Free Speech – Page 32 – artdiamondblog.com

The Unintended Consequences of Requiring Monks to Read

(p. 28) The high walls that hedged about the mental life of the monks–the imposition of silence, the prohibition of questioning, the punishing of debate with slaps or blows of the whip–were all meant to affirm unambiguously that these pious communities were the opposite of the philosophical academies of Greece or Rome, places that had thrived upon the spirit of contradiction and cultivated a restless, wide-ranging curiosity.
All the same, monastic rules did require reading, and that was enough to set in motion an extraordinary chain of consequences. Reading was not optional or desirable or recommended; in a community that took its obligations with deadly seriousness, reading was obligatory. And reading required books. Books that were opened again and again eventually fell apart, however carefully they were handled. Therefore, almost inadvertently , monastic rules necessitated that monks repeatedly purchase or acquire books. In the course of the vicious Gothic Wars of the mid-sixth century and their still more miserable aftermath, the last commercial workshops of book production folded, and the vestiges of the book market fell apart. Therefore, again almost inadvertently, monastic rules necessitated that monks carefully preserve and copy those books that they already possessed.

Source:
Greenblatt, Stephen. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.

Summers’s Unbreakable Washington Power Elite Rule: Insiders Don’t Criticize Other Insiders

(p. 5) A telling anecdote involves a dinner that Ms. Warren had with Lawrence H. Summers, then the director of the National Economic Council and a top economic adviser to President Obama. The dinner took place in the spring of 2009, after the oversight panel had produced its third report, concluding that American taxpayers were at far greater risk to losses in TARP than the Treasury had let on.
After dinner, “Larry leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice,” Ms. Warren writes. “I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People — powerful people — listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders.”
“I had been warned,” Ms. Warren concluded.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Summers did not respond to a request for comment.

For the full commentary, see:
GRETCHEN MORGENSON. “Fair Game; From Outside or Inside, the Deck Looks Stacked.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., APRIL 27, 2014): 1 & 5.
(Note: italics in original commentary, and in Warren book. I added a missing quotation mark.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date APRIL 26, 2014.)

The Warren passages quoted above are from p. 106 of her book:
Warren, Elizabeth. A Fighting Chance. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014.

In China “Overwhelming Evidence of the Leaders’ “Moral Vulnerability””

Source of book image: http://media.npr.org/assets/bakertaylor/covers/t/the-peoples-republic-of-amnesia/9780199347704_custom-d21f4e2d0281b692c74781102e750ff1e27b7cc9-s6-c30.jpg

(p. 21) During the night of June 3-4, 1989, when the Chinese Army was slaughtering demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, Wang Nan, a young student, was shot in the head. As he lay dying at the side of the road, soldiers threatened to kill anyone, even some young doctors, who tried to help him. In the morning, finally dead, he was buried in a shallow grave nearby. A few days later, the smell of Wang Nan’s body was so great that it was dug up and moved to a hospital.

After 10 days, his mother, Zhang Xianling, was called to the hospital to identify her son’s body. It took eight months, in the face of official obstruction, for Zhang to uncover what had happened to her son. In 1998 she held a modest remembrance service on the spot where he had died. The next year, on that day, she was barred from leaving her apartment. When she met Louisa Lim, Zhang said she longed to go to the fatal place again to pour a libation on the ground and sprinkle flower petals. “However,” Lim observes, ”someone will always be watching her. A closed-circuit camera has been installed” and “trained on the exact spot where her son’s body was exhumed. . . . It is a camera dedicated to her alone, waiting for her in case she should ever try again to mourn her dead son.”
Until I read about that camera in “The People’s Republic of Amnesia,” I imagined, after decades of reporting from and about China, that nothing there could still shock me. As Lim contends, Zhang’s “simple act of memory is deemed a threat to stability.” Lim’s overwhelming evidence of the leaders’ “moral vulnerability,” together with her accounts of the amnesia of many Chinese, make hers one of the best analyses of the impact of Tiananmen throughout China in the years since 1989.

For the full review, see:
JONATHAN MIRSKY. “An Inconvenient Past.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., MAY 25, 2014): 21.
(Note: ellipsis in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date MAY 23, 2014.)

