The story so far: Sean Hannity, declaring that waterboarding is not torture, announces that he'll allow himself to undergo the Verschärfte Vernehmung technique for charity. Keith Olbermann, with his unerring nose for ratings, puts up $1000 per second — double if Hannity "acknowledges he feared for his life and admits that waterboarding is torture."

Olbermann goes after Hannity on the legitimate grounds that Hannity is "trivializing torture." Which makes it all the more baffling that Olbermann's response is to further trivialize it. If you truly believe waterboarding is torture, and you are not evil, than you would not subject another human being to it, even Sean Hannity.

Watching the segment, it seems quite likely that Olbermann made this offer only to prove a point, knowing that Hannity wouldn't follow through. If Hannity did somehow accept, my guess -- my hope -- is that Olbermann would withdraw the challenge in order to keep the moral high ground (probably donating the money anyway).

But that's not how it looks to everyone on the outside. For example, here's the AP taking Olbermann at face value. Even if I'm correct and the AP is wrong, there are surely a lot of Olbermann supporters who actually would at least cheer on the waterboarding of Sean Hannity. Which makes it worth looking at what this would mean.

First of all, it probably wouldn't prove very much because while waterboarding of prisoners is certainly torture, waterboarding a volunteer definitionally is not. No doubt it's horribly unpleasant, and an honest volunteer should be able to extrapolate from his situation to understand the prisoner's point of view, but as David Schaengold succinctly pointed out the other day, "The central moral evil in interrogating someone by means of torture is that it overrides the victim’s moral agency. That is, the whole point of the exercise is to render the victim incapable of moral self-governance, so that your will, the will of the torturer, becomes entirely sovereign."

I can think of a few ways to enhance the possibility of a volunteer like Hannity to empathize with a genuine torture victim. Instead of having him report for waterboarding with TV cameras in tow, get him to sign a waiver (totally unenforceable, I understand, but for appearances sake) then wait a couple of months until he's not expecting it, throw a bag over his face, drag him away to a dark cell for a couple of days, and then waterboard him. 183 times. Indeed once you've done this, there's no need to offer more money for his admission that waterboarding is torture. Just tell him to say it. I guarantee he will.

The fact that many of us probably enjoy envisioning exactly that scenario, even if we wouldn't really go through with it (and the fact that some supposed opponents of torture at least believe they would go through with it), shows how hard it is for us to get our heads around torture, which is, fortunately, so distant from our experience of the world. So think about rape instead. It's actually a pretty good analogy. Suppose, just off the top of my head, Ann Coulter announced that forced sexual intercourse was not rape. Can you even imagine Olbermann offering $1000 a second for someone to rape Ann Coulter? To go through with it (though of course one can no more volunteer for rape than for torture) would pretty obviously be immoral.

Even so, there are probably some people who think it might be worth torturing Hannity just a little in order to win the debate over the unacceptability of torture. That's a difficult position to hold for someone who's trying to argue that the slightly more important result of potentially stopping a terrorist attack is not worth committing torture. And besides, it would almost certainly backfire.

Update: Now Olbermann is even more confused than ever or he's some kind of media double-agent. One of his new rules is: "Hannity need only admit to something factual to get the waterboarding to stop. He may choose among: 'Obama is not a socialist,' 'Waterboarding is torture,' or something else mutually agreeable between us."

So Olbermann wants to use waterboarding to get Hannity to say something he knows to be true but would not otherwise admit. In other words, Olbermann intends to prove that torture works.

9:48 AM :: Comments (28)

Hitch asks "What on earth is the point of a newspaper of record that decides that the record itself may be too much for us to bear?"

He starts with Earl Butz and jumps to "the alleged 'prophet' Mohammed" — and really, isn't it overkill to use "alleged" and scare quotes?

