Voices of reason

The third link (about the Geneva Accords) isn’t entirely nuts – I think he’s right on enforcement issues and the right of return, even though he is nuts on Oslo. That makes this an relatively temperate Krauthammer column.

Anyway, I don’t know how Andy can laud reasoning when he writes stuff like this.

The world sometimes makes no sense at all – Sullivan has an advanced degree from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, right?

Makes no damn sense.

The world sometimes makes no sense at all – Sullivan has an advanced degree from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, right?

At least their business school produces intelligent and reasoned grads…

“Europe didn’t do any real rape and pillage in North America after the American revolution, or maybe the war of 1812, and not a lot before that.”
Europeans did, which I think is Chris’s point and which Krauthammer buries somewhere deep, deep down, in the vicinity of his conscience and ethics. It ain’t coming up.

especially their efforts at raping and pillaging North America between (approximately) 1650 and 1900.

Yes, Andrew Jackson, that filthy European.

You guys thought those columns were unhinged? Bizzaro. I agree that the tongue-in-cheek diagnosis of Dean was over the top, but what’s your grief with the other two? Is it tone or substance?

Also, “defining deviancy up” was a nice New Republic piece. Onward to Mars!

“To my knowledge,” just so. I hate that phrase. I think it’s just a malapropism, but it certainly is widely used, and its very malapropism lends itself nicely to ambiguity. It’s supposed to mean (I think) “as far as I know” or “to the best of my knowledge,” i.e. I’m not sure, I don’t have all the facts, I could be wrong. But what it sounds like is “I know.” It poses as a disclaimer of certitude while in fact leaving the impression of certitude. It’s either idiotic or sly or both. I pray you, avoid it.

When did Sullivan say that Den Beste was obsessed with prepubescent girls?

(Joking.)

“Sullivan has an advanced degree from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, right?”

so does Alan Keyes…

Ahem, it is true that Europe did spend the better part of the last three centuries raping and pillaging much of the globe. It is also true that the US spent the better part of the last two centuries doing the same, perhaps on a somewhat lesser scale, since it started later — perhaps there is nothing that the US did which quite approaches what the Belgians did in the Congo at the turn of the century or what Germany did in Namibia before WW I, but the genocide of the indigenous peoples in the US was certainly of the same order, if not the same quantity. And while the European powers were the great producers of the slave trade and the Middle Passage, the US was one of its main consumers.

I don’t think that recognizing such a reality is intemperate at all, unless one abides by the rules of amnesia that have allowed the elites of Europe and North America to live off the fruits of that rape and pillaging while pretending that it did not take place.

Of course, there is a common guilt here, in which neither side of the Atlantic is anywhere near the moral high ground — the only question is which side occupies a deeper moral abyss in this regard. And there is nothing that is taking place today, however much we may oppose the policies of European nations or the US, which is similar to such past outrages.

Consequently, to employ such a true observation in the context of European-American debates over Iraq is to introduce a red herring.

Intemperate, no. Truthful but irrelevant to the question at hand, yes.

I’m not sure that, literally parsed, “to the best of my knowledge” is any more sensible than “to my knowledge”. Furthermore, “the best of”, if it means anything at all, must mean something like “to the utmost effort of my analysis and recollection”, which is likely rarely the truth. Thus, “to my knowledge” has the virtue of being both (usually) more accurate and always more economical. Both versions can be argued against on prescriptivist grounds (I’m not); while both versions by their very presence moderate what would otherwise be an absolute statement of fact.

I must admit that I’m baffled and slightly annoyed at an intellect that parses sentences at the precise point between connotation and denotation where the difference between “to the best of my knowledge” and “to my knowledge” becomes a cause of irritation. This is, I think, very close to where the friction between Ophelia and myself arises—much less, I think, out of any virtue or vice on the part of either of us than simply the fact that our respective uses of language are, shall we say, slightly out of phase. Put differently, I would never attach the meaning to this distinction that Ophelia does; while, on the other hand, I do read some things that she writes and infer a slyness or other provocative qualities that, in fact, may not be present.

As I get older I find that although I’d dearly love to understand human communication in some complete sense; I’d be quite happy to settle for merely being adept at identifying the most common modalities and responding appropriately.

I abhor Krauthammer because he’s generally been a conservative warmonger, a commonplace right-wing jerk. I can’t object to this, though:

Which is what makes Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” such a singular act of interreligious aggression. He openly rejects the Vatican II teaching and, using every possible technique of cinematic exaggeration, gives us the pre-Vatican II story of the villainous Jews.

His Leni Riefenstahl defense — I had other intentions — does not wash.

I must admit that I’m baffled and slightly annoyed at an intellect that parses sentences at the precise point between connotation and denotation where the difference between “to the best of my knowledge” and “to my knowledge” becomes a cause of irritation.

Keith, this is the written, printed word, not daily speech. It’s not such pedantic intellectual “parsing” to expect a journalist actually writes good plain English free from rhetorical tricks – especially while they’re praising someone else’s writing abilities…

Sullivan wrote Krauthammer *never* wrote a “dumb” column, and he qualified that with “*to my knowledge*”. That qualifier simply destroys the certainty of his statement. What he’s saying there is: “if it turns out that he wrote terrible pieces of crap, well I just haven’t been informed, so don’t hold it against me. I hereby declare my claim about Krauthammer’s columns *never* being dumb might be both true and false, depending on what columns you will be reading. I haven’t read them *all* so I really can’t say”.

He might as well have refrained from writing that K. *never* wrote a dumb column, no?

Or just put it clearly and directly like this: “*So far* I haven’t come across a column by K. that sounded dumb to me”.

But of course that would have had less impact…

So, “to my knowledge” was used in a sly rhetorical manner by Sullivan, no doubt (or should I say “to my knowledge”, eh).

It’s what happens when you try to appease all your readers, right left and centre. Maybe Sullivan didn’t even realise it, cos it’s just his usual style.