Obama Administration threat to free speech?

The argument here.

He lost me when I got to this paragraph:

Then there was the June 5 high school commencement speech in which White House Communications Director Anita Dunn called Mao Zedong -- one of history's greatest mass murderers and an implacable enemy of free speech -- one of "my favorite political philosophers." Dunn has, coincidentally, been the point person in President Obama's attacks on Fox News.

How can a reasonable person read that and not conclude that Ms. Dunn was joking, or she meant favorite as in interesting. It throws the reality of the rest of the article into question.

That's where a red "tilt" sign flashed for me, too, and the ball drained. If the remark was serious, then she's not serious enough for the job. Can her. But (maybe in paranoia) I immediately wondered about context, too, and the handling of the source. A Maoist in the administration? Further corroboration would be interesting.

Chuck Grassley is opposed to free speech as well. Is this what the FFs when they put their lives on the line had in mind when they crafted the first amendment? What is Grassley afraid an open discussion would reveal? This is the legislative equivalent of book banning.

Grassley's proposed amendment is stupid, but it isn't an attack on free speech. He's trying to block this commission from considering certain policies.

The lady who praised Mao Tse Tung is surely not a Maoist, whatever that might mean nowadays. On the other hand, I doubt that she was strictly joking. (If she had said, "George W Bush, one of my favorite political philosophers....", that would obviously have been a joke.) Rather, she was expressing that ambivalence that many liberal/Leftists have had about revolutionary totalitarian socialism. The Left is full of people who have strong emotional attitudes towards poverty and inequality, which they blame on capitalism, without having much of an ideology to guide them. When they see someone like Ho Chi Minh or Mao Tse Tung or Fidel or Hugo Chavez, who seem serious about destroying capitalism, they have, at best, mixed emotions. In these circles, expressing admiration for genuine revoltionaries like these men is a way of signalling that you're cool.

(Just a tiny little footnote, to make sure that both Pros and Cons reading this will hate me: it is not accurate to call Mao Tse Tung a mass murderer, as the person I referenced did.)

Grassley's amendment is a head in the sand moment. He knows what the outcome of a real, legitimate rethinking of the War on Drugs would yield. It would make it much harder to fill all those privately owned and operated jails we have in this country.

This would gut one of the major purposes of Webb's effort.

Doug>

A tiny footnote. It seems a little pedantic to point out that Mao Zedong was not a 'mass murderer'. He may not have signed the actual death sentence of millions, but by forcing through his revolutionary policies he caused the deaths of many millions, he must have known it, but still he persisted with those policies. The millions were considered expendable. It hardly matters whether you call this 'murder' or something else. Perhaps Stalin wasn't a 'mass murderer' either?

Also, it's not true that many of the left have no ideology at all. I'd have thought they are all committed in some way to the redistribution of surplus wealth through raising taxes and state provision of eg healthcare, in the belief that it's the best way to ensure the well-being of those at the bottom of the pile, and that those at the bottom ought to be helped whereas those at the top shouldn't accumulate to excess. Whether you believe that is right or not is ideological, surely.

Third_cheek: I suppose it comes down to what you mean by "ideology". Your description of the leftist worldview is correct -- a more elaborate explication of it can be found here -- but I tend to use the word "ideology" for a more elaborate, thought-out set of propositions about how the world works: a theory of history and society, if you will. By that definition, Marxism is an ideology, the kind of libertarianism (or classical liberalism) you find among the followers of the "Austrian" economists is an ideology, Objectivism is an ideology, Roman Catholicism can be an ideology, sort of -- a worked-out world-view, in other words.

People tend to use the word "ideology" negatively, as a sort of synonym for "dogma", and there is a strain of conservatism which proudly asserts that conservatism is 'not an ideology, but a disposition'. In fact, it's a strain of conservatism I would associate myself with. But ... perhaps inconsistently, I still believe that we need to incorporate as much scientific thinking about human society as possible into our own political views. So I am not totally unsympathetic to people who have ideologies. At least you have something to argue against (if the ideology is wrong), whereas arguing with a typical American liberal is like B'rer Rabbit vs the Tar Baby.

As for Mao, Stalin, etc.... I will postpone replying for a bit, but only ask you to clarify which particular policies of Mao you are talking about? I suppose you mean the (disastrous) Great Leap Forward, which caused tens of millions of deaths? Or other things?

Doug

Yes. I'd call the leftist view I described ideological, but the extent to which it needs to be worked out is vague. I wasn't referring to ideology in the pejorative sense, but in that respect I agree, it would have to be a more thoroughly worked out dogma. Nonetheless I think Blair's New Labour was ideological in the sense you describe, even though it wasn't at all well worked out, and not 'very' left.

As for Mao, yes, I think the Great Leap Forward is a good enough example of policies that lead to millions of avoidable deaths, and it's difficult to imagine that Mao didn't just think those lives expendable. Similarly forced collectivisation in the Soviet Union, in particular in Ukraine, lead to millions of deaths. I guess these are the usual examples, so I'm genuinely curious to see your response.

Yet another example of Obama threatening Fox News:
http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2009/11/06/sesame-street-ombudsman-says-pro...

When all perspective is lost, even puppets are the enemy.

11>

I don't understand, how is this an example of 'Obama' threatening Fox News?

That first statement was dry humor, poorly executed apparently. :)

And poorly understood by me :)

Third_cheek: I'm thread-jacking here, but what the hell.

As regards use of the term "murder" and "mass murder"... I am trying to be terminologically precise.

So I exclude the term "murder" from deaths caused as a result of ordinary military operations, for example. These may be awful, perhaps worthy of the utmost condemnation, and so on ... but I don't use the term "murderers" for a government which, in fighting a war, kills civilians, even when it does this deliberately, as our government (among many others) did in the Second World War.

Nor do I use the term for the deaths which come about as a result of bad or negligent government policies, assuming these are not intended to cause the deaths.

I think the deaths caused during the Harvest of Sorrow were intentional, and they would qualify as murder; the deaths caused by the insane policies of the Great Leap Forward were not, and so they don't, as I am trying to use the word.

>15 Doug1943:

I'm not sure that a political leader has to have intended any particular deaths for them to be called 'murders'. By acting is such a way that it is known will result in 'collateral damage', some kind of utilitarian calculation is made, one in which the deaths of a smaller number of people are deemed necessary as part of a policy which might overall lead to fewer deaths or less suffering. I think this is still 'murder' but I don't thereby assume that political leaders who make such decisions are necessarily acting badly. Mao may not have known who would die and how many, he may have been very unhappy about the deaths, but I still find it implausible that he didn't effectively make a utilitarian decision which would lead to some deaths. His main error may simply have been the number of deaths that might be caused, but in making the decision I'm inclined to think that Mao and his colleagues knew that someone would die as a consequence, even if they didn't know how many - they were not, after all, stupid people. So they deliberately acted in such a way that would cause death, and they got the sum of their actions terribly wrong. It's murder, even if they didn't intend it on such a scale and their overall aim was a good one (arguably). Saying that in this case it is 'killing' rather than 'murder' seems to be a political definition. One might thus say, "Oh Mao didn't murder anyone, he only 'killed' people." "Governments don't 'murder' they only 'kill', or act in such a way that just happens to kill, on behalf of citizens." This is worrying

I don't know, this is off topic so I'll give it a rest. Sorry!

11> What's interesting is that the Sesame Street episode didn't cause any complaints when it first aired two years ago, but it merits a news story on its rebroadcast.