Compare and contrast these two takes on my “Sexing the Sharia” post—the first, from the Moderate Voice’s David Schraub, who argues that “it doesn’t even come from an honest effort to find truth”; the second, from Boston Globe and Reason columnist Cathy Young (who, to my shame, I wasn’t aware had a blog), who sees things a bit differently.
My own take is that Schraub, in his rush to show how clever he is (“it played out exactly how I predicted it would–conservatives take a reasonable liberal post, distort it so it ‘blames America first,’ proclaim it to be the epitome of liberal thought, and conclude with a lament that all the moderate liberals who don’t engage in this type of thinking are gone”), completely misreads the post, and from that initial misstep fashions the very kind of presumptuous cartoon analysis he thinks he’s deconstructing.
My post, you’ll recall, highlighted the problems certains readers have with a particular type of rhetorical presentation that “feels the need to establish its bona fides with knee jerk self-criticism before it can dare criticize others / Others.” Specifically, I noted that “comparingâ€â€even obliquelyâ€â€the situation of women in Saudi Arabia to that of women here, causes many people in the center and on the right (and probably a few pragmatic Dems, too) to tune out.”
Does such a characterization “distort” Jill’s post “so it ‘blames America first’”? Does it “proclaim it to be the epitome of liberal thought, and conclude with a lament that all the moderate liberals who don’t engage in this type of thinking are gone?”
Hardly.
But then, I suppose that’s because David Schraub’s post “doesn’t even come from an honest effort to find truth”…
****
update: Schraub responds and misses the mark again. I offer some corrections in the comments to his post.
Look on the bright side, Jeff. Being misrepresented means that you’re being listened to and some don’t like that. You’re making a difference.
Hmmmm.
1. I’m amazed that David didn’t get the movie quote. It’s only one of the most famous sci-fi movie quotes around.
2. I agree with you Jeff. Whenever I read a post or an article by a liberal, as soon as I see that “but here in America …” I just turn the page and move onto something more interesting.
If the purpose of said article was to just create literary noise, then it’s successful. If it’s to educate, inform or alter opinions, then it’s an abject failure.
I think it means that he likies the Goldstein.
Yeah but Jeff, they’re moderate over there, not extremists like you so they can distort what you say,build lovely strawmen like this
In other words, it was exactly the approach the right says the left never takes.
and just generally bash the right.
BECAUSE OF THE MODERATION!!!!!!
I think the point that John C. made over at Feministe is quite valid, and an accurate description of the conservative position. It is uncommon for a liberal article to critisize anyone without at least adding a token critisism of America, or some part of American culture.
I’m not sure where Mr. Shraub got the “blame America first” quote, but I would say that it is not the conservative view of things, or at least not mine. Liberals don’t have to blame America first, but they do seem to have to blame America somewhere. A scan of dailykos on any day will quickly prove my point.
Tried to post over at the moderate voice, but you have to log in or something :(
So it’s hypocritical to not complement folks for not using cheap rhetorical tricks.
Hey Goldstein, nice job of not using a strawman on this post. I’m sure there are some other bullshit tricks you could have tried, I’m only on my second cup of coffee though so forgive me if I can’t come up with more.
Speaking of Feministe, they are still keeping absolutely silent about the hundreds of posts Jeff has done without using the word “bimbo”. HYPOCRITES!
Veil of ignorance? How culturally insensitive!
How about Burqua of Ignorance instead?
I’d post this at the moderate voice, but I don’t feel like registering.
In his post, as evidence, he cites:
#1 – Note that he didn’t cite an earlier post. Isn’t it a logical possible inference that the feministes might have taken a public admonition (from Jeff, etc) about liberals tending to “swipe America” in otherwise unrelated arguments into account while writing a post – the very next day? That this public admonition might have influenced the subsequent post, subsconsciously, consciously and earnestly or even cynically? I wouldn’t assert that this is the case, but it’s certainly within the realm of possibility.
#2 – Shraub’s “evidence” also relies on the idea that Jeff , John Cole and other conservatives that read feministe are responsible for commenting on multiple posts, and subsequent posts that may contradict (by mere implication) a previously criticized narrative. Of course, this is not a reasonable standard.