The book under review is:
Lim, Louisa. The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

“Tanks at the ready in Beijing on June 6, 1989, two days after the Tiananmen Square massacre.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT review quoted and cited above.

Bowen Receives Standing Ovation for Calling Student Protesters “Immature and Arrogant”

BowenWilliamHaverfordCollegeCommencementSpeaker2014-06-01.jpg

“William Bowen, speaking at Haverford College on Sunday [May 18, 2014], criticized students who staged a protest over another scheduled speaker.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A3) William Bowen, a former president of Princeton University, criticized students who had objected to Haverford’s invitation to Robert Birgeneau, a former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, to speak at commencement.
. . .
“He is a person of consequence,” Mr. Bowen said. He said he told students, “If you expect to agree with commencement speakers on everything, then who will you get to speak? Someone totally boring.” He added that he also called the subset of students who had objected to Dr. Birgeneau “immature and arrogant.”
. . .
Phil Drexler, president of the Haverford Students’ Council, said some in the audience were upset but others gave a standing ovation. “I felt validated by the speech because I had wanted to hear Dr. Birgeneau talk,” said Mr. Drexler, a graduating physics major. On the plus side, he added, he likely won’t soon forget his commencement.
A number of commencement speeches have been derailed by student and faculty protests this graduation season. Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, withdrew last week from speaking at Smith College. Similar outcries foiled engagements by former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice at Rutgers University and human-rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali at Brandeis University.

For the full story, see:
NATHAN KOPPEL. “Commencement Speaker Blasts Students on Protest.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., May 19, 2014): A3.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 18, 2014, and had the title “Haverford Speaker Bowen Criticizes Students Over Protests.”)

June 16th Is Liberalism Day

In the old days a “liberal” was someone who believed in freedom, including free markets and minimal government. Milton Friedman defended “liberal” in its original sense in his article “Liberalism, Old Style.”
At some point the left hijacked the word, at least in the United States. (I understand that in much of the rest of the world “liberal” still retains more of its original meaning.)
Maybe there’s some defensible justification for hijacking a word, but most of the time it seems like a dishonest and cowardly way to win an argument by muddying up the debate.
Dan Klein and Kevin Frei are trying to reclaim the word “liberal” from the pirates of the left. As part of their effort, they have proclaimed June 16th to be “Liberalism Day.”
I believe their cause is just, but I am not sure it is efficient. Time and effort are scarce, so we must pick our battles.
On the other hand, the meaning of “libertarian” has narrowed over recent decades. It used to be that most libertarians believed in minimal government; increasingly more libertarians endorse anarchism. It used to be that most libertarians believed in national defense; increasingly more libertarians endorse total isolationism.
I do believe in some minimal night-watchman state, and I do believe that sometimes there is evil in the world that must be fought. So maybe I should start calling myself a “liberal” in the original sense, what Friedman called a “classical liberal”?

#LiberalismDay

Bloomberg Blasts University Faculty Intolerance for Conservative Ideas

(p. A11) From former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s commencement address at Harvard University, May 29:

Repressing free expression is a natural human weakness, and it is up to us to fight it at every turn. Intolerance of ideas–whether liberal or conservative–is antithetical to individual rights and free societies, and it is no less antithetical to great universities and first-rate scholarship.
There is an idea floating around college campuses–including here at Harvard–that scholars should be funded only if their work conforms to a particular view of justice. There’s a word for that idea: censorship. And it is just a modern-day form of McCarthyism.
. . .
In the 2012 presidential race, according to Federal Election Commission data, 96% of all campaign contributions from Ivy League faculty and employees went to Barack Obama.
Ninety-six percent. There was more disagreement among the old Soviet Politburo than there is among Ivy League donors.
. . .
Diversity of gender, ethnicity, and orientation is important. But a university cannot be great if its faculty is politically homogenous. In fact, the whole purpose of granting tenure to professors is to ensure that they feel free to conduct research on ideas that run afoul of university politics and societal norms.
When tenure was created, it mostly protected liberals whose ideas ran up against conservative norms.
Today, if tenure is going to continue to exist, it must also protect conservatives whose ideas run up against liberal norms. Otherwise, university research–and the professors who conduct it–will lose credibility.
Great universities must not become predictably partisan. And a liberal arts education must not be an education in the art of liberalism.

