The triumph of malice

The phone rang early this morning. I am not a phone person. The only reason I carry a cell phone is because my spouse, who is currently hospitalized, says it is a convenient way to track my movements, so that people know where I am and what schemes I am pursuing throughout the day. But that is a concession on my part. And, of course, the cell phone is the fastest way to summon help. That is, in itself, a dubious premise, because my need for help is based upon my history of falling into the river when I am putting the dock in at Tacoma Park and my affinity for canoeing. First, I have never, ever capsized a canoe accidentally. The instability of the dock floats is another matter, but the fact is that a cell phone would be rendered useless by a dunking in the fetid James River, so I don't know if it is really a safety device. I suppose the assumption is that I would have enough fingers left to punch the buttons if I had an adverse encounter with the chain saw, the table saw, the weed-whacker, or the garden tractor. The point is that I do not like telephones and I resent when they intrude upleasantness into days I plan to spend on uplifting matters.

So, I answered the phone this morning because it might have been a call from the hospital, but it turned out to be a friend wanting to know if I was going to answer a challenge from a blog regarding the case of a former state legislature being arrested for , and apparently admitting to, sexual encounters with young women who include a step-daughter and a legislative page. The phone call pissed me off. I was being asked to turn my attention from pressing matters, such as will Street Sense be able to repeat his Kentucky Derby performance, and find out just what my agitated friend was talking about. So, I reviewed the stuff on the arrest of Mr. Ted Klaudt, and decided I much preferred contemplating the future of Street Sense who is beautiful and is truly nice people. Animals are often better people than people are. And they seldom play gynecologist.

Well, as the day turned out Street Sense, pictured above winning the Derby, came from behind again and led the race for a time until being nosed out by Curlin in the finish pictured below, Curlin on the left and Street Sense on the right.

It was a beautiful race befitting the nobility of race horses, and I don't think I am being too much of an aesthetic bigot by saying they are much more pleasant to puruse than is former Rep. Ted Klaudt.

Last night I awoke to what I thought was the thunder booms and rushing winds of a lightening storm. It turns out that it was the thunderous tongue-clucking and breathe-sucking over the Klaudt affair.

The telephone call that intruded upon a day that I intended to devote to more uplifting pursuits called attention to the fact that one of the regressive blogs launched an assault on a blog post at Clean Cut Kid and concluded with this challenge:

The Northern Valley Beacon has come down hard on bloggers who reasoned this way. Let us see if he does so now.

That meant I had to go see what atrocity of reasoning Clean Cut Kid committed. Chad's post bears the headline "Family Values." Then Chad comments: "I see they arrested former Republican legislator Ted Klaudt this morning." Chad reprints the lead to the arrest story.

When I first looked at Chad's post and when I looked again, I saw that it was an exercise in irony. As this story broke, many alert people were struck by the irony that a legislator who worked hard to push the the abortion ban through the legislature under the banner of family values was arrested for acts contrary to those values. The irony is obvious.

But the blog that excoriates Chad attaches all its indignation and derogations to the fact that Chad identified the legislator as a Republican.

If you want to see the low, mean, road, check out Clean Cut Kid. Chad announces the story under the heading: "Family Values." So apparently all those who disagree with Chad on social issues are discredited by one act of criminality. I suppose by that same logic if one homosexual is a child molester, all homosexuals are child molesters. The comments on Chad's post suggest that the only important thing is that the word "Republican" be firmly attached to this story. For the Clean Cut Klan, this story is just one more weapon to use against their enemies.

What this blog post charges Chad with is commiting the fallacy--sometimes a deliberate propagandic ploy--of hasty generalization, or an inductive leap. The blog contends that Chad asserts that one Republican law maker who stood under the banner of family values got arrested for a criminal act in violation of those values, therefore all Republican legislators are criminals.

