Kathy Griffin tweets a graphic, comparing Phil Robertson and Matthew Shepard — not a victim/victim.

pic.twitter.com/5nGDM1FxWb
— Kathy Griffin (@kathygriffin) December 23, 2013

Twitchy decries the comparison mainly on the theory that Robertson committed no act of violence against gay people and also observing that "the murder of Matthew Shepard... might not have had anything to do with Shepard being gay after all, but rather with drugs."

Here's the book that came out last September examining that evidence that the murder wasn't about homosexuality but crystal meth: "The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths About the Murder of Matthew Shepard."

But let's take this a step deeper and compare the repression of free speech and the use of physical violence to control and oppress people. Murder — especially torture murder, like Shepard's — is a terrible crime. Is it even worse if it is a hate crime — that is, if the victim is chosen because he belongs to a group toward which the murderer feels hate? The reason it is considered worse is because of what it does to the minds of other members of the group.

We all fear crime, and if there is a lot of murder going on, it erodes our sense of well-being and may inhibit our freedom to move around town. But when the crime is hate crime, it has a disparate effect on the minds of the people, so that some are constrained and afraid more than others. That matters! In fact, spreading a false belief that a murder is a hate crime also imposes that disparate burden on members of the group that was supposedly targeted.

Hate speech similarly affects the minds of the members of the group against whom hate has been expressed, and it can produce the same kind of fear of violence that is caused by a report of a hate crime. Now, there is hate speech and there is hate speech. Think of the most virulent hate speech, and you should see how powerful it is, how justified and painful the fear is. In extreme cases, members of the targeted group should take alarm and even flee in terror. A purveyor of hate speech need not commit an act of violence to create a fear of violence. He might inspire others to commit those acts of violence, and even if he doesn't, the threat of violence alone has an effect. False reports of hate speech work the same harm.

In the set of statements that could be characterized as hate speech, what Phil Robertson said was not that bad. Many would argue for a narrow definition of hate speech such that what Phil Robertson said would not be in the set at all. Defining the category very broadly is a political and rhetorical move, and it isn't always effective. At some point — and perhaps with Robertson, we've hit that point — you're being too repressive about what can be said on issues about which decent people are still debating, and it would be better to hear each other out and remain on speaking terms.

There is more good to be achieved by talking to each other and not shunning than by treating another human being as toxic. In fact, to treat another person as toxic is to become hateful yourself. It's better to let the conversation flow, and if you really think your ideas are good, why switch to other tactics? What's the emergency? Especially when your cause — like gay rights — is for greater human freedom, you ought to resist becoming a force of repression.

Since making his controversial remark, Phil Robertson has put out the message that as a Christian he loves everyone. Love speech is the opposite of hate speech, and it has so much more to do with Christianity than the reviling of sin in the earlier remark. He wants to speak against sin, but it's a problem when you aim a remark at a kind of person who has, over the years — over the millennia — felt a threat of violence and the burden of ostracism. I think Robertson knows that.

That's what I want to say in this conversation that I think should flow on. The love is in the conversation. The conversation is an independent good, even if we never agree.

Come on, haters. Show the love.

It's Christmas Eve.

Greetings from Austin!

We're back in Madison, but here's a handful of photos from Austin, where we spent the last week.

Home for Christmas.

Are you home for Christmas? We are, having driven from Austin, Texas in the last 2 days. Did you even notice we were gone?

I've saved up all my photographs. I'll post a few soon.

An extra day to sign up for Obamacare... because somebody just noticed the existence of time zones.

Huh?

Lecturing is "traditional and honorable method for passing on knowledge, communicating one’s passion for one’s subject, and modeling how to think."

Isn't it?

On the "Duck Dynasty" flap, Mike Huckabee is opposing and fomenting the squelching of anti-gay speech.

He said:

"I think it's come to a point in our culture where political correctness has made it so if you want to take a point of view that is traditional, that holds to a steadfast, old-fashioned biblical, Christian values - which are also, by the way, values of traditional Judaism and even Islam - and somehow you're just supposed to shut up and keep that to yourself."

Huckabee pointed to a "new level of bullying on the part of these militant activist groups,” as reason for Robertson's suspension by A&E, referring to groups like the Human Rights Campaign, which urged the network to suspend the star.

But Huckabee conceded that Robertson's comments would have been "more appropriate for the duck woods than it would be for the pages of a major news magazine."

So Huckabee is part of moving the culture to the very point that he's observing that it's come to. There really are things you don't say in mixed company, and it's long been part of the culture to refrain from voicing religious views that make other people uncomfortable. In Christianity, there are many many sins, and it's not socially acceptable to talk about all of them openly and indiscriminately.