For the full commentary, see:
Mike Bloomberg. “Notable & Quotable: Mike Bloomberg at Harvard.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., May 31, 2014): A11.
(Note: ellipsis added; italics in original.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 30, 2014.)

“Religious Muslims Generally Insist on the Literal Truth of the Quran”

(p. A16) There are few role models for former Muslims, . . .
One group . . . is Ex-Muslims of North America, . . .
Members of the group, founded last year in Washington and Toronto, recognize that their efforts might seem radical to some, and take precautions when admitting new members. Those interested in joining are interviewed in person before they are told where the next meeting will be held. The group has grown quickly to about a dozen chapters, in cities including Boston, Chicago, Houston, New York and San Francisco.
One of the group’s founders who was at the conference, Sadaf Ali, 23, an Afghan-Canadian, said that she had once been “a fairly practicing Muslim.”
During childhood, she said, “I was always fairly defiant.” As she grew older, she struggled with depression, and she thought that praying more and reading the Quran would help. She became more religious and looked forward to a traditional life. “I thought my life was sort of set out for me: get married, have children,” Ms. Ali said. “I might go to school. I’ll have a very domestic life. That’s what my family did, what my forefathers did.”
But as a university student, her feelings began to change.
As I started to investigate the religion, I realized I was talking to myself,” Ms. Ali said. “Nobody was listening to me. I had just entered the University of Toronto, and critical thinking was a big part of my studies. I have an art history and writing background, and I realized every verse I had come across” — in the Quran — “was explicitly or implicitly sexist.”
Quickly, her faith crumbled.
“So in 2009, I realized there probably is no God,” she said. “What is so wrong in having a boyfriend, or having premarital sex? What is wrong with wanting to eat and drink water before the sun goes down during Ramadan? What is so wrong with that? I couldn’t handle the cognitive dissonance anymore.”
. . .
The members of Ex-Muslims are adamant that they respect others’ right to practice Islam. The group’s motto is “No Bigotry and No Apologism,” and text on its website is inclusive: “We understand that Muslims come in all varieties, and we do not and will not partake in erasing the diversity within the world’s Muslims.”
But they are equally adamant that it is still too difficult for Muslims inclined to atheism to follow their thinking where it may lead. Whereas skeptical Christians or Jews can take refuge in reformist wings of their tradition, religious Muslims generally insist on the literal truth of the Quran.
“I would say it’s maybe 0.1 percent who are willing to challenge the foundations of the faith,” said Nas Ishmael, another founder of the Ex-Muslims group who attended the conference.

For the full story, see:
MARK OPPENHEIMER. “Leaving Islam for Atheism, and Finding a Much-Needed Place Among Peers.” The New York Times (Sat., MAY 24, 2014): A16.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MAY 23, 2014.)

Bill Clinton Says U.S. Control of Internet Protects Free Speech

(p. A11) . . . , Mr. Clinton, appearing on a panel discussion at a recent Clinton Global Initiative event, defended U.S. oversight of the domain-name system and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann.
. . .
“I understand why the reaction in the rest of the world to the Edward Snowden declarations has given new energy to the idea that the U.S. should not be in nominal control of domain names on the Internet,” Mr. Clinton said. “But I also know that we’ve kept the Internet free and open, and it is a great tribute to the U.S. that we have done that, including the ability to bash the living daylights out of those of us who are in office or have been.
“A lot of people who have been trying to take this authority away from the U.S. want to do it for the sole purpose of cracking down on Internet freedom and limiting it and having governments protect their backsides instead of empower their people.”
Mr. Clinton asked Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia: “Are you at all worried that if we give up this domain jurisdiction that we have had for all these years that we will lose Internet freedom?”
“I’m very worried about it,” Mr. Wales answered. People outside the U.S. often say to him, “Oh, it’s terrible. Why should the U.S. have this special power?” His reply: “There is the First Amendment in the U.S., and there is a culture of free expression.”
He recalled being told on Icann panels to be more understanding of differences in cultures. “I have respect for local cultures, but banning parts of Wikipedia is not a local cultural variation that we should embrace and accept. That’s a human-rights violation.”