But Chad does not say that. He points out the irony in the alleged acts of this man and the family values he purported to stand for, and Chad points out that he was a Republican legislator, who repeated the party line about family values. Nowhere does Chad suggest in his post that the irony applies to anyone but Ted Klaudt.

The issue here is what we semanticists distinguish as the language of reports and the language of judgments. A report on what Chad said would outline accurately and clearly the words and the context. That would provide us with the facts about what Chad posted. However, we get the language of judgment, which gives us a map of the mind of the offended blogger, not a clear and accurate portrayal of what Chad actually posted.

The offended reader supplied the inductive leap of suggesting that one Republican committed criminal offenses, therefore all Republicans commit them. By imposing this conclusion and attributing it to Chad, the blogger has set up the conditions by which Chad can be charged with a lowness and meanness.

Clean Cut Kid neither stated or implied the generalization with which he is charged.

And so, Clean Cut Kid is not the blog we come down on for faulty reasoning.

We often comment about the malevolence that throbs through many blogs. We are often charged with regarding any viewpoint that does not agree with ours as malevolent. Actually, we make our charge of malevolence from a long and clearly established principal about things uttered with malicious intent. Negative statements about people that are factually accurate and uttered as fact, not judgment or opinion, are said to be uttered with an absence of malice. However, when ad hominem attacks against individuals are done with the purpose of discrediting the person and derogating their reputations in the eyes of others, they are uttered with the presence of malice. And, therefore, they are malevolent.

It is not a matter of differing opinions. It is a matter of whether we are receiving a factual report or receiving a judgment with the purpose of damaging a person.

Chad's post contained nothing but the ironic heading of "family values" with factual information following.

The most cogent comments on the blog scene about this matter come from Bernie Hunhoff at South Dakota Magazine who notes the betrayal of trust committed against the people of South Dakota and against the adolescent children who were entrusted to the Kaudt family for care. If we are to come down hard on someone, it is that the betrayal of word committed by Ted Klaudt is compounded by deceiving and betraying words generated on the Internet forums. Like supermarket tabloids, many blogs thrive on what one observer of the Klaudt business has called "tavern talk." It is a matter of malevolence looking for some pretext to unleash itself.

I am so wearied of the human degradations purveyed on the blogs, that I, frankly, glossed over the news of the Klaudt affair. I feared I would learn of someone who had young women shackled as sex slaves in a dungeon. What I learned was no less astounding, but incomprehensibly wierd. According to the statements in the arrest indictment and in the news, Klaudt used deception and fraud to get young women to submit to would-be gynecological examinations.

I don't know if reparative justice will be served for those young women, but I can hear the Saturday night tongue-clucking from the town cafes and taverns resounding throughout the land. Especially on the blogs.

The day was not totally wasted. I wonder if there is any way to nominate Street Sense and Curlin for sainthood.

Spring bumper sticker fashion show

Here is a preview of the bumper stickers for the 2008 political and fashion season:

Bush Bumper Stickers (Emphasis ours, to designate those that contain a strong element of wit.)
1. 1/20/09: End of an error.
2. That's ok, I wasn't using my civil liberties anyway.
3. Let's fix democracy in this country first.
4. If you want a nation ruled by religion, move to Iran.
5. Bush. Like a rock. Only dumber.
6. 2004: Embarrassed - 2005: Horrified - 2006: Terrified.
7. If you can read this, you're not our president.
8. Of course it hurts: you're getting screwed by an elephant.
9. Hey, Bush supporters: Embarrassed yet?
10. George Bush: Creating the terrorists our kids will have to fight.
11. Impeachment.
12. America: One nation, under surveillance.
13. They call him "W" so he can spell it.
14. Whose God do you kill for?
15. Cheney/Satan '08.
16. Hail to the chief.
17. No, seriously, why did we invade Iraq?
18. Bush: God's way of proving intelligent design is full of crap.
19. Bad president! No banana!
20. We need a president who's fluent in at least one language.
21. We're making enemies faster than we can kill them.
22. Is it Vietnam yet?
23. Bush doesn't care about white people, either.
24. Where are we going? And why are we in this hand basket?
25. You elected him. You deserve him.
26. Impeach Cheney first.
27. Dubya, your dad shoulda pulled out, too.
28. When Bush took office, gas was $1.46!
29. Pray for impeachment.
30. The Republican party: Our bridge to the 11th century.
31. What part of "Bush lied" don't you understand?
32. One nation under clod.
33. Bush never exhaled.
34. At least Nixon resigned.
35. Are we kinder and gentler yet?