#3 – Seeing as Jeff’s commentary was more specifically focused on another indivual’s nasty assault on Karol from Alarming News’s critique of the feministe piece, Shraub completely misrepresents the main target and full contextual nature of Jeff’s argument.
Which is ironic, when you think about it, because while Shraub is accusing Jeff of not making “an honest effort to find truth” within a macro context (implying the not entirely reasonable blogging standard that conservative critics’ failure to note multiple posts is contextually dishonest) – he displays his own failed “”an honest effort to find truth” within a much more attainable micro context – by misrepresenting the nature of the specific post that he criticizes.
Which leads me to believe that Shraub either has poor reading comprehension skill, has an ax to grind with Jeff, or both.
I don’t know what the rest of you guys are talking about but this, Chris Clarke’s biography, is pretty damned funny. (Is he intending to be funny?) Here’s an excerpt:
I apologize, disingenuously, for lowering the level of discourse.
Womanized excessively.
Hmmmmm, and now he hangs out at Feministe … coincidence?
TW “possible”, as in “I suppose it is”.
On the Aliens quote:
It’s been said that no one ever died of embarrassment, but this…this is going to leave a scar.
Mr. Schraub states in the second paragraph of his post:
It’s not true of course–the examples they give (when they’re even accurate, more on that later) are the anomalies, and the rule is that Democrats are well aware that our country is, compared to most, a beacon of liberty and civil rights. <b>They just don’t labor under the illusion that a favorable comparison to Saudi Arabia makes us perfect.<b> (emphasis mine)
Unlike us conservatives, for whom it is always a Morning in America where the sun always shines and the apple pies always warm.
911? Yeah, there’s a screaming convention going on in the apartment next door and I think I just heard a gunshot as well. The guy is one mean honcho—kicked my dog the other day—and his wife is just a wisp of a thing. I suggest you get over here right away. Oh, before you hang up, thought you might want to know my husband has real anger management issues—even hit me once, but only once—but is getting the counseling and treatment that he needs. What? Why –? Oh no, there’s not need to come to our apartment as well. That’s not what I meant at all. Really. Seriously.
Let’s go back to basics for a second.
Jill wrote about spousal abuse in Saudi Arabia, then ended the entire post with this sentence:
Note that she didn’t further define the ‘cultural ills’ she speaks of, she explictly stated that what’s wrong with Saudi Arabia is also wrong with the US.
When confronted in her comments and in Jeff’s other posts about differences between these two countries in laws, in societal norms, and in nearly every other measure or attitude, she retreated to: ”Nowhere did I say that Saudi treatment of women is on par with treatment of women in the U.S. I was simply saying, as Lauren more eloquently put it, “I don’t see anything wrong with trying to keep our own house in order while helping another with theirs.†”
Now go read the quote above again and tell me how her new explanation can be teased out of what was originally written.
Violence against women is wrong in all forms and I agree with vitually everything else Jill wrote in that post. But for David to assert that we’re misreading what was written, which clearly and completely equates both societies…? Maybe Jill used an unfortunate combination of words, but what she wrote has a clear meaning that cannot be read any other way.
BLT–
Not only does she equate the two societies (as you stated), she makes the outrageous claim that to NOT equate them is “dangerous”.
It isn’t much of a patriarchy when the police arrest, and the courts convict, a man for violence against women.
Is it?
Word: getting. “Getting it is hard if you don’t remove your ideological blindrs.”
Huh. I hadn’t thought of that. You’re right, it is within the realm of possibility, but for the record I wasn’t thinking about any of that when I wrote the post about abortion in Colombia.
Wow I’m getting tired of explaining this. In the paragraph before, I quoted Baz, and referenced patriarchy-blamed. The cultural ills I was referring to? Misogyny. Yes, it’s a much more extreme breed in Saudi Arabia and it directly influences laws, customs, etc. But I did not say that our societies were identical. Saying “we have shared cultural ills” does not translate into “we are exactly the same.”
And with that, I hope to not have to repeat myself for the 100th time.
