Castro
Project Censored PS
Peter Phillips of Project Censored has responded to my critique, in which I point out that the director of an entity nominally devoted to fighting censorship actually supports censorship, as long as it’s done in Cuba. You’ll find Phillip’s largely boilerplate response, which fails to engage any of the points I made, at the bottom of the original post. He
Herbert on Project Censored
While I’m on the subject of hypocrisy on censorship… I’m listening to There’s Me and There’s You, the forthcoming release by the Matthew Herbert Big Band. I like Herbert’s music; I’m intrigued by his process. His Chomskyite politics I can do without, although I agree with the statement on his album cover, which takes the form of a personnel list
“A soldier of ideas”
It’s nice to start the morning with a hearty good riddance to Fidel Castro, who declares in his resignation that “I only wish to fight as a soldier of ideas.” It was observed in passing on NPR this morning that in Castro’s Cuba, people are forbidden to have Internet connections in their homes. Soldier of ideas? No, Castro is a
A fair question
Darcy James Argue, quite unwittingly, has tied together my two previous posts in an interesting and morally serious way: He asks why Dudamel is getting heat from some for not forcefully opposing Chávez, while Gergiev (whose work I just happened to praise unreservedly) gets a free pass on his close ties to, and explicit political support for, the odious Vladimir
Cuba responds
It became clear last year that Cuba is governed as much by nepotism as by socialism. And while the Cuban state may block citizens’ access to U.S. media, its leadership certainly pays close attention. This statement by Raul Castro seems to allude to the question that touched off the Clinton-Obama foreign policy dispute, which I discussed here: If the new
Pinochet
In this disgraceful post, Jonah Goldberg of the National Review describes himself as “basically” a sympathizer of the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who died over the weekend. Hitchens reminds us that Pinochet ordered the car bombing of Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C. in September 1976. So, for Goldberg, a foreign leader who authorizes a terrorist attack on American soil