Well, there is common ground after all!

1. He is nominally Canadian and speaks with a British accent;
2. He loathes The People’s Dominion;
3. He is unable to exercise his vocation in the People’s Dominion because his skills are not economically marketable and Mr. Steyn’s requirements cannot be met with the resources available to the People’s Welfare System, which are considerably less plentiful than those available in The Southern Republic.

We will however concede that we did not intervene forcefully enough at an earlier stage of his development and direct the resources of The People’s Health Care System (padded rooms, wet sheets and ECT) necessary to arrest the further development of psychopathic tendencies, the consequences of which are now being inflicted on the polity of The Republic. In The People’s defense, Mr. Steyn was at the time incarcerated in an institution (King Edward’s School, Birmingham, England), where he was subjected to a brutal regimen of “games,” cross-dressing and an obscure practice of ritual humiliation known as “tossing off,” and was therefore outside The People’s jurisdiction.

That is all. Vive le Dominion!

You mean you have to put up with him too?

As a Canadian, I humbly apologize for inflicting Mark Steyn on you folks south of the border – but better you than us. I don’t suppose you’d be willing to take Adam Yoshida as well?

I think the essential problem is, those of us who actually believe in freedom of speech are basically bringing a knife to a gunfight (unfortunately, without a hidden tommygunner waiting in ambush, either). We can heap much merited derision and scorn on the likes of Steyn, but ultimately, we must grudgingly respect his right to spread his toxic bullshit, because, well, that’s what we believe in.

I have wanted to come back to this comment since it was first posted, and I just haven’t been able to. Of late, I’ve been too busy coughing up more green, slimy stuff than is usually seen outside of an Aliens movie. It’s pretty annoying. I hate colds.

Much as I may love you, Doc, I gotta disagree here. Tolerance in NO WAY implies a need to be tolerant of the intolerant. In fact, it pretty much neccessitates the opposite.

Chris Hedges, who wrote American Fascists – which is really something everyone should be reading – opens his book with a quote from Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies, which I will place here in full. Popper said it better than I could.

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed and tolerance with them. We should therefore claim in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.

Michael Bérubé had something similar in his latest book, which I left out in my car so I can’t quote exactly – hope he forgives me if I screw it up too badly. But the essence of it was that if you encounter a person who meets your attempts at dialogue with shouts about how you are an evil person who must be put to death, then there can be at that point no dialogue with such a person. Dialogue requires the recognition of the basic humanity of both individuals attempting to dialogue, and if one party fails to concede this point, attempting dialogue with them is about as sensible as attempting it with a grizzly bear.

So, no, we really don’t have to tolerate their intolerance. I’ll concede their right to say intolerant things to a point, much as I concede the right of the KKK to exist. But when they act on their words, and when the words serve to encite further action that is intolerable in a civilized society, then steps must be taken to stop them. And the funny thing is that we even have plenty of legal channels open for stopping this kind of crap.

The only problem is that we’ve let those legal channels be taken over by people who think that dehumanizing people who think like us is okay.

So, we’re sorta screwed right now.

I’m sure he’d be shocked, shocked, I tell you, to discover that Julius Caesar was notorious for fucking everything in sight, male or female — his men used to boast about it. I’d love to see what’d be left of Steyn after Big Julie got finished ass-raping him.

I guess it’s the part about liberating people so that we can fight them. I really don’t get that, sorry.

Maybe you should be more thoughtful in your use of pronouns if you want to be understood. Is English your first language or what?

“ignorance is bliss.”

What part of “We’re liberating the people of Iraq so that we can fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here” don’t you understand?

What time is it. Mark Steyn?
Is that a cold sore Mark Steyn?
Liebe meine aufsminke! Mark Steyn.

I think they thought it would be a lesbo flick, then moved on………

I turned to look at the school secretary and I can’t imagine the look on my face. She said “what’s wrong?” and I replied “Do you know what happened there? Have you seen the pictures?” She frowned and me and said “well, we’re at war you know, and bad things happen to bad people in wars”. Then went about her typing.

We’re fucking doomed. Doomed.

an old one, but one of the best steyn slams out there

Jeebus, that’s like thinking you can lecture on business management because you’ve read Lee Iacocca’s book.

So, they’re genocide cheerleaders. Genocide wannabes. War crimes policy wonks. Something. Anybody?

mikey

If they’re talking about the part where the car goes off the cliff, then I think HH and MS may have missed the T & L moment when it occurred.

I want him to be FORCED to explain how fighting wars, invading nations, occupying nations, threatening nations, killing people, destroying infrastructure, making refugees, causing disease and wrecking an entire generation of American kids is doing any good.

Silly mikey.

None of the bad things are happening to him, personally, or anyone he gives a rat’s ass about, and it’s all so EXCITING!

No one ever paid this much attention to him when he was a mere theatre critic! He’s on the radio and the teevee and in syndicated columns and even books!

And then, there’s the money! And the meeting ‘important’ people! And the being part of Teh Greatest Clash of Civilizations EVAR! And the feeling like he’s Churchill and/or Coolidge (WTF?)!

And the being treated like he’s an actual, rational human being, and not the fucking amoral genocidal maniac we all know he is.