Maybe if you could have woven that kind of thought into your closing sentence, (you know, a little contrast to go with your comparison) we wouldn’t be having such trouble understanding. Because nothing in that last sentence hints that there is any difference in cultural ills that exist in both societies. Your choice of the word “dangerous” certainly underscores that.
Jill, you said that it was dangerous not to equate Saudi Arabia’s cultural ills with America’s cultural ills.
Perhaps you won’t have to explain yourself a 101st time if you admit even once that you were wrong the first time.
Because nothing in that last sentence hints that there is any difference in cultural ills that exist in both societies. Your choice of the word “dangerous†certainly underscores that.
Jill sez:
Jeff sez:
Jill sez:
Jill left out the “Although B is an extreme example”. Nice of you to include it for her.
That’s not what Jeff sez, CJ.
When you started off posting here, I thought you were sanctimonious, but that for the most part at least you pretended honesty. Now you’re just another preening moron cluttering my comments with your dissembling.
Jill left out the “Although B is an extreme exampleâ€Â.
So the entire post up to that point was…?
When you started off posting here, I thought you were sanctimonious, but that for the most part at least you pretended honesty.
You do like that word “sanctimonious”, don’t you? But you should mix it up a little – slip in an occasional “holier-than-thou”, “self-rigtheous”, or “preachy”, just for variety’s sake.
Also, if you think someone’s operating in good faith, responding to his comments with complete dismissal and/or mockery is probably not the best way to indicate that you’re interested in substantive debate.
Now you’re just another preening moron cluttering my comments with your dissembling.
“Preening” is a good one. No complaints there. And right on target, as well – I was literally batting my eyelashes and puckering my lips as I wrote that comment. But “dissembling”? Come on. I’ve never made any bones about being a liberal. I think you make some good points, and as I’ve said in the past, I have been convinced by a number of your arguments (that blame for the Katrina response should have been apportioned substantially more to the local governments than FEMA being the latest example). But you are so unremittingly hostile to the left that I can’t help but disagree with you sharply on a lot of other points. In this case, I simply don’t accept your overriding contention that a tendency to be self-critical and reflective is the same as being reflexively self-critical to the point of losing all perspective.
I’m not sure how that counts as “dissembling”.
A more appropriate comparison:
Let A = bad eating habits
Let B = Jeffrey Dahmer’s homicidal, cannibalistic acts
Here’s a story about a kid who B’ed and got in trouble. Although B is an extreme example, we should not forget that children need to be taught not to A.
Jill, I don’t want you to have to repeat yourself another time; I’m sure it’s beyond tiresome. Since this is an important topic, both in terms of misogyny and of how we express ideas in written language, I would like to point out what I see as the potential sticking point in your last sentence. Again, you said:
You’ve narrowed ‘the cultural ills’ to mean misogyny, so we could then rewrite your sentence:
At first that sounds somewhat more reasonable to me, since to claim we in the US share in common with S.A. ‘the cultural ills’ that harm women is a very broad charge. I personally see ‘the cultural ills’ of Saudi Arabia is being vast in number and in scope. If we’re now defining that down to a general term like misogyny, it’s somewhat more reasonable sounding. And there’s no doubt that the evil of misogyny exists in the US and pretty much every everywhere, unfortunately.
But then we’re back to defining what we mean by misogyny since that’s a general evil than can take many forms. Forms such as stoning for adultery, female circumcision, and honor killings, none of which are legally practiced in the U.S. And so we come full circle back to equating an extreme form of violence/misogyny in one country to how women are treated in the US, with no other qualifiers.
You need not re-address the issue again for the 101st time: you’ve clarified your point in the comments both on your blog and here, but the original post reads as though you were fully equating ‘cultural ills’/misogyny between the Kingdom and the US and that’s what bothered me and flawed your post in my eyes. Sorry to trouble you.
How about we let
A= beating up your wife in America, and getting arrested, thrown in jail and scorned by your neighbors and family, and
B= beating up your wife in Saudi Arabia and getting respected by your neighbors as a good and caring husband.
and then saying the cultures are comparable.
