The big—and sad—news yesterday was that the novelist Salman Rushdie was stabbed on stage at an event at the Chautauqua Institution in southwestern New York:
Eyewitness reports said that a man wearing a black mask rushed onstage and began to attack Rushdie as he was sitting on the stage. Paula Voell, a retired journalist, told the Buffalo News that it was quickly apparent that an assault had taken place.
“We saw the man race a few steps across the stage and there was horror – the whole audience reacted, and probably 15 spectators raced on to the stage to try to attend to him, or so it seemed,” she said.
Phone footage captured moments after the attack shows audience members scrambling on to the stage to help. Gasps are heard around the auditorium as members of the public immediately evacuate the space.
He was rushed to the hospital, placed on a ventilator and underwent surgery. He will likely lose an eye, his agent Andrew Wylie said: “Salman will likely lose one eye; the nerves in his arm were severed; and his liver was stabbed and damaged.”
The attacker has been identified as 24-year-old Hadi Matar. Joshua Goodman, who just happened to be at the event while he was on vacation with his family, writes for NBC New York that:
State Police Maj. Eugene Staniszewski said the motive for the stabbing was unclear. A preliminary law enforcement review of Matar's social media accounts shows he is sympathetic to Shia extremism and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps causes, a law enforcement person with direct knowledge of the investigation told NBC News.
Well, I understand why the police need to say the motive is unclear, but it doesn’t take a genius to guess that Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Rushdie for his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses played a role. Douglas Murray argues in The Spectator that the “best response” to the stabbing is to read the novel.
Charles C. W. Cooke writes that you either support free speech or you don’t and tells his readers to “Pick a side”:
I don’t care why the person who stabbed Rushdie thought he needed to be punished for his writing. I don’t care why the men who attacked Charlie Hebdo felt upset with that magazine. I don’t care why the British government is trying to add yet more censorship powers to its already bulging stack. I don’t care why Charlie Kirk thinks he’s found the one true exception to the First Amendment. I don’t care why the wokesters believe they can remedy structural inequality with Red Ink. I don’t care. Pick a side.
I think free speech is important, and I get why Cooke feels the way he does, but I don’t think statements like this are very useful. I’ve never met anyone who is completely against free speech or completely for it in every situation. All speech is regulated to some degree; what matters is which speech and why.
Anyway, for now I just hope Rushdie recovers without further serious complications and justice is done.
Nobody’s playing video games on Netflix. Yes, Netflix has games: “It’s been nearly two years since Netflix began its big push into gaming, and the streaming giant’s presence as a household name isn’t quite translating. According to recent findings from analytics company Apptopia, 99 percent of the service’s users have never touched a single video game on the platform. If you’ve played any of their titles, congratulations: You are the one percent.”
I write about Bruce Lee in The Washington Examiner: “When Bruce Lee died mysteriously in 1973, he was on the cusp of becoming the first international Chinese film star.”
Is the Internet a disease? Ryan Kemp reviews Justin E.H. Smith’s The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: “The problem is straightforward: The Internet as we know and use it in our daily lives (the realm of Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc.) significantly limits our capacity for freedom in all the various and complex senses of the term. We might think about the proliferation of action-constraining algorithms and ubiquitous surveillance. Smith, a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris, admits that these things undermine our well-being, but he focuses instead on the so-called crisis of attention: the idea that the Internet is ferociously adept at cultivating distraction.” I’m not so sure, but read the review yourself.
The new Emily Brontë biopic is going to be terrible: “It will not be entirely true to the life of its subject, which the trailer reminds us—in looming hot pink text—was a REBEL and a MISFIT and a GENIUS, not least because it blesses her with a historically inaccurate love affair.”
In praise of leftovers: “I have worked in restaurants, lived on sustenance homesteads, volunteered for aquaponics and permaculture farms, and harvested at food forests from Hawaii to Texas. I invariably come home with a crate of spare cuttings and leftovers that no one else wants. My pockets are often full of uneaten complimentary bread. This is possible because I live in a country where 30 to 40 percent of food produced is never eaten, where the average family throws out $1,500 worth of food every year, and where a typical restaurant discards about a half-pound of food per meal. This is an astonishing historical anomaly.”
