Quote of the day
posted at 10:00 pm on August 12, 2007 by Allahpundit
“Dissent is, or should be, the lifeblood of a free society.”
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A Newsweek writer taking after Newsweek. I mean really beating up on Newsweek. Strange days, these dog days of summer.
RushBaby on August 12, 2007 at 10:13 PM
No way! Really?
boomer on August 12, 2007 at 10:13 PM
Amen.
Pablo on August 12, 2007 at 10:14 PM
Mr. Samuelson does mis-speak.
Dissent is not the life blood of a free society, but the right to dissent is.
locomotivebreath1901 on August 12, 2007 at 10:16 PM
No kidding. Or as Marshall McLuhan once said, “Moral indignation is a standard strategy for endowing the idiot with dignity.”
Incidentally, Steve Boriss of The Future of News blog has a great post on Samuelson and Newsweek that’s well worth your time.
Ed Driscoll on August 12, 2007 at 10:29 PM
locomotivebreath1901 on August 12, 2007 at 10:16 PM
Hear hear. It’s not as if we all thrive on dissention–in fact quite the opposite. But it needs to be endured, not squashed.
If I were editor.
TexasDan on August 12, 2007 at 10:30 PM
Mmmmmmm…I’m not so sure about that. Take the current congressional leadership. Is it merely having the right to dissent that keeps the juices flowing, or actually doing it?
Pablo on August 12, 2007 at 10:33 PM
Oooh! I like that.
Pablo on August 12, 2007 at 10:34 PM
Thomas Jefferson on dissent:
Laura on August 12, 2007 at 10:36 PM
Thank you for the link. Your post on the subject was exemplary as well. I particularly enjoyed your Newsweek “bullet points” and the link to the parable of the “Parliament of Clocks”.
Hence the blogosphere, indeed!
RushBaby on August 12, 2007 at 10:41 PM
Sean Penn meant to remind Hugo Chavez of this; in his presence, however, he wet his pants.
Microsoft meant to remind the Chinese…but when analyzing their financial status…
Michael Moore meant to remind the Castro brothers…
Nancy Pelosi meant to remind Bashar al-Assad but was too busy nuancing her way into his graces…
Someone should remind Ahmadinejad…I’m thinking the media…
And please don’t forget Putin, media again…and all tyrants in the world who get a brake, while the U.S. is considered “nazi”.
And never, never forget to put ‘progressives’ into single quotes.
Entelechy on August 12, 2007 at 10:44 PM
Right! And the exercise of that right can be wise or unwise, responsible or irresponsible, patriotic or unpatriotic.
petefrt on August 12, 2007 at 10:55 PM
I like. “The Bill of Rights and Constitution are not a suicide pact”.
Just took part in a VJ parade. The last one left in this country and under attack. Advertisers won’t support it and letters from all over the country condemn it, but I got to meet a Pearl Harbor survivor and some submariners from WWII in order to thank them.
What a screwed-up nation this has become. Never forget the people who keep the greatest nation “evah” safe.
Hening on August 12, 2007 at 10:58 PM
In principal, I agree. In practice, the spirit of that comment takes on a very strange left-wing ideology so that it’s not dissent at all – it’s just plain anti-americanism espoused by the left and spread as gospel by most of the MSM. But don’t question their patriotism. Somehow, being born here doesn’t make you any more American than if standing in my driveway somehow makes me a car. The true spirit of dissent as shown by our founding fathers is not the kind of dissent we see in practice today.
thedecider on August 12, 2007 at 11:01 PM
Speaking of myopic, real climate experts aren’t denying global warming, they’re throwing down the BS card on loons promoting that humans are causing it.
Global warming insanity is a just world sized Spotted Owl fiasco/lie fest with the global economy going the same way that the Forrest industry did in California…bankrupt.
Speakup on August 12, 2007 at 11:09 PM
I disapprove of what you say, and I will fight to the death to keep you from saying it.
Mindthoughts of an environmental autocrat, 2007.
Dusty on August 12, 2007 at 11:13 PM
There are two great and obvious problems with the oft-repeated liberal motto that dissent is the highest form of patriotism.
First and foremost, it omits one word – and that word is “honest.” Or perhaps “sincere.” Or maybe the best of all is the phrase “in good faith.”
If your dissent is truly “honest,” if you are dissenting “in good faith,” then you truly have the best interest of your country at heart. If that is the case – if you believe you have a better option – then dissent is truly the height of patriotism.
