Stranger Than Fiction

Commenting on my post exploring the possibility of an armed insurrection in Burma, Zeitlin snarkily noted:

There is one US military unit that has experience covertly kicking all sorts of South East Asian ass. Let’s send Rambo to Burma. “Than Shwe, I’m coming for you”

As it turns out, this is pretty much what actually happened.

HT: Mangoat

Wherein I stop defending Gregg Easterbrook

In spite of his repeated idiocy on the environment, science, religion, and most everything political, I have defended Gregg Easterbrook. Even when I winced while reading his work, I continued to stand by him. Why, you ask? Well, because I liked his football column, Tuesday Morning Quarterback (now hosted at ESPN.com’s Page 2). Sure, Easterbrook was repetitive, pretentious, and formulaic, but he consistently showed how players, GMs, and especially coaches keep making the same mistakes, and even more shockingly, keep getting rewarded for making those mistakes.

But I’m done with all that now. Easterbrook is an idiot in intellectual’s clothing, and no amount of witty football insights can save him from being an utter moron.

Let me take you to the moment I changed my mind about this man. I was reading the readers’ roundup he posts every Wednesday, and I came across this:

Noting that this is the 50th anniversary of Sputnik, the Edsel, “West Side Story” and Boris Pasternak’s “Dr. Zhivago,” TMQ supposed that half a century ago, technology was buckets of bolts while art was magnificent; now tech is magnificent and art is in poor repair. Why? Vox Day of Milan, Italy, author of “The Irrational Atheist,” supposes, “Technical stuff depends on science, art depends on religion. The former is now ascendant, ergo our art leaves something to be desired. That’s Camille Paglia’s theory, anyhow, which is interesting in light of her atheism. Paglia has written, ‘Great art can be made out of love for religion as well as rebellion against it. But a totally secularized society with contempt for religion sinks into materialism and self-absorption and gradually goes slack, without leaving an artistic legacy.’ Richard Dawkins, a prominent atheist, argues in ‘Unweaving the Rainbow’ that science is capable of inspiring greater art than religion, though this hasn’t happened yet.”

Of course, there’s much to take apart here, starting with Easterbrook’s unproven assertion that somehow art is worse than it was fifty years ago and the reader’s baseless claim that only religion can inspire art. But that’s not what riled me up, as I’ve trained myself over the years to simply tune out whenever Easterbrook writes about anything other than football.

No, it was the name of the reader from Milan that stuck with me. Vox Day. Now where had I heard that name before?

Oh fuck me.

Yes, he’s talking about everyone’s favorite World Net Daily columnist, Vox Day, a.k.a., Theodore Beale. The same Vox Day who’s a super-misogynist (he thinks the 19th Amendment should be repealed, and don’t get him started about rape). The same Vox Day who’s anti vaccination. The same Vox Day who’s against science and reason, is ridiculously racist, and is perhaps the vilest piece of shit I’ve ever seen in the blogosphere. That Vox Day.

Of course Easterbrook was willing to pimp Beale’s book, but apparently he was unable to do a quick Google search and learn that his reader is a contemptible hag. Easterbrook’s blinders frame everything he encounters; in this case all he had to read was “religion is awesome” before abandoning any logical examination of Beale’s claims, as well as any due diligence that might entail.

So that’s it, Gregg. The next time PZ tears you a new one, I’m not going to be the one offering caveats.

I’m a LIAR!

My esteemed cousin William, now blogging from his comfy fellowship at Harvard, brings to my attention to the story of Tania Head, former president of the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network, 9/11 survivor, and apparently an utter fraud. As the linked NY Times articles states, her claims that she escaped the south tower and that her fiancee perished in the north one are almost certainly false.

William seems to think that this is indictment of the administration and the Times, saying

This lady’s brand of craziness…is mirrored in the nonsense of the NY Times devoting time and energy to debunking her story. Bush lied, and thousands and thousands have died; this stupid lonely chick tells some stories, and the Times rakes her over coals.

I’m going to have to disagree. While Head apparently never profited financially from her involvement in survivor organizations, she’s still caused plenty of emotional damage, especially to the family of “Dave”. She compounded their grief over his death with thoughts that “Dave” had hidden his entire life from them. How else to explain his impending nuptials to a woman they had never met?

Additionally, Head’s enemy here is not the Times, but the truth. The Times was just the vessel, the truth was bound to catch up with her anyway, as witnessed by La Vanguardia’s recent foray into the matter. And let’s not blame the Times’ city desk for not taking on the Bush administration, it’s a perfectly legitimate local story.

I think my cousin falls into a fallacy about journalism that I’ve seen before, namely in the comments of Litbrit’s descent into 9/11 crackpottery over at Ezra’s place:

Doubting government’s official stories–questioning them, even–is a function of journalism.

This sounds all nice, but it’s completely wrong. As pointed out by Vidor in that same comment thread, the purpose of journalism is to discover the truth, not to question the government; the latter is merely a tool used to obtain the former. Tania Head’s sins are nowhere near as great as the Bush administration’s, but that doesn’t mean she deserves a reprieve from her reckoning with reality.

This post’s title inspiration below: