CNN’s Fareed Zakaria is back from purgatory. Zakaria had been exposed for the second-hander I’ve long claimed he was—and worse. Front-and-center tonight—opining on the final presidential debate at Boca Raton, Fla.—Zakaria was found to have plagiarized another journalist’s work: the New Yorker’s Jill Lepore.
What’s more, plagiarism is a pattern for Fareed. Dan Amira provides a Zakaria background check, and with it evidence that “… this isn’t even the first time that Zakaria has been accused of taking ownership of another writer’s work.
If you’d imagined that a pathetic excuse for a writer, as is Zakaria, would be run out of town for his transgression—you’d be wrong. You’d be making a dodgy presumption of standards—moral and other.
Despite a pattern of plagiarisms, Zakaria’s employers were content to merely suspend his column for a month. (Someone called Tunku Varadarajan accuses everyone baying for Fareed’s journalistic blood of envy.)
Zombie Zakaria joins another by now infamous CNN friend, Candy Crowley, who helped tilt last week’s presidential debate in BHO’s favor.
She’s a gorgeous girl. She’s also stabler than her late mother-in-law (which, I guess, is not saying much, considering that the dodo Diana was a manipulative neurotic, given to histrionics).
In any event, Kate Middleton, aka The Duchess of Cambridge, will get over the fact that images of her bare breasts and bum are already in circulation, snapped in order to feed the voyeuristic fetish of the average consumer.
Certainly demand-driven, unethical, ugly and maybe even immoral: Hounding this girl wherever she goes is all of the above. But surely only trespassing on private property renders the action of the offending photographer illicit in natural law?!
Was the photographer trespassing on private property? No report seems to specify. “Invasion of privacy” laws seem to belong to a broadly defined area of law, one that has little to do with the always unmentionable rights of private property.
…the Republican National Convention did provide Americans with extraordinarily important information about Mitt Romney and the sort of leader he is likely to be …he is also a rules lawyer who is more than willing to smash the spirit of the game while rewriting its rules any time it appears to suit his interests. From keeping important party figures such as Ron Paul and Sarah Palin off the podium to refusing to recognize the duly-elected delegates from Maine, from changing the party rules on the fly to indulging in a Soviet-style vote count in which only votes for Romney were reported, it is clear that Mitt Romney is even more inclined toward authoritarian rule than Barack Obama has ever shown himself to be.
The problem with assertions made above in “Romney’s Fair Warning,” by Vox Day, my WND colleague, is that they are … assertions, in which Day skips a crucial step. This step would involve showing that Mitt Romney and the Republican National Committee are one and the same thing, and that the candidate is involved in the bureaucratic machinations of the party executive.
This is quite possible, but unproven in the column; Day has been too quick to collapse the distinction, at least in so far as administrative matters go, between the purview of the Republican Party politburo and that of the candidate.
I mean, did the candidates running at the time have a hand in what the National Republican Senatorial Committee did to Christine O’Donnell?
Again, it is quite possible that Mitt Romney agreed with party leadership’sdecision to bar the most controversial speakers from the 2012 RNC. But it is unclear that Romney was behind it. Assertions absent proof don’t cut it in journalism.
It is clearly untrue to say that a paleolibertarian is one who always opposes a woman’s absolute dominion over her body, as a poster on Wendy McElroy’s Facebook Wall has implied.
Abortion is one hill I do not care to die on; I’ve committed enough professional Seppuku over the years. However, I have repeatedly stated that, for a classical liberal (at least), “it’s [highly] problematic to say that by virtue of her fertility, a woman loses a title in her body.”
Otherwise, here is Wendy’s brilliant articulation of self-ownership. Watch Wendy on Stossel’s, 7:28 minutes in:
Wendy McElroy: As far as I’m concerned, this is my skin. Everything beneath this skin belongs to me, or I don’t own anything. I am a self-owner-
John Stossel: Even if there is a living being inside you?
Wendy McElroy: If there is a living being inside me, I’m glad you used the word “being” and not “individual with rights,” if there is a living being inside me, it exists on my breath, it exists by my, the blood pumping through my veins, by the food I eat. It is within my skin, and if you say to me that there, that I do not have jurisdiction over my body, that, in fact, society or someone else has jurisdiction, the, the word that describes someone else owning my body is slavery.*
UPDATE I: Glad people have remained civil on Facebook, so far. That’s the way. Always. However much one disdains the procedure, you can’t get away from the fact of self-ownership. You have no right to take custody of another person’s body. They either own themselves or don’t.
You can’t “own” your body in conjunction with other busybodies.
Your tortured analogy, MW, does not hold or even come close. Any reasoning about this fraught topic must proceed, at the very least, from a correct analogy. This is why this debate cannot proceed from logic. People lose their logic (or perhaps they never had the ability to reason to begin with) when it comes to abortion. Enough, now folks. The most honest position the anti-a-woman’s-right-in-her-body proponents can advance is this: a woman, by virtue of her biology, does not have total title in her body. As a propertarian, I find this position untenable, but agree that individuals who hold it will try to finesse it. So this is the final word. “Respek,” as Ali Gi would say.
JV: This is what I mean by a lack of reasoning faculties on the topic, and plain dissembling. What irks here is not only that I said, “enough,” and this is my Wall. But that you, JV, frame your “distinguishing” argument” as exhaustive. The initiation of force is most certainly not the only distinguishing feature between the mother and the fetus. (Unrelated: there is a prerequisite for Facebook Friendship.)
UPDATE III (1/1/021):
Libertarians view women as having dominion over their bodies! My comment, then, is on the cultural specter of females freed from men, morality and tradition: how quickly they turn into diabolical libertines. Most women need traditional strictures to balance exhibitionism and promiscuity.
NEW – Argentina becomes the first country in Latin America to legalize abortion after a landmark vote.pic.twitter.com/obFbMJrLiv
You're libertarian, @WayneWs40. You distinguish the illegal from the immoral. Lib women should feel free to scrape their wombs, over which they certainly have dominion–but not on the public dime. #Abortionhttps://t.co/HHZlhur4i3
CNN’s Fareed Zakaria is back from purgatory. Zakaria had been exposed for the second-hander I’ve long claimed he was—and worse. Front-and-center tonight—opining on the final presidential debate at Boca Raton, Fla.—Zakaria was found to have plagiarized another journalist’s work: the New Yorker’s Jill Lepore.