer of trollage, to justify whatever one is writing next

– but that they avoid discussing certain subjects –> assumption 1 – assuming a voluntary, politically-motivated avoidance rather than the obvious and declared shock at unfolding events: “tried to write… couldn’t find the words then and I can’t now…”

– because the facts don’t fit neatly into their scheme of things —> assumption 2 – projection of obtuseness and ideological motivations behind lack of commentary on the siege for all of 2 days (how’s that for reading between the lines)

– Call it hypocrisy, call it self-censorship, call it a failure of responsibility and imagination.
–> list of judgements derived from above assumptions

– And if some people are offended by such suggestions, too bad –> 2nd disclaimer (a.k.a. the wrapper) to justify whatever was written before, and declare immunity from (and indifference to) possible responses except the congratulatory kind

– I am offended by the alternative. –> the punchline, reinforcing superiority of speaker’s moral indignation.

A classic pattern, perfect for rhetorical speeches and sermons.

You can package pretty much any kind of strawmen in that format.

Len,

What seems to rile (some) CTers, and especially their apologists, is that Jimbo’s criticism is coming from their left. That’s obviously a very weak flank. They just can’t imagine that left-liberals like us would be so… disloyal.