Niggerfying Obama

The regressives have kissed their KKK crosses and started their campaign of denigrating Barack Obama. To understand fully the racist implications, one needs to recall that the term "denigrate" means to attack the reputation of someone by attributing blackness to them. "Denigrate" means to color as black.

The tack being taken is to resonate the old cliches of niggerhood being a condition of lying, cheating, stealing, and stinking. While even the most craven regressive in our day hesitates to simply apply the appellation "nigger," the racist implication is conveyed through attributing one of those defects of character. The current defect being circulated by the regressives against Obama is lying.

We received an e-mail from a regressive, who likes to challenge progressives, which forwarded an essay on an Obama speech with the note:

"This is a super essay. It is about time someone revealed the bull-crap of this closet Moslem. "

The essay contends that when Obama gave his speech to a congregation in Selma on the anniversary of the Selma march, he lies about the effect that march had on his family. Obama says that the actions of people in Selma encouraged his African father and caucasian mother to go foward with their relationship which resulted in the birth of Barack Obama, Jr. The writer, one Paul R. Hollrah, tries to make the case that Barack was born on August 4, 1961, and the first march in Selma occured on March 7, 1965, so that march could not have influenced the Obama family decisions.

Of course, in his speech Barack Obama was not making a cause-effect case about how the march and his parents's decisions. He was making a case for how the march gave courage and substantial action to the civil rights changes of the time and was expressive of the aspirations of blacks in America and throughout the world.

Hollrah's essay is a bald attempt to denigrate by distorting the words of Obama and appealing to old, racist stereotypes so cherised by the regressives.

Then blogger Melanie Morgan on WorldNet Daily takes up the lying tack:

Sorry, but Barack Obama is a bald-faced liar.

You see, Obama is a rabid gun-grabber who wouldn't even have been allowed to carry a weapon to fire at the 9-11 terrorists if he had his way. He received an "F" rating from the National
Rifle Association, and it's not hard to understand why.

She contends that because of Obama's low rating among the NRA mob, his claims to Charlie Rose that he would have taken up arms against the 9-11 terrorists are lies.

Great reasoning, Melanie.

This is how niggerfication works in the 21st century. It does not come right out with the N-word, but it uses the old stereotypes with the same old racist objectives. The regressives will try their damnedest to recapture the racism and discrimination of old that comprises their social vision.

The price of defamation

Mt. Blogmore has recently announced a decision to edit comments by Sibson. For a time South Dakota War College shut off the anonymous comments feature because PP said he got tired of editing out offensive stuff. Of course, all the ignorant yoyos start screaming censorship. They don't understand that the First Amendment applies to the government, not to private entities that can edit what they publish at their whim.

And the yoyos make all manner of insistences for protecting anonymity. They cannot comprehend that the First Amendment does not license their personal cowardice.

However, what puzzles us is the matter of defamation. In a comment on Mt. Blogmore I noted that part of my duties as an editor for a newspaper was to fact check and edit letters-to-the-editor. There was no question about why we did this. If a statement was made in a letter-to-the-editor that was false and defamatory, the newspaper could be sued. And most state libel laws emphasize the aspect of defamation which hurts people in their business or profession.

