Tag Archives: Ann Coulter

General discussion

This guy gets it kind of

Here's Michael B.Keegan, one of The Huffington Post's (sorry!) various bloggers, on Ann Coulter:

When you put Ann Coulter on TV, she may say something provocative. She is also guaranteed to say something offensive, tasteless, and meant only purely to provoke controversy. These are not the same thing.

George Stephanopoulos, host of ABC's This Week, appears to have forgotten the difference between provocative discussion and straight-up trolling.

Last Sunday, This Week invited Coulter to participate in a roundtable discussion for the third time this year. Reliably, Coulter managed to fit as many ignorant and insulting statements as she could in her time on national television while shamelessly plugging her latest book. She announced that civil rights are only "for blacks" – not for "gay rights groups, those defending immigrants, and feminists." She continued, "We don't owe the homeless. We don't owe feminists. We don't owe women who are desirous of having abortions, or gays who want to get married to one another."

We could spend our time countering Coulter's anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, anti-homeless rant, but that would be a waste of time. Her cheap attempts at provocation have kept her in the public eye for years but have never, as far as I know, led to a productive discussion. Her attacks on 9/11 widows, women voters, abortion providers, Jews and Muslims are not designed to start an honest conversation. Instead, they were shameless attempts at self-promotion at the expense of decency and civility.

Is there any other commentator who's invited to "mainstream" talk shows simply to hurl ignorant insults?

Coulter is the epitome of the false "balance" the mainstream media is trying to bring to political debate, treating right-wing conspiracy theories and animosities as just the "other side" of the news. Coulter's not presenting anyone's "side." She's just talking trash and calling it an opinion.

This sounds pretty much right to me.  Coulter's participation in our national discussion is completely unserious and only someone sadly unable to distinguish seriousness from sophistry could conclude otherwise. 

The problem, however, lies in trying to identify what's so bad about it.  Keegan here has argued, correctly I think, that Coulter isn't really trying.  There isn't any value, he implies, in refuting views she holds only as provocations.  What to do, however, with people who do hold these views.  The other day (I can't remember where), Alan Colmes said that Sean Hannity, a Fox News blowhard, holds his views sincerely, and that he admires him for that.  I'd still think that Hannity has no place in ordinary debates, no matter how serious he takes himself to be.  He's not really up to the task of critical self-evaluation. 

So, yes, Coulter's probably not serious.  But more importantly, her views have been decisively refuted already.  Why bother giving them more life?

General discussion

Sacred Band of Thebes

General Ann Coulter, to whom I won't link (see this link in the Huffington Post), has stood up to defend the now notorious GOP crowd booers.  She thinks the policy of allowing gay soldiers in the military, which is by the way the current law of the land, spells doom for our military.  Among other points, she argues:

Soldiers, sailors and Marines living in close quarters who are having sex with one another, used to have sex with one another or would like to have sex with one another simply cannot function as a well-oiled fighting machine. A battalion of married couples facing a small unit of heterosexual men would be slaughtered.

Here's Plato, in the Symposium:

And if there were only some way of contriving that a state or an army should be made up of lovers and their loves, they would be the very best governors of their own city, abstaining from all dishonour, and emulating one another in honour; and when fighting at each other's side, although a mere handful, they would overcome the world. For what lover would not choose rather to be seen by all mankind than by his beloved, either when abandoning his post or throwing away his arms? He would be ready to die a thousand deaths rather than endure this. Or who would desert his beloved or fail him in the hour of danger? The veriest coward would become an inspired hero, equal to the bravest, at such a time; Love would inspire him. That courage which, as Homer says, the god breathes into the souls of some heroes, Love of his own nature infuses into the lover.

Anyway.  Probably shouldn't feed the trolls.

