Ah! Mark Steyn. When he’s good he’s very good indeed:
PALIN: How many AP fact-checkers does it take to change a lightbulb?
FACT: Palin has gone seriously “rogue” in her facts here. AP fact-checkers are prevented per union regulations from changing lightbulbs.
AP writers Matt Apuzzo, Sharon Theimer, Tom Raum, Rita Beamish, Beth Fouhy, H. Josef Hebert, Justin D. Pritchard, Garance Burke, Dan Joling and Lewis Shaine contributed to this joke. We’ll be here all week.
And when he’s bad he’s even better:
Hmm. Greater Bombay forms one of the world’s five biggest cities. It has a population of nearly 20 million. But only one Jewish center, located in a building that gives no external clue as to the bounty waiting therein. An “accidental hostage scene” that one of the “practitioners” just happened to stumble upon?
“I must be the luckiest jihadist in town. What are the odds?”
Comments 13
Steyn’s a — well, a North American treasure, at any rate. I’m not sure of his citizenship status.
I was rereading his book America Alone not too long ago, in the wake of an attempt by a commenter at TOC to bring up every specious charge that has ever been flung at Steyn in LeftWorld. While doing so I came across the passage at the end in which he makes his case that growing government control makes us vulnerable.
As he pointed out, the existence of meticulously-observed federal rules for responding to airliner hijackings was the key to the success of the first three planes on 9/11. Aloft in a commercial airliner, people are in an absolutely controlled environment, one in which individual initiative is discouraged at least as firmly as assault and murder on the ground. It took an environment of that kind for the hijackers to succeed using only box-cutters.
Steyn posits that if gangs of “youths” tried to go out and wreak havoc with box-cutters in the parking lot of an American sports bar, they’d come off much the worse from the encounter. I suspect that if gangs of “youths” tried torching cars in San Bernardino, CA as they did in the Parisian suburb of Clichy-sur-Bois, they’d end up on their faces on the pavement, being held down by groups of, shall we say, unsympathetic locals while the cops were summoned. And the cops, unafraid themselves, would come.
But up in those airline jets on the morning of 9/11, everyone aboard was constrained by hundreds of little rules. Keeping airline travel safe does make it necessary to have a lot of rules — the argument is not that there should be more shouting (or wrestling) matches between passengers and aircrew in the sky.
But it’s a beautiful and valid example of the effect of rules. They make people passive and manipulable. That’s their function. Whenever we go to impose a new rule, we always need to keep that in mind. There are large areas of life in which it is our inherent right to NOT be made passive and manipulable.
Controlling environments with lengthy lists of rules also creates vulnerabilities. Manipulability on the part of large groups of people is highly exploitable, as evidenced by the box-cutter-assisted takeover of the 9/11 airplane-weapons. Our rules-imposed docility can be used against us.
The point of natural rights is that we ourselves get to decide how many rules there ought to be — not sets of people who want to control and exploit us.
Steyn’s meditation on this idea was well worth rereading.
November 15th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
@ J.E. Dyer:
gad, what a mess.
put a large number of people in a small enclosed space hurtling through the air.
allow each person’s action to be guided by no more than their deeply thought-out ideas on the correct actions dictated by natural law.
November 15th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
You’re so predictable, Smidge. I think you know as well as everyone here does that I not only didn’t say we don’t need rules for airline travel, I explicitly said we do.
Perhaps you will indulge us with a demonstration of reading comprehension re this passage:
Do you have any criticisms to offer that are logical and valid?
November 15th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
why should I obey rules of logic?
won’t it merely serve to condition me further in submissiveness?
November 15th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
@ J.E. Dyer:
You were faced with something like the same problem the Associated Press resolved by calling Nelson Mandela the first African American winner of the Peace Prize, or whatever.
I’m not surprised to learn you’re a fan of Steyn’s also. He can make me laugh while writing in all seriousness about the darndest things.
Jonah Goldberg is another writer who can put a wild twist into a serious column and make me laugh. I’m assuming you’ve read his Liberal Fascism. If you haven’t, it’s excellent, even considering the unforgivable mistake he made in the footnotes concerning Superman’s birthplace, probably because he’s a young whippersnapper who grew up after revisionism had corrupted even the timeless tales contained in the sacred comic texts.
November 15th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
@ Sully:
I have indeed read Liberal Fascism, and am gratified to see that someone else noticed the Superman solecism.
Your reference to the young whippersnappers reminds me of a column some while back in which Rick Brookhiser wrote of being corrected by his offspring when he spoke of going to the Gap to look for jeans.
“Dad,” he was informed, with a rolling of eyes, “it’s not ‘the’ Gap, it’s just Gap.”
Bless their hearts. When these young pups were not even a gleam in their parents’ eyes, ‘way back in the mists of time, the old farts among us were shopping at The Gap when it first existed, and sold pretty much nothing but jeans and jean jackets, and had the radio jingle that went: “… fall… in… to… the… Gap!”
It’ll always be The Gap.
November 15th, 2009 at 3:01 pm
Superman wasn’t born on Krypton? Assuming he was, where did JG have him born?
November 15th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
@ CK MacLeod:
http://sullysside.blogspot.com/2008/07/its-terrible-thing-to-discover-feet-of.html
I later discovered, after on and off research, that there is a Superman story out there which puts his birth in the midwest. As I recall it was was created for some TV show or some relaunch of the comic books.
November 15th, 2009 at 8:45 pm
@ J.E. Dyer:
And here I imagined myself the only one in the world outside of academia who ambles through footnotes munching on the readable ones.
November 15th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
@ Sully:
Superman born in Russia
http://www.orwelltoday.com/sovietsuperman.shtml
Send this to the Doughboy.
November 15th, 2009 at 8:57 pm
@ fuster:
What a putz.
November 16th, 2009 at 7:53 am
@ Sully:
Have you considered that Jonah Goldberg may believe Krypton to have been the American heartland – now lost forever? It would explain a lot.
November 16th, 2009 at 8:16 am
@ CK MacLeod:
He’s never explained himself on the matter, or at least he hadn’t the last time I did a relatively thorough web search on it. Instead he has chosen to pretend ignorance of, or at least maintain silence on, his shameful little mistake in that footnote; perhaps so I will buy the next edition of his book to see if he has quietly edited it out thus giving it the Stalinist treatment of a solecism.
The quality of vanity is mightiest in the mightiest.
November 16th, 2009 at 10:32 am