Richard Bennett

Check back in a couple of days.

Edwards’ blogger resigns, Malkin gloats:

“Blogmaster” Amanda Marcotte has resigned from the Edwards’ campaign (the site is currently down). Of course, it’s all the right wing’s and Catholic activists’ fault (a blame-avoidance strategy I highlighted on The O’Reilly Factor tonight before news of Marcotte’s resignation broke)

Happy happy.

Well, not really. In politics as in comedy and network design, timing is everything. The time to spring a story on Amanda’s bad attitude toward men would have been October, 2008, and only if Edwards had an election to lose. But when rookies like Malkin get involved it’s all about them, and all about right now.

Silly girl.

Of course, the irony in this is Malkin accusing anybody of being “offensive.” Really.

UPDATE: Conservative bloggers as a whole are gloating about this (see: James Joyner for a pile of links). I suppose I should be too since Amanada Marcotte is one of my least favorite people in the entire universe, but as Malkin is on the same list for me, I’m curbing my enthusiasm. Is the blogosphere good for anything besides taking scalps?

UPDATE2: Another scalp, and that answers the question.

Venture capitalist David Cowan didn’t drink Google’s free speech Kool-Aid either:

…the campaign for net neutrality has transcended logic, manuevering instead to prevail upon Congress with an emotional appeal to the voters. “If we are silent, if we don’t stand up for Internet Freedom,” warns Hollywood star Alyssa Milano, “corporations will take away our right to choose!” As always, it’s easy and popular to demonize corporations.

In his letter to the public (a great PR play, and a nice pander to regulators who look for reasons to work), Eric Schmidt wrote that net neutrality will prevent broadband carriers from controlling what people say or do online. As I have blogged before, Eric is certainly a genius (I can pander, too), but this call to fear is wrong on so many levels, not to mention egregiously hypocritical. (Remember China?)

For one thing, accelerating a stream of packets, even at the mythical expense of some random packets, does not “control what people do online.” Also, ISPs are not public utilities; they are businesses whose owners–including individual investors and pension funds–have no legal obligation to amuse Eric with whatever internet sites he craves. (Should AOL and the mobile environments of AT&T and Verizon be legally forced to provide access to outside content?) Having said both those things, the market will not reward ISPs who effectively block or even slow access to the full array of web sites–there is demand for express traffic and free traffic, so both sevices should and would exist.

It would be extremely helpful if more VCs would speak out on this issue, as one of the other arguments Google uses pertains to innovation and helping all those struggling college kids in their dorm rooms trying to build the next Google.

The Christian Coalition joined Google’s Save the Internet coalition after being convinced that the Internet’s lack of regulation was a danger to their free speech. The free speech argument is a red herring, of course, as the enhanced IPTV services from AT&T and Verizon that are bringing change to the Internet have nothing to do with content or viewpoints. The Save the Internet movement is really a cynical ploy on Google’s part to shackle ISPs in order to extend their search hegemony into video delivery. But Save the Internet says it’s really important, so we have to trust Google to preserve free speech because we can’t trust the Telcos and ISPs.

Is this remotely believable?

We’ve seen one example of Google’s concept of free speech in China, and another regarding their own Vice-President of TV, Vincent Dureau. After he correctly observed that the Internet can’t scale to HDTV, Google called out its Public Relations shock troops to sanitize Dureau’s remarks. The Google PR team is spinning like mad, but Dureau hasn’t backed down and we applaud him for that.

And now we have another egregious free speech violation that should be of interest to Google’s followers among the Christian Coalition. Nick Gisburne is an atheist activist who posts videos on YouTube criticizing religion generally and religious texts in particular. His favorite technique is citing violent passages from the Holy Books without commentary, letting them hang themselves. This was fine with YouTube as long as Gisburne confined his criticisms to Christianity, but when he posted a video of verses from the Koran, YouTube deleted it and cancelled his account:

My YouTube accounts have been deleted

Deleted accounts are not quite part of the plan! This is now a censorship issue.

My NickGisburne and Gisburne2000 accounts were deleted because of ‘Inappropriate Content’, basically a video of material (no added commentary from me) from the Qur’an. I added nothing to that video, I was merely using material from the Muslim Holy Book, and for that I was removed from YouTube, along with all my videos, and everyone’s subscriptions to me (over 500).

I’ve seen the video in question and Gisburne’s description is correct: it consists of nothing but verses from the Koran and background music, without even a word of added commentary.

So the question, gentle reader, is this: can we trust Google to manage our Internet? I see no reason to believe that we can.

See Instapundit for a handy collection of relevant links.