As the business editor for a newspaper, I was often called into conferences
with our counsel and business people who claimed that something published in the paper was harmful to their business or profession. In the huge majority of cases, what they complained about was information we had an obligation to publish. It dealt with company financial statements, citations from regulatory agencies, and law suits. A physician, for example, was being sued by a patient for incompetence and he complained that notice of the law suit was defamatory and injurious to his practice.

A few cases were judgment calls. And when the newspaper thought the complainant had a case, we were quick to try for a resolution that did not take us into court. In one such case, a reporter quoted a person in a story who said a local certified public accountant took money to give a government agency a pass on an audit. The newspaper paid and issued a retracting statement. It recognized that the reporter and editors should have investigated the charge for any credibility before putting the quotation in the paper. The fact that the charge was made in a quotation of an individual did not relieve the newspaper of responsibility for publishing.

At that time, the courts were rough on news media that published defamatory information. The last case of prominence we remember that found in favor of a plaintiff against a newspaper was when a supermarket tabloid claimed Carol Burnett was an alcoholic. She sued and won.

That leads to the question of blogs and discussion boards. A professor colleague of ours in an eastern university system decided to research who has responsibility for comments put on internet forums. The responsibility of the publishing agent has not changed. If a blog or a newspaper discussion board permits a defamatory comment, it can be sued.

What has changed is the money. Most people who are defamed find that prosecuting a defamation case will cost them more money than they could hope to obtain from a court case. Legal action is not taken simply because of the cost involved. And many blogs or bloggers would not have the resources to pay a penalty anyway. So, the one restraint on defamatory speech is rendered largely ineffective. Now we are not talking about negative comments that are covered by the fair comment and criticism rule. We are talking about factual assertions that are damaging and untrue.

There used to be a remedy for defamation that resulted in punishment of the defamer called criminal libel. In essence, the idea was that wrongfully tarnishing a person's reputation was in the same category as stealing from them. So, libel could be prosecuted under criminal law. Most states have long repealed criminal libel from their statutes. In the few states that retain them, they are not used. The nuisance factor from people involved in petty squabbles was the issue.

The study on defamatory statements made on internet forums did find some serious cases of libel not covered by any form of privilege.

The study suggests that the only way to deal with such cases is to refine and reinstitute laws on criminal libel. Or to remove the prohibitions against dueling. People who think they have been wrongfully tarnished can call out those who offend them and have at with weapons of their choice. But, of course, the offenders would have to be identified, and that means anyone posting on an internet forum would have to provide their names.

The study points out that the concept of free speech does not cover anonymity and the cowardice behind it. That is not to say that sometimes people, for reasons of personal safety, use anonymity to get out important information, but in the vast majority of cases anonymity is merely the ploy of cowards and reputational sneak-thieves.

Blogging: a study in scatology

The number of blogs tending toward the progressive viewpoint are diminishing in South Dakota, while those that espouse the regressive cant continue to grow. The same goes with the comments under postings.

Because of personal business, we find little time to post, but we still believe that the Internet offers an opportunity for cogent and valuable discussion. There is a problem, however.

Our good colleague Dr. Silas, who directed research on political communications, and who hopes to retire from his academic position this spring, has some points about web logs that are in line with our thinking. He writes that blogging is like motorcycle riding. Many people like the freedom and sense of exhiliration that riding a motorcycle can provide, but when you ride in groups, people tend to identify you with gangs. And so it goes with blogging. In order not to be perceived as a menace, motorcycle enthusiasts have to find different ways in which to share their enthusiasm rather than roar down the highways in hordes. And so, many bloggers, are searching for different forums that are not dominated by--to paraphrase Skakespeare--the idiots spewing forth their sound and fury.

What time I have been able to spend on the Internet since the Virginia Tech massacre has been devoted to discussions of how professors of English deal with student papers that signal some portentous problems in some students. Some years ago, the Dakota Writing Project was involved in developing guidelines on this matter, and I have been sorting through archives trying to relocate the results of that work.

I might post a summary here as well as on the other discussion forums in which I am participating.