Hitch also urges me (well, not me personally but "you") to refuse to buy books or (gulp) do readings at Borders, because the chain banned an issue of Free Inquiry that published the Mohammed cartoons. That is a pretty cowardly and hypocritical move for a store that celebrates Banned Books Month every year. Must I oblige Hitchens' request when April 1 rolls around?

5:24 PM :: Comments (2)

Last week I weighed in on a lopsided debate between Christopher Hitchens and TV rabbi Shmuley Boteach on the topic, "Does God Exist?". To my delight, the 92nd Street Y has now put the entire 90-minute debate online. It's Hitchens at his finest and an intellectual hoot from start to finish. C'mon, it's not like you're getting any work done anyway. At least watch Hitch's opening statement.

3:37 PM :: Comments (10)

The other night, I attended a debate at the 92nd Street Y between Christopher Hitchens and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach on the question of the existence of God. As everyone who agrees with me agrees, it was a ridiculously lopsided match up, with Hitch taking command from the start and never relenting.

This is the only clip available so far and it doesn't exactly capture the mood of the debate because it shows Boteach in sermon mode rather than argument mode, which is what he was usually in. Still, Hitchens has a moment that was pretty typical for him when he says, "We've already answered that question. He to the best of his ability."

11:08 AM :: Comments (1)

Christopher Hitchens spreads a little holiday cheer today with an essay denouncing Hanukkah. Like all Hitchens' work on religion, it's smart, witty and totally frustrating. Hitchens, you see, is at heart a fundamentalist. I don't mean that in the way people usually do: that he is so dogmatic and evangelistic about atheism that he's the equivalent of a religious fundamentalist. Hitchens has countered that attack persuasively -- or mostly persuasively -- in several outlets since the publication of his book God is not Great.

Rather what I mean is that Hitchens' ideas about the religious faiths he rejects are based entirely on fundamentalist interpretations of those faiths. For him there is only one true form of any religion -- the one handed down by God as transmitted by ancient religious authorities. Any variation on that is a false or deluded form of religion worthy only of dismisal. That's just what the fundamentalists say.

So when it comes to Hanukkah, Hitchens tells the true and rarely heard, during this season, story of the Maccabean revolt and concludes that, "The display of the menorah... has a precise meaning and is an explicit celebration of the original victory of bloody-minded faith over enlightenment and reason." [emphasis mine] He outright rejects liberal rabbi Michael Lerner's reinterpretation of the holiday.

But here's where Hitchens' own powers of reasoning fail him. Hanukkah has never had a single precise meaning. No religious holiday -- hell, no religion -- ever has. As an atheist, Hitchens must affirm that religion is a human construct that evolves according to human needs. To traditionalists who say, "but that's not what God meant," the response is simple: God doesn't make the rules. Hanukkah provides an ideal demonstration of this phenomenon. It began not as Hitchens claims, with the Maccabees, but earlier, as a winter solstace celebration, Nayrot, that was probably little different from the celebrations of the surrounding cultures of the era. Later, this merged with the celebration of the Maccabees' victory and became Hanukkah. Six hundreds years after that, as Jewish society had become more theistic and introspective and less militaristic, the supposed supernatural intervention of Yahweh became the most important thing about the holiday-- as seen in the newly evolved story of the miracle of the lamps. In the 19th century, Zionists adapted Hanukkah to their nationalistic idea of Judaism. In 20th century America, Hanukkah became, for all intents and purposes, the Jewish Christmas -- or more precisely, the secular Jewish alternative to a secular Christmas. In some ways it came full circle -- a winter solstace celebration once more -- but the millennia of history now attached to it made it all the more rich and more meaningful.

It is still common to hear some Jews (even secular ones) say that Hanukkah is "not a major holiday." But that is experientially false. It may be a minor holiday for Orthodox Jews, but it is a major one for the rest of us, and there is nothing inauthentic about that. If there is no God, how can a religious holiday, or any religious custom, have an external meaning outside of human culture and discernment? Meaning must be conferred by our observances and our celebrations. Obviously, this is not a matter of individualistic, conscious redefinition -- though that can play a part. Nor am I saying that holidays "can mean whatever we want." Rather, customs evolve along with the human cultures and societies that nurture them. Only an organic change that reflects the needs and values of large groups will resonate in our hearts.