For the full commentary, see:
L. GORDON CROVITZ. “INFORMATION AGE; Open Internet: Clinton vs. Obama; The former president strongly defends the current system of oversight by the U.S.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., MARCH 31, 2014): A11.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the shorter title “INFORMATION AGE; Open Internet: Clinton vs. Obama.”)

18 Unions Each Spent More on Politics than Koch Brothers

(p. A13) Harry Reid is under a lot of job-retention stress these days, so Americans might forgive him the occasional word fumble. When he recently took to the Senate floor to berate the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch for spending “unlimited money” to “rig the system” and “buy elections,” the majority leader clearly meant to be condemning unions.
It’s an extraordinary thing, in a political age obsessed with campaign money, that nobody scrutinizes the biggest, baddest, “darkest” spenders of all: organized labor. The IRS is muzzling nonprofits; Democrats are “outing” corporate donors; Jane Mayer is probably working on part 89 of her New Yorker series on the “covert” Kochs. Yet the unions glide blissfully, unmolestedly along. This lack of oversight has led to a union world that today acts with a level of campaign-finance impunity that no other political giver–conservative outfits, corporate donors, individuals, trade groups–could even fathom.
. . .
The Center for Responsive Politics’ list of top all-time donors from 1989 to 2014 ranks Koch Industries No. 59. Above Koch were 18 unions, which collectively spent $620,873,623 more than Koch Industries ($18 million).

For the full commentary, see:
KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL. “POTOMAC WATCH; The Really Big Money? Not the Kochs; Harry Reid surely must have meant the unions when he complained about buying elections.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., March 7, 2014): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date March 6, 2014.)

Environmentalists Seek to Silence Those Who Dare to Disagree

(p. A13) Surely, some kind of ending is upon us. Last week climate protesters demanded the silencing of Charles Krauthammer for a Washington Post column that notices uncertainties in the global warming hypothesis. In coming weeks a libel trial gets under way brought by Penn State’s Michael Mann, author of the famed hockey stick, against National Review, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, writer Rand Simberg and roving commentator Mark Steyn for making wisecracks about his climate work. The New York Times runs a cartoon of a climate “denier” being stabbed with an icicle.
These are indications of a political movement turned to defending its self-image as its cause goes down the drain.

For the full commentary, see:
HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR. “BUSINESS WORLD; Personal Score-Settling Is the New Climate Agenda; The cause of global carbon regulation may be lost, but enemies still can be punished.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., March 1, 2014): A13.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Feb. 28, 2014, and has the title “BUSINESS WORLD; Jenkins: Personal Score-Settling Is the New Climate Agenda; The cause of global carbon regulation may be lost, but enemies still can be punished.”)

The Krauthammer column that the environmentalists do not want you to read:
Krauthammer, Charles. “The Myth of ‘Settled Science’.” The Washington Post (Fri., Feb. 21, 2014): A19.

Fired Dissident Xia Yeliang Warns that Chinese Universities Do Not Value Academic Freedom

“Xia Yeliang in New Jersey. Professor Xia, whose firing by Peking University provoked an outcry, is joining the Cato Institute.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A10) A Chinese dissident, dismissed from his job as an economics professor at Peking University after clashes with his government over liberalization, will become a visiting fellow at the Cato Institute on Monday, he said.

In an interview on Friday, the dissident, Xia Yeliang, warned that American universities should be careful about partnerships with Chinese universities. “They use the reputations of Western universities to cover their own scandals,” he said.
“Perhaps Western universities do not realize that Chinese universities do not have the basic value of academic freedom, and try to use Western universities to cover their bad side,” Professor Xia added.

For the full story, see:
TAMAR LEWIN. “Chinese Dissident Lands at Institute With a Caution to Colleges.” The New York Times (Mon., FEB. 10, 2014): A10.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date FEB. 9, 2014, and has the title “Chinese Dissident Lands at Cato Institute With a Caution to Colleges.”)