How to turn a massacre into a degradation festival

Monday on the Virginia Tech campus surpassed the blood-filled violence of the most dementedly vicious horror film. If someone submitted a screen treatment of the events that happened there before it happened, the reviewers would say that the violence was so extreme, relentless, and excessive that it did not have the element of plausibility that horror films require to make them effective. Cho Seung-Hui will have a mark on American culture because he escalated actual violence to a level that existed only in the imagination. Unfortunately, he had the motives and ability to make his imagination actual.

The demented horror of that mass shooting, with definite connections to Columbine, takes its place with the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11 as events that diminish the freedom that once was the distinguishing mark of American life and replace it with a society consumed by procedures and apparatus for keeping it "secure." Cable television shows have gathered opinions of campus security experts about what to do, and they have advanced the proposal that students should be required to swipe an identification card at the door of each campus building before they can enter the premises. In effect, the idea is to imprison the campus population and organize it around security checks. These experts are so far removed from the purposes of the academic world that it cannot occur to them that such procedures would effectively eliminate the university as it has developed since the Middle Ages. But you can depend upon cable television news to come up with the truly ignorant and stupid.

One would think that people would not want to make one of the most horrific atrocities to ever be experienced in our country more atrocious. But the imaginative cable news media can always be relied on to find a way. Their purpose is to find sub-culprits to blame for what Cho Seung-Hui did, not find out what made him the way he was.

On either CNN or MSNBC Monday evening, the news host was interviewing the president of the VT student body. She asked if he thought that the university administration was remiss in not shutting down the campus after the first shootings and, thus, allowed a two-hour gap for the perpetrator to prepare and launch his final assault. The student body president replied that the focus of the campus was on regrouping its resources, healing, and getting on with its work, not placing blame. The woman repeated her question about six times. The young man refused to be badgered into giving assent to a leading question. However, over the ensuing days, this blame-placing theme became a staple of the television news reports. In other words, the cable news media set an agenda hunted down people who would affirm its supposition that the university misperformed and was negligent. They are still harping on this theme. They did not merely ask a question, which would be legitimate in its own right. They hammered on it until they got the answer they wanted. That is not journalism. It is setting an agenda and propagandizing it.

The president of Virginia Tech is a smart man. He immediately asked the Virginia Governor to set up a panel of qualified people to examine the performance of the University on Monday. We will wait for the report of that panel, and we trust it will include the role the media played in exacerbating this massacre.

Then NBC News received its packet of multi-media statements from Cho Seung-Hui. It immediately turned it over to authorities, but it also prepared the photos and edited the video clips for broadcast. As an old newsman, I firmly believe that all contained in the packet should be released to the public in a news context. NBC put on video clips of Cho addressing the television audience and not to be outdone in the furious scramble for ratings, CNN and the rest of the pack quickly followed. The question raised by the media is whether it was appropriate to let Cho dominate the airways by broadcasting the videos and, therefore, detract from the news of the victims.

The question is an exploitive sham. If the clips were published in a news context, they would not be exploited for their sensational aspects, but presented in a framework of developments that would emphasize the tragedy of Cho and what motivated him, not let him glare at the television viewers with his trapped-rat-like snarl and cast his invectives as if he were a living presence on the camera. The significant choice made by cable news media was to choose sensational television over journalism. As usual, horrific titillation won out over straight journalism. The latter might be found boring.

The families of victims were, according to some reports, further horrified at seeing the killer of the victims receive a public platform that displaced the acknowledgments of the students and professors who were killed while engaging in lofty and inspiring purposes. Still, these same people will want to know and understand what drove Cho to kill them in such a highly-planned, methodical way. Not just the relatives of the victims, but the entire country deserves to have these events reported for the information and understanding of the massacre, not to have it exploited by carping accusations against the authorities and through the badgering of friends, relatives, and campus people to see what outrage can be fomented to keep those suckers out there glued to their television screens.

