Crying Wolf...

I linked this below, but isn't it funny how so many -- perhaps looking to stir the racial pot for added audience attraction? -- find anti-semitism in a family name that he referred to himself?*

CHUCK LORRE PRODUCTIONS, #327
I'm writing this vanity card in Israel. I like it here. Not for the geography, or architecture, or even the history. No, I like it because for the first time in my life I'm surrounded with DNA much like my own. Until I got here, until I wandered around Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, I didn't realize how much my double helix yearned to be around similar strands. Now that's not to say that I don't occasionally have that very same genetic experience in Beverly Hills (particularly in Chinese restaurants on Sunday night). But the sheer homogeneity of Israel overwhelms any over-priced kung pao gathering at Mr. Chow's. The cop, the cab driver, the hotel concierge, the pilot, the waiter, the shoe salesman, the beautiful girl looking right through me as if I didn't exist -- all Jewish! If I had to sum it up, I'd say the sensation is like being at a B'nai B'rith summer camp that is surrounded by millions of crazy bastards who hate the sound of kids playing tetherball, and all the poor little camp has going for it is pluckiness and nukes. Anyway, I have to believe my visceral and very pleasant reaction is some sort of evolutionary, tribal thing. Some sort of survival gene that makes human beings want to stay with their birth group. Which raises the question, why have I spent a lifetime moving away from that group? How did Chaim become Chuck? How did Levine become Lorre? The only answer I come up with is this: When I was a little boy in Hebrew school the rabbis regularly told us that we were the chosen people. That we were God's favorites. Which is all well and good except that I went home, observed my family and, despite my tender age, thought to myself, "bull$#*!."

I honestly don't get it. If you don't like pushback, why the heck do you go writing about "outliving" someone, in the first place and then call them names -- anti semite! -- and get all overly sensitive when they respond in kind? (Maybe because today, it still seems to work? **)

Silly rabbits... someday, when we see true anti-semitism and racial prejudice with actual consequences, the good majority will turn away, because we've been conditioned to accept somebody's hurt feelings = no actual harm. A shame really, but them's the times we's living in, apparently... where feelings matter more than facts, and merit rides shotgun to color consciousness that people in some circles seem to like feeding on... Enjoy it while it lasts, I suppose. I've got a feeling overall, people of all colors in this country are wising up to such divisive tactics.

------------

*You know,
I've been wondering for some time now,
if Mr. Ta-Nehisi Coates recognizes the titular similarity between his memoir -- The Beautiful Struggle -- and Hitler's Mein Kampf ? Doubt it; on a hunch that he's just not all that well read. (Does reading having read Hitler -- in historical context -- count as anti-semitism too these days?) ;-) Even if it's just one book of many consumed and considered? Wait a minute, don't answer that...

** Eugene Volokh tackles a similar subject on his (very meritorious, and always well-worth-reading) legal blog today:

Thugs Win Again
Eugene Volokh • February 25, 2011 4:07 pm

This time they are pro-Israel thugs as opposed to extremist Muslim thugs (and various other thugs), but thugs are thugs. Here’s what happened; I quote Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign v. King County (W.D. Wash, decided last Friday): The county Department of Transportation in Seattle sells advertising on buses; the Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign bought space for an anti-Israel ads: “The proposed ad read ‘Israeli War Crimes: Your Tax Dollars at Work,’ and featured a picture of children next to a bomb-damaged building.” When this hit the news, the Department got lots of objections, including “four [messages that] suggest[ed] an intention to disrupt or vandalize buses, four [that] communicate[d] violent intentions, [and] approximately twenty [that] express[ed] concern for rider safety.” The first two categories consisted of these messages:

If you want to see how tough Jews can be, then go ahead and run those despicable ads and we’ll see who has the last word on this. If you run these ads, we will work together with our Jewish friends and others to shut Metro down.
...

The Department then canceled the ad contract, partly based on these messages. And the federal District Court held that the action was likely constitutional, because the ad violated city policy that excluded ads that are “so objectionable under contemporary community standards as to be reasonably foreseeable that it will result in harm to, disruption of, or interference with the transportation system” or that are “directed at a person or group” and are “so insulting, degrading or offensive as to be reasonably foreseeable that [they] will incite or produce imminent lawless action in the form of retaliation, vandalism or other breach of public safety, peace and order.” This policy, the court said, was viewpoint-neutral and reasonable, when applied to this ad, because “The threats of violence and disruption from members of the public ... led bus drivers and law-enforcement officials to express safety concerns.”


Now on the one hand I sympathize with the Department’s safety concerns, and its desire to protect passengers. But on the other hand, behavior that gets rewarded — here, the making of threats — gets repeated.

The message is clear: If you want to stop speech that you dislike, just send a few threatening messages and you’ll win. You don’t actually need to act violently, and risk punishment for that. You could send the threats anonymously, in a way that makes it quite unlikely that you’ll be punished. In fact, it might well be that — as in this case — the agency will not even try to get you punished. (“[N]one of the threatening communications were referred to law enforcement.”) The very fact that the speech suppressors here weren’t that awful just makes the speech suppression itself even more dangerous.

Indeed, might the thugs in this case have learned this very lesson from past incidents where threats have led to the suppression of speech? And what will future thugs learn? What speech, whether pro-Israel, anti-Israel, pro-atheism, anti-Islam, pro-Christianity, pro-animal-research, or whatever else will be immune?

You know why I like that blog?

The "conspirators" (their humorous word, btw), for the most part, tend to write "up". So even when one disagrees, or perhaps doesn't initially understand the point being made, they don't go for the cheap score -- writing what readers might want to read... or rather, what readers might think they want to read...

And there's very little artificial diversity in the cast, as well.

Plus Eugene's my age (b. 1968)***, of fresh immigrant stock himself, and smart too in many matters.
---------



*** I'm pretty sure though -- with his boyish looks probably coming from "clean living" -- he's gonna outlive me. Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with that...

Heh.