This is the problem I have with the whole premise. If you are the person getting beaten, obviously it matters not where or who is doing it, but Jill insisting on equating the two cultures is what upsets me. I really don’t see the ingrained misogyny in the American culture she alludes to.
I think that would be the horror movies she mentioned in the other thread.
America makes Friday the 13th movies!!
Down with the machete wielding, hockey mask wearing zombie slasher of patriarchy!!!
or something….
tw: indeed heh
Well, Jeff, I think your first mistake was caring what Feministe “thinks” in the first place.
But that’s just me. A brutal, vicious male oppressor.
Mojo, we are two people. Stop oppressing me—it hurts.
I think this is an interesting debate, because it brings up issues that Jeff’s returned to frequently.
Like it or not, any kind of communication between two people is a collaboration between the speaker and the recipient.
I was once drinking a coffee sweetened with a piece of chocolate, opened Tolland’s bio of Hitler, read a passage about Hitler “drinking coffee sweetened with chocolate,” and immediately coughed my drink up. To this day I can’t think of coffee with chocolate without feeling nauseated.
Tolland never intended to deliver a message “Chocolate in coffee is bad,” but I still “got” that message. It wasn’t Tolland’s fault or intention; the “failure” there is clearly mine—I imposed meaning on the anecdote.
On the other hand, there’s another class of “failures” where the writer failed to get his or her point across. This is “bad writing.”
It is absolutely crystal-clear that Jill did not mean to say that the US is as misogynistic as Saudi Arabia. However, her original post can be read that way. Don’t even pretend it can’t—dropping it into the last paragraph, the use of the word “dangerous”—it’s a reasonable reading.
Personally, I suspect (but cannot prove) that if her first reply had been something along the lines of “Wow, did I screw that up! What I meant to say was…” then this wouldn’t have gone on so long.
Ok. This really is the last word.
I understand how my original post could be read as making a direct comparison between Saudi Arabia and the United States. To say that I ignored that is ridiculous; I addressed it here and here, right at the top of the comments on the post. When a commenter noted the same things that you’ve all said, I responded with, “Yeah, that’s a great point, and an important one. We’re definitely on the same page with this one. Thanks for your response, Jon, you definitely targeted a lot of things I overlooked.”
I have no idea why this has gone on so long, but it isn’t for lack of me explaining myself and saying that I hear where you’re all coming from.
Read what I actually wrote, and what it was responding to. Someone asked how I thought we could end domestic violence in the United States. I responded with a few suggestions, one of which was collectively weeding out those things which blend sex and violence. There are many, many such examples. I used horror movies not because it’s the best one, or anywhere near the most important, but because it’s one which is easily accessible to most people. It’s pretty extreme to interpret that as me saying horror movies are the highest form of patriarchal oppression.
I do see what you’re saying, but come on… the rest of the post was a pretty huge qualifier.
Jill—you “addressed it” by describing another domestic violence case in the United States. You state that you don’t want people to forget these things happen in the US as well—but can you point to someone who claims there is no problem with domestic violence in the US?
Jill,
Yeah, this thread is wearing out fast.
But let me be the first to say “Salud!” to you for coming in here to duke it out. Not many liberal bloggers would dare to do that.
My question to you is, how do you manage to be a liberal but seem to lack the rage that appears to drive most of the liberals I come in contact with? I usually can’t even say the word “Bush” without winding up with spittle on my face in lieu of a coherent conversation.
Anyway, I’ll be keeping an eye open on your blog from now on. I am always interested in what is going on to the left of me, but it seems that what I mostly find over there is knumbing dementia. If you ARE demented, you are pleasantly so…
A) Althought I agree with Jeff, mostly, most of us hopefully have enough grey matter to spot and identify the error in comparing SA and US. Jill did. Updating the post would’ve been nice, but so would reading what Jill had to say in comments. Maybe that’s just me, though. Clear to me; not so clear to others.
B) Jill and Lauren are both attractive, not-stupid young ladies, and as such I’m inclined to give them a break in the tightly-packaged rhetoric department. I fully admit that this could stem from bred-in paternalistic shemshwa, shemshwa meaning whatever the hell you want it to mean. I’m enjoying a double of Balvenie Doublewood; gimme a fargan break. Plus, both of them have shown more than adequate composure in the face of criticism, which in my book counts for quite a bit. I could aspire to that, maybe.