And Hanukkah has undergone that kind of organic change, as has everything else about the wonderful, awful, human-created phenomenon of religion. Humanists should light their menorahs proudly tonight. Say an extra secular blessing for Christopher Hitchens.

9:57 AM :: Comments (10)

Last week, Kathy Griffin had TV censors reaching for their scissors with her Emmy acceptance speech. "A lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus... Suck it, Jesus. This award is my God now."

Now Fox News religion correspondent Lauren Green has a rebuttal.

I don't know what went through her mind and why she would think that was cutting edge or even funny. But first, I want to actually show you that, in fact, Kathy Griffin is wrong. Jesus had everything to do with her winning that award. And here's the reasoning.

Jesus died on a cross 2,000 years ago. His dying words were, "Forgive them Father for they know not what they do." He died and they buried him in a rock cut tomb. Three days later, as the Bible says, he rose from the dead. That day...

Well, I'll stop there. Suffice to say that Green continues like that for 2000 years, linking the crucifixion directly to the advent of democracy and free speech. It's the most humorless response to a joke at an awards ceremony since Sean Penn called Jude Law one of our finest living actors.

Besides, it's not clear why Green thinks it will help Jesus' image for him to get credit for "My Life on the D List." Really, you're just giving Hitchens ammunition.

It's also amusing that Green starts out by saying that if Griffin had stopped after saying "no one had less to do with this award than Jesus," "I could have been mildly insulted at that and turned the other cheek, as the founder of Christianity taught." But it was after the, you know, punchline, that Green felt this was no longer an option. Because that's where the founder of Christianity drew the line. I came across this attitude a lot in talking to evangelicals for my book: I believe in turning the other cheek, but when you attack my family/country/ministry/god.... Please. I think if Jesus was still preaching forgiveness when they pounded nails into his hands, you can suck it up for a Creative Arts Emmy speech. It's not like it was the Primetimes.

12:06 PM :: Comments (17)

From two recent reviews of Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great.

"The tangled diversity of faith is, in the event, no obstacle for Hitchens. He knows exactly which varieties of religion need attacking; namely, the whole lot. And if he has left anyone out he would probably like to hear about it so that he can rectify the omission." —The New Yorker

"Yet one person is conspicuously absent from Hitchens's list of religious evil-doers: George W. Bush. Yes, the man who said Jesus is his favorite philosopher "because he changed my heart" and, as governor of Texas, proclaimed June 10 as "Jesus Day," goes unmentioned. How can this be? The explanation has to do with Hitchens's subtitle. If "religion poisons everything," then it must be responsible for most of the evil in the world, since belief of this sort is currently so widespread and pervasive. If a political leader is religious, he or she must be bad, and if he or she is bad, he or she must be religious. This is why Saddam gets slammed for his cynical exploitation of Islam and why Bush, author of the Global War on Terror and the war on Iraq, both of which Hitchens supports, gets a free pass. If he is to be believed, our faith-based President is defending rationalism against religious intolerance. " —The Nation

Continue reading "Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes" »

10:22 AM :: Comments (11)

Submit the worst possible caption for this New Yorker cartoon. Click here for details. Click here to see last week's results.

Winner
"The shades aren't working. I can still see everyone we know perishing by flood." —gary

Finalists
"I've heard that the epic tale of the Great Flood cuts across many cultures and generations, with its roots reaching back to into the mists of ancient lore. I just didn't think it would cut across this week's vacation, that's all." —SK

"Uh-oh. I think I found the two crabs." — Abbie Normal

Continue reading "The New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest #100" »

9:33 AM :: Comments (176)

Kate alerts me that there will be a (nationwide) preview of A Brief History of Disbelief on tomorrow night's Bill Moyers Journal.

