M
mlchance
Guest
From The Boston Globe:
It rocketed across the Internet a week ago, a startling newspaper report that agents from the US Department of Homeland Security had visited a student at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth at his New Bedford home simply because he had tried to borrow Mao Tse-Tung’s ''Little Red Book" for a history seminar on totalitarian goverments.
The story, first reported in last Saturday’s New Bedford Standard-Times, was picked up by other news organizations, prompted diatribes on left-wing and right-wing blogs, and even turned up in an op-ed piece written by Senator Edward M. Kennedy in the Globe.
But yesterday, the student confessed that he had made it up after being confronted by the professor who had repeated the story to a Standard-Times reporter.
The new era of “fake but accurate” inaugurated by Dan Rather continues. Senator Kennedy wrote in his op-ed: ''Incredibly, we are now in an era where reading a controversial book may be evidence of a link to terrorist." Of course, the incident to which Senator Kennedy refers never happened, but that’s not relevant, as Laura Capps, a Kennedy spokeswoman, explained.
According to Capps, Senator Kennedy cited ''public reports" in his opinion piece. Even if the assertion was a hoax, she said, it did not detract from Kennedy’s broader point that the Bush administration has gone too far in engaging in surveillance.
As Robert Heinlein noted in 1953:
I found in traveling around the world that a great many people . . ., apparently well educated and sophisticated, were convinced that the people of the United States were in the grip of terror and that free speech and free press no longer existed here. They believed that the United States was fomenting a third world war and would presently start it, with Armageddon consequences for everyone else, and that the government of the United States smashed without mercy anyone who dared to oppose even by oral protests this headlong rush toward disaster.
These people could “prove” their opinions by quoting any number of Americans and American newspapers and magazines. That they were able to quote such American sources proved just the opposite, namely that we do continue to enjoy free speech even to express arrant nonsense and unpopular opinion, escaped them completely.
– Mark L. Chance.
It rocketed across the Internet a week ago, a startling newspaper report that agents from the US Department of Homeland Security had visited a student at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth at his New Bedford home simply because he had tried to borrow Mao Tse-Tung’s ''Little Red Book" for a history seminar on totalitarian goverments.
The story, first reported in last Saturday’s New Bedford Standard-Times, was picked up by other news organizations, prompted diatribes on left-wing and right-wing blogs, and even turned up in an op-ed piece written by Senator Edward M. Kennedy in the Globe.
But yesterday, the student confessed that he had made it up after being confronted by the professor who had repeated the story to a Standard-Times reporter.
The new era of “fake but accurate” inaugurated by Dan Rather continues. Senator Kennedy wrote in his op-ed: ''Incredibly, we are now in an era where reading a controversial book may be evidence of a link to terrorist." Of course, the incident to which Senator Kennedy refers never happened, but that’s not relevant, as Laura Capps, a Kennedy spokeswoman, explained.
According to Capps, Senator Kennedy cited ''public reports" in his opinion piece. Even if the assertion was a hoax, she said, it did not detract from Kennedy’s broader point that the Bush administration has gone too far in engaging in surveillance.
As Robert Heinlein noted in 1953:
I found in traveling around the world that a great many people . . ., apparently well educated and sophisticated, were convinced that the people of the United States were in the grip of terror and that free speech and free press no longer existed here. They believed that the United States was fomenting a third world war and would presently start it, with Armageddon consequences for everyone else, and that the government of the United States smashed without mercy anyone who dared to oppose even by oral protests this headlong rush toward disaster.
These people could “prove” their opinions by quoting any number of Americans and American newspapers and magazines. That they were able to quote such American sources proved just the opposite, namely that we do continue to enjoy free speech even to express arrant nonsense and unpopular opinion, escaped them completely.
– Mark L. Chance.