General discussion

Professional troll

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Whilst waiting to begin serving his sentence for fraud, Lord Conrad Black pens an encomium to Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham in the National Review Online.  He writes:

Coulter attracts greater leftish opprobrium because of her more frequent recourse to reflections that she well knows will, as she says, “stir the pot.” Thus, John Edwards was a “faggot,” by which, she explained, she only meant a “wuss,” and Christians were “perfected Jews” because the New Testament was “like Federal Express.” When an airline was boycotted for yielding to passenger concerns and disembarking six Muslim imams before takeoff, she said that if the Muslims would boycott all the airlines, there would be no need for any airport security. And when a Muslim questioner objected to this comment at one of her speeches, in Canada, she replied, “Take a camel.” More of a jolt to conventional sensibilities was her lamentation that Timothy McVeigh did not bomb the New York Times building instead of a federal building in Oklahoma, after, she explained as the intended controversy erupted, “everyone had left the building except the editors and reporters.” The mindless reflexiveness with which the soft Left responds to Coulter, especially, is premeditated by her and is a vastly entertaining send-up of the boring, high-minded liberals that she can turn on like a spigot at will, to her own amusement and profit.

As Black puts it very ironmannishly, Coulter is a professional troll, and people are suckers for feeding her.  I suppose I'd agree with that. 

via Sadly No   

Hasty Generalization, Straw Man, weak man

Nothing’s Sacrosanct

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Ann Coulter’s been paying attention to Elena Kagan’s SCOTUS nomination proceedings.  She even read a profile of Kagan from the New York Times.  Kagan’s aunt notes that the family was intellectually engaged:

“There was thinking, always thinking,” Joyce Kagan Charmatz, Robert Kagan’s sister-in-law, 71, said of the family’s dinner table. “Nothing was sacrosanct.”

That “nothing was sacrosanct” caught Coulter’s eye.  She’s skeptical about whether in a liberal family that there could be a nothing’s-off-limits discussion.  She first observes:

Really? Nothing was sacrosanct? Because in my experience, on a scale of 1-to-infinity, the range of acceptable opinion among New York liberals goes from 1-to-1.001.

And then she ponders:

How would the following remarks fare at a dinner table on the Upper West Side where "nothing was sacrosanct": Hey, maybe that Joe McCarthy was onto something. What would prayer in the schools really hurt? How do we know gays are born that way? Is it possible that union demands have gone too far? Does it make sense to have three recycling bins in these microscopic Manhattan apartments? Say, has anyone read Charles Murray's latest book? Those comments, considered "conversation starters" in most of the country, would get you banned from polite society in New York.

Coulter’s hypothesis is that Kagan’s family was actually a group of insular liberals, people who pretended to be open-minded, willing to hear out all the sides, and so on, but never actually met anyone who had an opposing view.  Coulter knows all those New York liberals, and she knows just how dogmatic they can be: 

Even members of survivalist Christian cults in Idaho at least know people who hold opposing views. New York liberals don't. . . .  Even within the teeny-tiny range of approved liberal opinion in New York, disagreement will get you banned from the premises.

Seriously?  Now, for sure it’d be easy to switch out ‘New York liberals’ with ‘Texas conservatives’ and all the right-wing talking points with lefty talking points, and you’d see just what a bigoted and ridiculous tirade that’d be about conservatives.  Surely, we all know there are dogmatists on both sides. But they don’t define the sides, and they don’t define how parenting happens.  One of the things that Coulter fails to observe is that Joyce Kagan Charmatz is trying to get across that the Kagan family was not one of those dogmatic families you might see on the liberal side.

The larger problem is that Coulter has the worst of the ‘New York liberals’ define them all.  We’ve observed a number of times here at the NonSequitur that this is a form of straw-manning more precisely called weak manning. The basic trope is to find the worst and dumbest representative of a group you hold to be wrong, criticize this representative, and then act as though the group is wrong uberhaupt on the basis of this criticism.  For example, we all have shut-in uncles who surf the web in their bathrobes who are just right of Ron Paul libertarians.  When they say stupid things at family reunions, we don’t think this necessarily impugns libertarianism.  Every time you’re inclined to think that libertarians are stupid, you must remember Robert Nozick was very likely smarter than you. Same goes for Coulter – every time she thinks she can define the class ‘New York liberal,’ their views and their parenting on the basis of the worst of the class, she should exercise some measure of judgment.