To add to the tragedy is that mass shootings and bombings are becoming punctuation points that mark the direction our culture is taking. As much has we are repulsed and horrified by Cho, he represents something contained in our culture that produces events like the Oklahoma City bombing and the Columbine massacre. There are people in our culture leading desperate, volatile lives, and we do not know how to recognize them or understand them. Cho obviously had mental problems, but like those other perpetrators, he functioned in society up to a point. The very fact that he attended college and did his class work is evidence that he wanted something more at some point than recognition as a bloodthirsty monster.

Timonth McVeigh was executed before we ever found out just what combination of political attitude and personal pathologies drove him. In the Virginia Tech massacre, Cho Seung-Hui turned into a horrific personality. But in their constant attempts to badger witnesses, impose its less-than-intelligent accusations on administrators and officials, and appeal to the basest of human instincts, cabke television news assumes a role of drooling monster right along side of Cho.

Television news lost any claims it ever had to moral probity when it chose to no longer distinguish between news and the purely salacious.

Thirty-three are killed, and the gun loonies come slithering from under their rocks

The 33 deaths at Virginia Tech hit me hard. For one thing I am a professor, although retired, but I have a reverence for young people preparing themselves and, consequently, the world for a bright future. I hold a special regard for colleague professors who guide them in their preparation. I think strongly that there is a sacredness in knowledge and the development and transmission of it. I see those young faces and the professors going about their gentle profession and the sense of loss overwhelms.

Another thing about this latest incident is that my cousin's husband, an expert on special education, retired from Virginia Tech. The family lives in a neighboring town.

Another incident for which I felt a connection was the killing of five people at the University of Iowa on November 1, 1991. The place where it all began, Van Allen Hall, was a place where I met a fellow graduate student each afternoon. At the time I was finishing graduate courses and made a 100-mile roundtrip commute each day. The man I met up with at Van Allen Hall rode with me, and I stopped by to pick him up there before we began the drive to our homes.

In that incident a brand new doctorate who was one of 300 in the world with his specialty in astro-physics killed three professors, a research assistant, and an associate vice president for academic affairs. He also shot an undergraduate who was working as a receptionist in the vice president's office. The young woman is now a paraplegac.

Even though I was working in South Dakota at the time of the incident, I could visualize the place and the people who worked there. It was a place where one quickly got the sense that important knowledge was being developed there.

The shooter, Gang Lu, a Chinese national, left letters about what his motives were. He was recognized as a brilliant scholar, and he was in contention for a special prize for his dissertation. The prize carried a cash award of $1,000. The prize was awarded to the researcher Lu shot to death.

This incident is one in a number of in which academics who feel somehow slighted and humiliated wreak vengeance on professors and peers. There is no information at this time that such was the motive at Virginia Tech, but it is the most prominent factor in incidents that erupt in what is intended to be the tranquil and thoughtful environment of a university campus.

Such occasions must be unbearable for the families and friends of those who have been killed. They affect the nation, indeed the world, so adversely. So it is a particularly offensive and egregious and unforgiveable matter when the NRA and its loonies turn it into an occasion for its cause by saying that if other students had been carrying weapons, the shooter would not have taken so many lives. I am a gun owner. As I write this, I can look at the wall to my left and see a rack of shotguns and a rifle. And behind me are two black powder muskets. I enjoy shooting sports, I respect firearms, but I do not think they have a place in moderating the factional and personal issues that exist in society. There are problems that need to be solved, but their best chance of being solved is at Virginia Tech and all the places that try to apply human knowledge and understanding to human concerns.

Making some people think they are being demeaned and rejected as lower-order creatures is a problem that higher education has not cogently addressed. Any ranking and indicating the worth of people through some hierarchical scheme is inherently violent. That is the premise that drives our American quest for liberty, equality, and true justice for all.

As for letting everyone be armed to settle their resentments and disputes, we have an elaborate, and expensive, and life-costing experiment in just that.

It is called Iraq.