If you don't believe me, here's an experiment you can do over the next 3 days. Whenever you find yourself in a conversation with a fat person, inform them that gluttony is a sin. Here are some Biblical verses you can incorporate into your experience:

Proverbs 23:20-21 warns us, “Do not join those who drink too much wine or gorge themselves on meat, for drunkards and gluttons become poor, and drowsiness clothes them in rags.” Proverbs 28:7 declares, “He who keeps the law is a discerning son, but a companion of gluttons disgraces his father.” Proverbs 23:2 proclaims, “Put a knife to your throat if you are given to gluttony.”

Let me know how that works out for you. But you won't do it, because you know it's not acceptable.

What people are having trouble with is the somewhat sudden change, with hostility to homosexuality moving into the category of something not appropriate to spout to a general audience.

And that doesn't mean Phil Robertson shouldn't have said what he said. He was being interviewed and pressed on a topic and he answered honestly. He has a reality show that is entertaining because it's somewhat daring and different, and people can choose whether they'd like to drop in on this particular cast of colorful characters. The culture of the show is a different, smaller circle than the whole American culture. And the network, A&E, is another culture. It includes some entertainment premised on colorful indiscretions that go only as far as fits a corporate brand.

We're in the process of figuring out what you can say where, what has no consequences, what counts as funny or daring and offensive to some but not enough to have a negative effect a speaker or a network, and what everyone ought to know by now is going to hurt you.

What hurts a business like A&E is different from what hurts an individual human being, especially one who believes he is building up his treasures in heaven.

"Opposition to Obamacare rose six points among women, from 54% in November to 60% now..."

"... while opinion of the new law remained virtually unchanged among men.... That's bad news for an administration that is reaching out to moms across the country in an effort to make Obamacare a success."

A CNN poll.

Sixty-three percent say they believe the new law will increase the amount of money they personally pay for medical care, which may not be a good sign for a law known as the "Affordable Care Act."

Yeah, maybe not.

Susan Rice and the single-earner household.

From the "60 Minutes" piece on Susan Rice, who is "not the first woman to be national security advisor, or the first African American. But she is the first mother. She has two kids: Jake, 16 and Maris, 11."

Her husband, Ian Cameron, used to be an executive producer at ABC News....

Lesley Stahl: Ian, you actually have stopped working.

Ian Cameron: Yeah.

Lesley Stahl: To take care of the kids?

Ian Cameron: Yeah. Well we were in a situation, you know, financially that one of us could step out of the working world.

"I think this is an attempt to improve the image of the current government, a little, before the Sochi Olympics — particularly for the Western Europeans."

"But I don’t consider this humane or merciful... This is a lie," said Maria Alyokhina, one of 2 members of Pussy Riot, who was imprisoned in Russia for staging a protest in Moscow's main cathedral and who has now been set free. She says she was forced out and would prefer serving the full 2-year sentence to serving as a propaganda tool for Putin.

Having chosen a church for their protest, they were accused of religious hatred, but they say they chose the church because of its political political support for Putin.

"Sexual sins are numerous and many, I have a few myself. So what is your safest course of action?"

"If you’re a man, find yourself a woman, marry them and keep your sex right there. You can have fun, but one thing is for sure, as long as you are both healthy in the first place, you are not going to catch some debilitating illness, there is safety there. Commonsense says we are not going to procreate the human race unless we have a man and a woman. From the beginning Jesus said, 'It is a man and a woman.' Adam was made and Eve was made for this reason. They left their fathers and mothers and be united to become one flesh, that’s what marriage is all about. But we looked at it and said it was an outdated stereotype. When you look back at the human race, the sins have always been the same: We get high, we get drunk, we get laid, we steal and kill. Has this changed at all from the time God burnt up whole cities because their every thought was evil?"

Phil Robertson preaches, and The Daily Mail is there with exclusive access, trying to understand where he's coming from. And I'm trying to understand how this long game will play out.

A puffy, glum Obama at an NCAA basketball game.

Pictured here (and at the top of Drudge). What a drag to go to a recreational event, to look like someone on vacation, and to know that photographers will be photographing every instant of your expression and that editors will be able to select from the 1000s of images the one that expresses whatever message they decide they want to send about you... you and your wife and your daughter. There is no recreation, only the appearance of recreation. So why go to the game at all? Because you want to get your phony-baloney message out, that you're on vacation, Christmas vacation, and that everyone else ought to chill out and get all holiday-ish and off your case.