If that is why you are dissenting – from an honest, good faith belief that we are following the wrong course, and that there is a better course – then I salute you. You are a patriot.
The problem, of course, is that for 99% of those who repeat that tripe about dissent and patriotism, their dissent is anything but honest and offered in nothing but bad faith. If you dissent for the sake of dissent, if it is a knee-jerk reaction, if it is for political or partisan reasons, if it is anything but wholly honest … then you are not a patriot.
You are a traitor. A traitor in time of war. You should be shot. Period. At any time in history other than this moment, you would have been.
Oh – and that second problem with the dissent equals patriotism meme? Well, that one’s simple:
For those who say it – it only applies if your dissent agrees with their dissent.
And that’s so hypocritical it ought to have you howling with laughter.
This article is the perfect illustration. I dissent from my government’s belief in the fiction of global warming. Why aren’t I offered the mantle of being a true, absolute-authority-having patriot for my good faith dissent?
Because it’s the wrong flavor of dissent.
Liberals are nothing if not funny.
Professor Blather on August 12, 2007 at 11:37 PM
Free Speech is the lifeblood of a free society. Dissent is just whining rapped up as free speech
William Amos on August 12, 2007 at 11:37 PM
Where? Please let me know – I would really love to take part in that someday.
Professor Blather on August 12, 2007 at 11:39 PM
Rhode Island is the last state with a VJ Day holiday, though I’m not aware of a parade.
Pablo on August 12, 2007 at 11:52 PM
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, in order to know if the climate is warming or cooling, one has to be able to measure the temperature of the climate over time. There are legitimate experts who assert that we don’t have a proper measuring infrastructure fully in place, and even if we did, the very concept of an “average temperature” is hard to pin down. So if we don’t have accurate measurements, we cannot state if things are getting warmer or cooling in any scientifically authoritative way.
So all these a priori assertions that a long term warming trend has been definitively verified are just a bit optimistic.
Since the only constant in nature is change, it is safe to say that the average mean temperature is either trending up or trending down. Pinning down the slope (and knowing if these are long term trends) is not as easy as it might seem, as the recent modification to the NASA data points out, albeit for a different root cause.
You can find a boatload of interesting stuff about global warming here.
Herikutsu on August 13, 2007 at 12:20 AM
And, as has happened with the majority of all previously proposed scientific theories, this “human-casued global warming” may turn out to be WRONG.
Controlling pollution rationally is always wise.
But panic is not.
(BTW- CO2 scrubbing technology exists, so that “problem” has already been solved. How many of the panic-istas have mentioned this technological fact? See: Carbon Sequestration & Klaus Lackner.)
profitsbeard on August 13, 2007 at 12:32 AM
This is all fine and good, but WHERE’S THE MSM COVERAGE OF THE OVERTURNED “HOTTEST YEARS ON RECORD” BS!?!?!?
This is infuriating! It’s bad enough when there’s a AP wire story that the liberal media choose not to pick up, and it only gets a few mentions on Fox and in the Wall Street Journal, maybe a tiny passing mention on CNN… but there IS NOTHING! Literally, outside of blogs, there is NOTHING on this! We’ve got one of the biggest “proofs”, quoted time and time again about the “hottest” years being almost all in the last decade being COMPLETELY overturned, where the hottest years are now:
5 of 10 are before friggin’ WWII!!!!!
Wow, I wasn’t aware that when my grandfather told me the other day that on the farm he grew up on north of Detroit, that when he talked about going down the long road (named after his family, that remains today) to go to the store, etc. via horse and buggy in the 20s and 30s, that he really meant that some time traveler had brought them a Hummer from the future… along with everyone else in the country. It was an SUV Emissionpalooza, apparently, in the early 1900s! Right? I mean “carbon emissions = warming”, so that can be the ONLY explanation. Not increased solar activity. Not the fact that the weather stations taking the readings are in parking lots and hot hot rooftops. It’s carbon, period. Consensus!!!!!
By the way, I’m not going to really take this far here… but I have to point out that we were told BY SCIENTISTS (and idiot enviros) that these “hottest years” were scientific facts. And we continue to hear that there is “consensus” on global warming (which anyone who’s paying attention knows is bullsh** anyway)… But think for a moment, all you evolutionists who say “it’s established science” and “consensus”, if there’s even a slight possibility that the wool is being pulled over your eyes. There are an infinite amount of assumptions, made based on the larger assumption of evolution, that have been flushed down the toilet… some of them HUGE, and there is a steady flow of small ones. Yet when something is proven to have not evolved the way they had been forced to assume, the “scientists” wave a magic wand and say “we discovered that it evolved differently (and/or faster, etc.)”. That’s not science, because they didn’t discover that something evolved at all… they simply proved their original assumption wrong, but because there is an overall assumption of evolution, they see a lack of evidence as evidence. It’s shameful, and unscientific.