The clip is... not promising. Miller's tone is less confrontational than Dawkins, to be sure, but opening with "religion caused 9/11 and America is just as religious as the Middle East, therefore Christians and Muslims are all equally nuts and dangerous" (I'm paraphrasing, but accurately) isn't likely to convince anyone other than Christopher Hitchens. Certainly Miller's pronouncement that "It's inconceivable that [9/11] could have been done without religion, for it's only in the name some absolute assurance of a permanent life after death that someone would be able to undertake such an act," would be news to the Tamil Tigers.

Still it should be interesting to hear Miller discuss all this with the devout, but rational, Bill Moyers.

Update: Having watched the Moyers segment, it looks like the series, and Miller, will be pretty good after all. The clip they chose was pretty unrepresenative of Miller's tone, which is thoughtful and respectful (but not in any wimpy way). Interestingly, it sounds like Miller, though he doesn't know the category, is an ignostic, which is what I increasingly think of myself as, if forced to put a label on my "disbelief."

4:52 PM :: Comments (0)

I'm getting a little fed up with everyone declaring that the coming military escalation in Iraq is the last chance for success. Does anyone imagine that when this new tactic inevitably fails, the pundits and media outlets currently using the "last chance" formulation — Mort Kondrake, Christopher Hitchens*, Front Page, etc. — will actually tell Bush that he is now out of chances and demand withdrawal? Face it, anyone who still thinks Bush has a last chance is going to give him as many more last chances as he asks for.

It's gotten so bad that what passes for straight talk is John McCain saying, "This may not be our last chance, but it's as close to our last chance as anything I can think of," and Chris Matthews declaring it Bush's "second to last chance." Tom Friedman hedges his last chance talk by giving Bush a laundry of list of conditions there isn't a chance in hell he's going to meet — and then giving him a full year to meet them.

People who see through the smoke: Melinda Henneberger, Leonard Pitts.

*Hitch uses "last chance" only in the headline, which may well have been written by someone else. Also, his piece predicts utter failure for the surge, though he still holds out hope for something that will save his war.

4:43 PM :: Comments (2)

Time.com goes with a contrarian headline for last week's big news.

Totally predictable context after the jump.

Continue reading "Is Christopher Hitchens writing their headlines now?" »

3:59 PM :: Comments (0)

Submit the worst possible caption for this New Yorker cartoon. Click here for details. Click here to vote for your favorite anti-caption from last week's contest. Click here to see the previous week's winner.

Winner
"Kids, remember when I told you about the miscarriage I had when I was fifteen? Guess who survived after all!" —Dave

Finalists
"I told you Daddy would make it home for Christmas! Unfortunately, he can't stay long, as he's in the middle of delivering a prisoner." —John Tabin

"It's your daddy, Caleb. I had him exhumed. Remember that tantrum you had when I told you that he was dead and he couldn't be here for Christmas? and you started breaking things, kicking the dog, and screaming 'I don't care if he's dead, I want my daddy home for Christmas, not you, you old cow'?" —danny

Honorable mention

Continue reading "The New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest #80" »

9:40 AM :: Comments (172)

The New York Times tries hard to find someone who will object to Bob Dylan's latest obscure borrowings, this time from Civil War poet Henry Timrod on several tracks from his new album Modern Times (a masterpiece, by the way).

As I argued the last time around (in a post Christopher Hitchens called "deft" and "objectively pro-terrorist"), there's really no scandal here, no matter how many Albuquerque middle school Spanish teachers you have on your side.