C) There is no C.
My post had very little to do with Jill. She’s the hot one, after all.
Oh. And Jill?
I forgot.
I agree with Jeff. A great post until the last paragraph. Although “misogyny” applies to the K.S.A. AND the USA, mentioning them in the same breath demeans the real meaning and seriousness of both types. They are two different animals, and everybody (except the afore-mentiond “demented”) knows it.
Not to mention that if the US is still so misogynistic that it can be mentioned in the same breath with Saudi Arabia, it would seem that we don’t have much of anything to thank the feminists for after all.
Well Paul, you can thank the feminists for 1.29 million abortions a year in the United States, the equivalent of a September 11th every single day of the year.
All-purpose liberal argument template: “Conservatives would take us back to the dark days of the past! Not that things are any better now, mind you.”
Uhh, my point was that it was a pretty bogus example—I’m not sure but it sounds like you agree (more or less).
Just out of curiosity, in your opinion, what is the best and most important example?
How many abortions do you think there’d be with no feminists, Ed?
I know this conversation has been going on way too long, but do check out my reply to David in this update on my post.
Slartibartfast: That’s a great question, one which I had not considered and one to which I don’t know the answer.
So I went to Google, and found this page that gives statistics starting in 1972. Those statistics indicate a doubling of the number of abortions between 1972 and 1980, and a fairly constant number since then.
This graph indicates that 5 years prior to Roe v. Wade, abortion was statistically insignificant.
I cannot speak to the accuracy of these statistics, but they are from the top ten results on Google for the search terms abortion+statistics+United+States.
The graph (derived from these statistics) indicates that abortions were extremely rare prior to the second world war, rare from 1943 to 1968, and that the number skyrocketed between 1968 and 1980.
So if the statistics are accurate, the short answer to the question of how many abortions there would be without feminists is “almost none”.
So if the statistics are accurate, the short answer to the question of how many abortions there would be without feminists is “almost noneâ€Â.
Modify that to “statistically tracked abortions” and you’ll have it right. Without legal abortion services, people will still have them in numerous ways without medical regulations.
Exactly. And before you try and argue that feminism or legalization or liberalism = higher abortion rates, I’d encourage you to consider the fact that Brazil has an abortion rate higher than ours, and the procedure is illegal there. By contrast, abortion is fully legal and free in the Netherlands, and they have the lowest abortion rate in the world (or perhaps second-lowest after Belgium, I’m too lazy to look it up right now—although Belgium has similar policies).
As for abortion having been insignificant before feminism, consider that abortion tools were found in the ruins in Pompeii, and abortion procedures are cited in some of the earliest medical textbooks. Feminists certainly didn’t invent it.
…sorry for de-railing the thread.
De-railing the thread, Jill? As I recall, the thread was about you saying something ridiculous, and ridiculing you for it. Consider the abortion topic this has morphed into as further ridicule of you for your “Challenging Colombia’s Restrictive Abortion Laws” post.
Wow, Ed, you really are an ass.
And as Jeff himself has explained several times, the original post wasn’t to “ridicule” me. It was criticizing what I said, to be sure, but most grown-ups can reasonably disagree and discuss the issues involved. For the most part, the level of conversation here and at Feministe has been civil (there are, of course, exceptions—you come to mind).
And the thread does get de-railed when it was about violence against women and cultural relativism and you come into it screamin’ about how the evil feminists invented abortion. I’m just sorry I bothered engaging you in the first place. I’m sure you’ll take greater pleasure in having the last word than I will, so consider my end of this conversation finished.
Jill, there never is a last word. And if you don’t see how equating entrenched-in-law violence against women in Saudi Arabia with unfortunate-and-against-the-law violence against women in the United States is ridiculous, then you haven’t been paying attention to this entire thread.
You think that I’m an ass? I think that you are an apologist for murder. Men in Saudi Arabia who beat their wives are the same as men in America, but women in America murdering their own babies is OK?
Time to recalibrate your moral compass, Jill.