THANK GOD FOR KRAUTHAMMER: Charles Krauthammer has never written a dumb column, to my knowledge. Even on emotional subjects such as civil marriage, he brings to the debate a calm reasoning that wins the respect of his opponents as well as his supporters.
See here, here and here for a few recent examples of the calm reasoning that Krauthammer’s opponents value so much. And then file this one along with the crackpottery of the bloke who was trying to convince us all a few months ago that Steven Den Beste was the Nabokov of the blogosphere.
I’ve been a subscriber to the New Republic for more than thirty years. In that time, Andrew Sullivan wrote many insightful, thought-provoking pieces. I’m afraid I can’t say the same for Krauthammer.
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.
While European discussion of Bush has been condescending, even patronising, American commentators have been almost apoplectic. Charles Krauthammer (US foreign policy cut free at last, 12-6-2001) refers to the Europeans as having ‘spent the best part of the last 500 years raping and pillaging vast swaths of the globe’.And that was before S11.
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.
But Krauthammer’s assertion in the piece cited by JQ is spot on: especially their efforts at raping and pillaging North America between (approximately) 1650 and 1900.
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…
Chris, do you mean South America? 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. [Unless you count Canada and, as far as I can tell, the Canadian frontier expansion was surprisingly peaceful, compared to that of the US].
More to the point, this kind of historical claim is a form of blood libel - it’s as if every US initiative was met with the observation that this is exactly what should be expected from the descendants of slaveowners.* Krauthammer is right in about the same way as Milosevic was right about the Field of Blackbirds. It’s not what you expect from a supposed voice of reason.
“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.
Krauthammer was kind of dumb to address the issue of the Geneva Accords. It is highly unlikely that, but for his advertisement for them, many people would have heard of their existence. And given the fact that none of the signatories had any power on the issue, it is fairly clear that they weren’t going to go anywhere, in any case.
It seems clear that he just wanted to use the topic to engage in more Palestinian-bashing. Someone should tell him that that gets a bit boring after a while.
especially their efforts at raping and pillaging North America between (approximately) 1650 and 1900.
Yes, Andrew Jackson, that filthy European.
he brings to the debate a calm reasoning that wins the respect of his opponents as well as his supporters.
Note to self: ‘calm reasoning’ now includes pop-diagnosing mental illness in one’s opponents with, and said opponents are grateful for being so diagnosed.
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!
Well, Andy did say, “to my knowledge…”
“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.
especially their efforts at raping and pillaging North America between (approximately) 1650 and 1900.Of course, I missed the irony in Chris’ point and read it at face value, something which has happened to me (in reverse) whenever I have written something ironic.
I think the next version of HTML should include irony alerts, which would be invisible in normal rendering but would come up flashing red whenever you hovered over the text.
When did Sullivan say that Den Beste was obsessed with prepubescent girls?
(Joking.)
“It poses as a disclaimer of certitude while in fact leaving the impression of certitude.“—Ophelia
Am I correct in inferring that you find “to the best of my knowledge” and “as far as I know” acceptable where “to my knowledge” is not? If so, I have to disagree with you because, to my mind, “to my knowledge” is clearly shorthand for “to the best of my knowledge” and not abbreviated, as you imply, for the purpose of appearing more an affirmation than a qualification.
If my inference is wrong, and you find all such qualifiers objectionable—presumably because they are “sly”—then I also must disagree because, again, to my mind, they are not “sly” but precise. I’m rarely ever absolutely certain about anything; but I often am nearly certain of something while still being quite aware of the gap between it and true certainty. Including such a qualifier is useful for indicating such an awareness; and that is useful because it’s implicitly a disavowal of intellectual imperialism.
“Sullivan has an advanced degree from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, right?”
so does Alan Keyes…
Hmm, Keith, the point is that “to my knowledge” means something quite different from “to the best of my knowledge” (or even “as far as I know”). The latter clearly signifies your statement is relative and approximate and therefore uncertain; the former doesn’t. Even if the intention of using it is not sly, the result is like Ophelia said. It’s an ambiguity. Plus, it is really redundant.
I do like nitpicking.
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.
Yeah, what Morvern said. I think “to my knowledge” is just short for “to the best of my knowledge” - but a shorthand used by people who don’t really pay enough attention to what they’re saying, because in fact leaving out “the best of” changes the meaning, thus creating an ambiguity where none was before. It removes the qualification. I don’t actually know that it’s ever intentional or sly; that was just a - well - sly suspicion. No doubt too sly by half.
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 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.”
The elites of Europe and North America are most certainly not living off the fruits of that rape and pillaging. They (and the non-elites as well) are living off the fruits of modern technology that have supplanted and overwhelmingly surpassed the fruits of that rape and pillaging.
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.
…the bloke who was trying to convince us all a few months ago that Steven Den Beste was the Nabokov of the blogosphere.
I missed that one. Who was the bloke?
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.
… and, it’s what happens when you are constantly shifting your opinions based on your readers’ criticism, and, in the very sentence when you claim something, you’re reserving the right to deny what you’ve just written, just in case. So that you don’t look like an idiot. When in fact you do.
It doesn’t look good for someone so proud of being an opinionated writer. Just speak your mind clearly, or don’t. Can’t do both at the same time.
Unless you’re Donald Rumsfeld. At least he’s funny when he does that.
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