I also note with amusement the argument that Bob crossed a line by being too erudite for most of America, because “plagiarism wants you not to know the original, whereas allusion wants you to know.” Is it Bob's fault that the rest of us have never read Timrod? How many people knew that Whitman poem I dug up last time? For that matter, the Times charts a Timrodism in a song called Spirit on the Water, without noting that the title of that song and its opening lines ("Spirit on the water/Darkness on the face of the deep") are equally "stolen." I'll generously assume this goes unsaid because in that case the source is so familiar. But it's at least possible that those liberal elites at the Times are no more familiar with the Bible than they are with Henry Timrod.

8:56 AM :: Comments (6)

I have no idea if Garrison Keillor was right about Bernard-Henri Lévy's American Vertigo, but I sure enjoyed his review in the Times a few weeks ago. It was, you know, funny. And that's not a word I normally use in conjunction with Garrison Keillor.

Christopher Hitchens does not agree. But he may just have missed the joke. His angry rebuttal in Slate today is dressed up with a lot of outrage, but it consists of only three actual criticisms. Here's one:

"As always with French writers," says Keillor, "Lévy is short on the facts, long on conclusions." I would give about, oh, five cents to know which ones Keillor has in mind. Perhaps he has been boning up on his Foucault or Balibar or Derrida, in which case he modestly makes no show of his own learning. He cannot mean Albert Camus or Olivier Todd or Michel Houllebecq.

No, he probably means to sound ignorant and bombastic for comic effect. The tip off comes exactly two sentences before the one Hitch quotes:

He admires Warren Beatty, though he sees Beatty at a public event "among these rich and beautiful who, as always in America . . . form a masquerade of the living dead, each one more facelifted and mummified than the next, fierce, a little mutant-looking, inhuman, ultimately disappointing." Lévy is quite comfortable with phrases like "as always in America." Bombast comes naturally to him.

And not just to him, it turns out.

5:03 PM :: Comments (7)

Back in college I edited a stoopid underground magazine. Twice we published cartoons featuring Jesus — once in a fake ad for Jesus on Ice and once in a fake ad for the Cruciphone, a telephone shaped like Christ on the cross. (Sophomoric? Hey, we were sophomores.) Now obviously they weren't anti-Christian cartoons, they were jokes about religion and consumerism and the tension between the sacred and the profane. But could they have offended Christians? Almost certainly. There was no big conservative Christian contigency at Oberlin back then, but had there been, we probably would have gotten the same outraged response we got when we made jokes that offended every other cultural or ethnic group on campus. (Good times, good times.)

So clearly I'm not of the school that avoiding offense should be one's primary concern when publishing a newspaper. That said, I think reasonable people can disagree over whether those crazy Danes should have published the notorious Muhammad cartoons, just because they had the right to.

On the other hand, there is absolutely no valid argument for American media outlets not printing the cartoons now as part of their coverage of the ensuing riots. For several reasons, this cowardly abdication of journalism is not, as the Times claims, "a reasonable choice for news organizations that usually refrain from gratuitous assaults on religious symbols, especially since the cartoons are so easy to describe in words."

First, even if the original publication was arguably gratuitous, the republication in the context of news coverage would be highly germane. Knowing exactly what got people so worked up is essential information. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure the Times ran photos of Piss Christ and Chris Ofili's Holy Virgin during those controversies; I'm absolutely sure that the paper has (rightly) reprinted antisemitic cartoons that have appeared in Islamic publications in the context of news stories.

Second, the cartoons are not so easily described — not that the Times has made any attempt to try. In 10 articles on the subject, the Times has described, sort of, exactly three of the 12 cartoons, and emphasized, repeatedly, exactly one. Dispensing first with the two cartoons that were mentioned only once, the paper noted that not all of the cartoons were inherently offensive: "One depicted a Danish anti-immigration politician in a police lineup, and another lampooned [Danish editor] Mr. Rose as an agent provocateur." This doesn't even include several others that depict Muhammad neutrally, a religious taboo, but not a mockery of Islam. Despite that, most of the Times' other reports have lumped all 12 cartoons together as "satirizing Muhammad." [Update: Oops. Missed a few stories. Here's one that describes three more toons, bringing the total to six out of 12.]