Heather Mac Donald isn’t the biggest fan of Harvard’s new figurehead:

The feminist takeover of Harvard is imminent. The Harvard Crimson reported yesterday that the university is about to name as its new president Drew Gilpin Faust, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Harvard’s Corporation, which is likely to recommend Faust to the university’s Board of Overseers for confirmation, could not have more clearly repudiated Lawrence Summers’s all-too-brief reign of meritocracy and academic honesty, or more openly signaled that Harvard will now be the leader in politically correct victimology.

Faust runs one of the most powerful incubators of feminist complaint and nonsensical academic theory in the country. You can count on the Radcliffe Institute’s fellows and invited lecturers to proclaim the “constructed” nature of knowledge, gender, and race, and to decry endemic American sexism and racism. Typical guest speakers include left-wing journalists Susan Faludi and Barbara Ehrenreich.

McDonald uses the term “feminism” in its modern sense (a special interest group seeking to marginalize men) rather than its historical sense (something about doormats and equality.) If she’s right, Harvard’s descent into mediocrity will accelerate rapidly. Not that many will notice, of course, because it hasn’t been a serious school for years now, but this sort of thing is vitally important in the Northeast for historical reasons.

My comment on this: the prevailing consensual reality in Cambridge is that Summers said “gurlz r dum”, so the natural reaction is to replace him with a president who says “gurlz rool, boyz drool.”

Linklove John Weidner.

Who is this Drew Gilpin person? A former professor of Women’s Studies and author of such penetrating books as Mothers of Invention on the plight of slave owning women in the Old South. I haven’t read it, so here’s what one Amazon reviewer said about it:

The subject of this book is a single class of women – rich, white, spoiled and utterly despicable. These women complained bitterly of how the war effected their miserable self centered lives with little concern about the effects the war had on those who fought it and what they were experiencing. The war meant little more to them than a threat to their way of life.

Ms. Faust tries to portray her subjects as victims and prisoners of their circumstances but these women were anything but. They embraced the supposed chains that bound them and had little concern for the profound and widespread pain and suffering caused for millions of others as a result of the war they so glamorized and romanticized.

This book is rather tedious if you are not a fan nor speaker of that odd language known as academia (why in the world does she include long diary and letter passages in French?) But it has some very good moments and will give the reader new insight into how truly horrid those magnolia queens really were. Not even a feminist writer sympathetic to anything in petticoats can hide that fact; as much as she tries.

So that’s your culture of victimology for you: Gilpin is wedded to the notion that women are so thoroughly oppressed, she has more sympathy for the slave owners who lost property in the Civil War than for the (human and often male) property itself. Surely Harvard can do better than this. What’s Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (“Sad as it may seem, my experience with radical, upscale feminism only reinforced my growing mistrust of individual pride”) up to these days, anyhow? Retired, probably.

Thanks to Jane Galt McArdle for Jeffrey Hart’s super-flame of Bush’s “conservatism”:

“Like the Whig gentry who were the Founders, I loathe populism,” Hart explains. “Most especially in the form of populist religion, i.e., the current pestiferous bible-banging evangelicals, whom I regard as organized ignorance, a menace to public health, to science, to medicine, to serious Western religion, to intellect and indeed to sanity. Evangelicalism, driven by emotion, and not creedal, is thoroughly erratic and by its nature cannot be conservative. My conservatism is aristocratic in spirit, anti-populist and rooted in the Northeast. It is Burke brought up to date. A ‘social conservative’ in my view is not a moral authoritarian Evangelical who wants to push people around, but an American gentleman, conservative in a social sense. He has gone to a good school, maybe shops at J. Press, maybe plays tennis or golf, and drinks either Bombay or Beefeater martinis, or maybe Dewar’s on the rocks, or both.”

Now that’s proper conservatism. I can’t comment on the Dewars, but Bombay Sapphire is without peer, and the critique of evangelicalism is right on the money. By all means, read the whole thing, especially Hart’s clarifications at the end.

A couple of days ago, Professor Weinberger was complaining that the diaper-wearing nutcase feminist astronaut story was going to wipe out serious news for two weeks, but that cable news obsession will probably pale in comparison with what I expect to be an avalanche of fake mourning for Anna Nicole Smith, arguably the most worthless example of misspent protoplasm in recent history.

John Cole notes the irony:

I can not be alone in my observation that it is rather humorous that the person who most likely will rescue two feminists from public scrutiny is a stripper/turned Playmate who graduated into a full-fledged celebrity drunk, an addict and alcoholic through and through, as well as a terrible mother.

No dude, you aren’t alone.

Oh, by the way, there’s some sort of trial thing going on in Washington, but the tragic loss of America’s Princess depressed the prosecutor so bad he had to rest his case. Or something.