/rant
Back to the point, I’m not shocked, but I am angry that there is a complete media blackout on this HUGE story… Even if you want to spin and try to insist that catastrophic man made global warming is occurring, if ANY media outlet expect to be trusted, they should report this. Even if they don’t think it’s HUGE as I do (I’ve said one of the largest stories of our generation), it still has to be reported, and it’s not. Not that most of your don’t already, but you should trust virtually NOTHING you’re told by the media unless you can see it for yourself. That’s the lesson learned by what is going on here. Again, they can downplay this and pretend it’s unimportant in the grand scheme, but no one can argue that this shouldn’t at least be reported.
RightWinged on August 13, 2007 at 4:57 AM
…Holy crap! After writing that last comment, and thinking about how NASA GISS had silently changed the temps on their “warmest years” data after the “oversight” was discovered, I figured I’d see if they’d decided to now do the honorable thing and post a headline on their site. I think ANYONE with an ounce of honesty would agree that they should at least have some mention of this story, which is huge for this group who specializes in this area, provided false numbers for a long time, and made a massive change just a few days ago. Guess what?
NOTHING!
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/
And the worst part is that in the main body of their page, the “News and Features”, the most recent piece was written in May, and is entitled… wait for it… Climate Approaches Dangerous “Tipping Point. These pieces of garbage. Your tax dollars at work my friends.
Incase you don’t click that link, here are the other stories listed on their main page (on the page they have infuriating alarmist summaries to entice you to click to read the entire articles):
Climate Change and Summer Heat Waves
Storms Power Saturn’s Jet Streams
The Color of Life, Here and Out There
Particulate Consequences
Global “Sunscreen” Has Likely Thinned
G.Projector Map Maker Released
Warmer Future Could Bring Droughts
2006 Was Earth’s Fifth Warmest Year
Modeling Carbon Monoxide
Really NASA GISS… all those stories, and you couldn’t even have the balls to note that things have changed a little? (and by “a little” I mean “a lot”)
Oh and here’s the best part (and by “best” I mean “worst”)
That second to last one, written in February entitled 2006 Was Earth’s Fifth Warmest Year is pumping the old bogus numbers:
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20070208/
Now you may ask yourself, “Wait… I thought 2006 was the Fourth warmest based on the new numbers?”. Well that’s true… but that’s because 2002, 2003, and 2005 all fell completely out of the top 10 list!!!
But does that matter to NASA GISS? Nope, they’re still liking this BOGUS article on their main page, with graphics and all showing “TOP 5 WARMEST YEARS WORLD WIDE SINCE THE 1890S” as 2005, 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006.
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20070208/
Now admittedly, they’re talking “worldwide” and I think the numbers that were changed were just the United States, but surely they impact the worldwide figures… and surely most of the reliable records from the distant past only existed in places like the United States and other advanced western countries (obviously not in the third or even second world countries)
But again, the overall point is there isn’t even a wire story out there if someone wanted to pick it up which is far beyond the media blackouts we’ve seen. Usually the story is at least available if you look hard enough. You can’t find this one unless you look at a dozen or so blogs. And surely it should be required that NASA GISS make an announcement and issue a press release, or at least put an F-ing link and write a paragraph on their web page!!!
RightWinged on August 13, 2007 at 5:16 AM
It was in Moosup, CT. The parade planners thought this might be the last year since the sponsors have been under pressure to stop supporting the event. It’s a nice event with good people with an appreciation for this country and the military. Amazing that celebrating the defeat of Imperial Japan has become an exercise in bad taste, racism and promoting the use of nuclear weapons. I would like to see the parade receive support from those of us that appreciate the sacrifice that was made to keep this country free back when we fought unconditional wars for keeps.
Hening on August 13, 2007 at 9:24 AM
No, the global-warming debate’s great un-mentionable is the fact that dissent of man-made global warming is crushed, even in the face of overwhealming evidence blowing it out of the water, to the point that there is no debate.
crazy_legs on August 13, 2007 at 11:36 AM