The one cartoon that has gotten all the attention is typically described as a picture of Muhammad "wearing a turban shaped like a bomb." But even that is far less helpful than seeing the cartoon would be. As Choire Sicha notes in his passionate essay, that description only raises questions: "Does the image... mean that all Muslims are terrorists? Is it a commentary on the tragedy that Muhammad’s religion has given rise to Wahhabism? Or is it a reference to a racist Western conflation of Arabs and terrorists?" (Admittedly, he also notes that it's hard to tell from the cartoon itself, but, hey, that's information too.)

Continue reading "At last they came for Mutts, but by then there was no one left to stand up" »

3:27 PM :: Comments (20)

Since I know a lot of my readers are good liberals who are capable of getting so muddle-headed about free speech that they are capable of persuading themselves that David Irving's right to hold insane racist opinion and attempt to pass them off as history means that C-Span somehow has the responsibility to let him do so on its dime, Charles Taylor's crisp demolishing of Irving and his mainstream defenders from Salon last month should help dispell that notion.

Let's imagine that there was a writer who took as his subject World War II. And let's suppose that because of his ability to amass and cite journals, transcripts, paperwork and all manner of documents, he gained a reputation as a meticulous researcher. Now let's say that the conclusion the writer drew from all of his research was an unshakable conviction that World War II never happened. It was, he insists, a massive fraud, and he declares under oath, "No documents whatever show that World War II had ever happened."

Now let's allow things to get curiouser and curiouser.

Continue reading "In denial" »

9:04 AM :: Comments (1)

Wonkette's reaction was also our first one:

"The NYDN peeks at Christopher Hitchens's Vanity Fair column and finds the Johnny Walker enthusiast looking on the bright side: 'That Bush did not surrender to the need for a colossal bourbon on Sept. 11 stands, I think to his credit.' Right. So let's go to the official Bush presidency scoreboard. Pros: Did not get stinking drunk on 9/11. Cons: Started a war that has yet to be proven necessary."

But then we read that quote again and stumbled over "I think." I think?! If there was ever a sentiment that really did not need a qualifier, isn't this it? Or is Hitchens just covering his ass, allowing himself wiggle room to continue blindly endorsing the Bush even if Michael Moore digs up footage of him drinking that bourbon.

11:40 AM :: Comments (2)

I'd like now to make some observations about Michael Moore's Farenheit 9/11 that will be more disjointed and incoherent than I might like because 1) I have actual work to do today and 2) I haven't seen the film yet (not through any resistance; it's just that neither Moore nor Kev has volunteered to come and babysit yet).

As an early critic of Moore, I've been watching the criticism of his new flick pretty closely, and I've noticed a couple of trends that don't reflect particularly well on the critics. Even without having seen the movie, I can see what's wrong with the complaints.

Continue reading "But then disjointed and incoherent is hip these days, right?" »

11:04 AM :: Comments (2)

As an amateur Dylanologist, I am just plain giddy at the discovery that Christopher Hitchens cites this blog in his Weekly Standard review of Christopher Ricks' Dylan's Visions of Sin.

Continue reading "I hitched up my pony to a post on the right" »

8:10 PM :: Comments (1)

Everyone knows I'm not a fan of Michael Moore, but when even Fox News is giving Fahrenheit 9/11 a rave review (OK, the Fox News gossip columnist, but still), I'm prepared to go into the new film with an open mind. Indeed, I would love it if the advance buzz is correct and Moore finally got it right, not just factually but as a filmmaker. My dislike of Michael Moore pales in comparison to my support for his agenda, and my criticism of him has always been that he's bad for the left. If he's now become good for the left, I'm ready to re-join the fan club (as long as I never have to work for him).

Continue reading "Five films in, Moore decides to get his facts straight" »

9:57 AM :: Comments (2)