The virtue of mischief: “One of the stranger sights on the University College London campus is the clothed skeleton of the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Stranger still is that a waxwork head sits on its shoulders, where Bentham’s own head should be, as per his will. Meanwhile, his preserved head is elsewhere – his friends thought it looked too grotesque for display, and commissioned the waxwork one instead. Legend has it that Bentham’s real head was stolen by some students from King’s College London as a prank against their University College rivals, and a ransom demanded for returning it. Apparently, this was eventually paid up, and the head was returned. Apocryphal or not, such tales of mischief are amusing, and apt to elicit in us a certain kind of sympathy. But there is something curious about this. Mischief is essentially a form of misbehaviour, and its practitioners are generally met with punishment and reproach rather than praise, at least when they are caught. Why is it, then, that tales of mischief so often elicit in us such a positive response? Could it be that there is something virtuous about mischief, and something noble about mischievous people, considered as a type?”
The kids are not all right: “The youth aren’t doing well — not in America, at least. Even before Covid, experts were ringing the alarm bells about a decade-or-so-long trend of American teens and tweens experiencing a steady uptick in anxiety, depression and self-harm symptoms. Late last year, US surgeon general Dr. Vivek Murthy published an official advisory attempting to raise awareness of this issue. As the accompanying press release explained, ‘from 2009 to 2019, the share of high school students who reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness increased by 40 percent…’ What’s going on?
My thoughts on your headline issues: Awful!, Yes, and Yes! The Rushdie thing isn’t really a free speech issue a l’Americain, but a question of whether humans should be allowed to respond to “fighting words” with thuggery. We’ve all seen that movie where this happens and probably cheered on the thuggery, but real stories like this are a disgrace. And yes, the internet is dissolving our brains, but I can’t see how adding a new communications path, however restrictive, is limiting freedom. And mischief is a good thing, especially today when imagination and humor are in such short supply. I haven’t seen the Brontë movie, but did grow up next door to the sisters. Can’t imagine this one ending well in today’s movie-making environment. Great summaries!
While I realize you are taking a global perspective given the sad event that sparked your commentary, when it comes to the United States, I compelled to quibble with you regarding your statement "All speech is regulated to some degree; what matters is which speech and why" when it comes to the United States. Instead, there are only specific contexts where government laws matter regarding speech, and First Amendment case history is littered with federal, state, and local laws being found unconstitutional.
The First Amendment is very clear in stating that the government may not limit speech or compel speech/belief. In service of balancing order and liberty (the only why for any limit in U.S. law), we've allowed the limits of regulating the sale and distribution of pornography, limiting types of pornography that contain criminal acts; time/place/manner laws (e.g. needing a permit to protest, placing distance limits on protests at funerals); truth in advertising laws; provable defamation with actual harm attached; and, the fuzzy standard about in person threats/inciting violence that is so fuzzy it will almost never hold. In terms of political speech, there are no limits which of course is related to why U.S. defamation laws are so weak relative to say the U.K.'s.
Anti-discrimination laws challenged in the courts from a First Amendment perspective are invariably found to be no good/vindictively applied by government. That there's a Fourteenth Amendment-civil rights/U.S. Bill of Rights-civil liberties conflict playing out consistently in the courts speaks to the why free speech/belief is such a prized value and civil liberty in the United States, even as some disdain it and value civil rights more than civil liberties.
Online platforms can and do censor speech - but that's not government regulation. Journalism has its own set of standards regarding what they will say or won't say that is an ever shifting line in the sand, but again, that's not government regulation. Employers having policies about employee speech (including USG classification of information) is equally not government regulation. That entities like this do censor speech in so many ways can be problematic, but limits like these appear to ebb and flow with cultural change, which is part of the human condition and why I dislike these limits, but still I recognize they are not for government (beyond when it's the employer) to say what they are.
But otherwise, actual speech/expressive speech isn't regulated (and I guess I must point out that being publicly shamed for something you say isn't regulation either, as well as there is no civil liberty or civil right to not have your feelings hurt by something ugly someone else says). And imho, in those situations where U.S. law has placed speech limits, there's room to consider instead laws that name criminal acts (assaulting someone when demonstrating at a funeral, killing someone with a dodgy product you sell or defrauding someone out of their money for a dodgy product you sell, etc.) - i.e., they don't need to be speech limiting laws.
Cooke's statement ... only free speech allows one to challenge ideas, to challenge one's own or other's beliefs. This is so fundamentally important to how human's learn, to how human's coordinate with one another and improve their own/other's lives, to socialize and practice discernment with whom they associate; I argue that it is the very bedrock of human progress. Any time speech is limited in any way, it creates the opportunity to control belief and direct (or stop) human progress in the interest of whoever has the political/coercive control in the moment. That our online connected world has challenged our comfort level with how this plays out doesn't change this.
So there you go, we've not met, but if we were to meet, I'd be that person who thinks there should be no limits on speech.