Stop talking about Obamacare. Please talk about "Duck Dynasty." Not my puffy face. Please look away. It's not that puffy. It will be puffier if I must cry myself to sleep another night. No. Don't look at me. Not in that shot anyway. Look at the "Duck Dynasty" guy. Isn't he hateful? Me, I'm that very nice, very likable man who works so hard for you and then vacations in Hawaii and goes to basketball games with his wife — don't look at her grim underbite — and his charming, lovely daughters.

"I could read my favorite right-wing columnists all day long. But I should really eat some lima beans, too."

"In the past, I have settled on a few 'lima beans.' But I usually get unsettled — I fall away. I stop reading them. Why? Is it that I can’t stand to be disagreed with? Can’t abide an opposing view?"

Jay Nordlinger's readers help him compile a list of liberals that righties can read..

Today's Phil Robertson is Justine Sacco.

Every day, apparently, somebody's got to get fired for saying something off, and since I've blogged about the Duck Dynasty flap, I've got to offer up the story of Justine Sacco, a lady no one had ever even heard of, who tweeted, got on a trans-Atlantic flight, and landed to find that during the 12 hours when she was incommunicado the internet had caught fire with outrage over a pointless, stupid remark she'd made, and #HasJustineLandedYet was trending. What a nightmare!

She joked about not getting AIDS, and she discovered she'd come down with a raging case of another disease — sudden-onset fame toxicity. There was no hope for the lady, whose specialty was actually PR, at which she was — to be fair to the company that fired her — manifestly incompetent.

Unlike Phil Robertson, Justine Sacco had no fans. She's just stranded out there, with no friends at all. It's pretty sad. One bad joke — on Twitter — and you're doomed. Will anyone dare make a joke again? Not about AIDS. Maybe not anything with a racial element that might be misunderstood. Maybe nothing that casts the speaker in the character of an absurdly insensitive lout. What else? Be careful! You never know when sudden-onset fame toxicity (SOFT) will strike.

ADDED: "Some liberal white person coming to grips with her privilege and wanting the whole world to know about it" — that's how Professor Jacobson saw the tweet. I said something similar in the comments to this post before reading that. It's actually a pretty easy joke to figure out, if you're at all inclined to read charitably. So the real question is, as Jacobson put it: "Why did so much of the Twittersphere quickly proclaim her a racist and go after her with such a blood lust?"

Jacobson's answer is: "Because it could." I'd say: There really is no "it." The whole 'sphere never does anything. But the virus of hate happens, because somebody saw something and retweeted it in a way that caught on. There was no mind at the top to exercise moral judgment about whether inflating a nonentity for the purpose of destroying her was a good idea or even minimally acceptable. It was a heartless force of nature. I call it SOFT. Human beings need to observe and see it and fight it.... while we still have minds... minds that have yet to go fully soft.

Why is the urge to impress women called a "ludicrous tendency of men" in The Wall Street Journal?

Perhaps you've noticed this column by Robert M. Sapolsky titled "The Cheerleader Effect: What Men Do to Impress." Read the whole thing. There are a number of interesting angles. I just want to highlight the depreciation of male desire:

[M]ales can be kind of pathetic.

When women are present or when men are prompted to think about women, they act differently, research shows. Well, duh. But in unexpected ways. A 2008 study in the journal Evolutionary Psychology showed that in the mere presence of women as witnesses, men become more likely to jaywalk and to wait until the last second to dash on to a bus. This reflects, no doubt, the well-known belief among men that jaywalking means you're a Roman gladiator of irrepressible virility. As I said, pathetic....

There is also a darker side to the tendency of men to show off in the presence of women....

Evidence of this "darker side"? One study showed that the presence of women made men more likely to make "loud blasts of noise" while playing competitive games. Another showed that the presence of women made men "more likely to endorse aggressive stances about war."

Now, other research shows that the presence of women also moves men toward more charitable giving and service. So Sapolsky concludes that "There's an important point here":

The allure of the opposite sex makes men more violent, but only, it seems, in circumstances where violence is rewarded with higher status. 

That's a weird way to talk about football games, but let's continue.

When status can be achieved in a more socially desirable way, things work differently. 

What's not socially desirable about athletic success? Why be dismissive of that? Because:

In short, with the right social arrangements, this ludicrous tendency of men can be harnessed not only to encourage a ferocious goal-line stand but to make the world a kinder place.

Harnessed! So maleness has (or tends to have) a psychological structure to it, but the point of understanding that psychology is to craft it into a harness so society as a whole can most successfully turn male energy into benefits for the group. This idea of manipulating men is supposed to seem justified because the male psychology is ludicrous. Meanwhile, females are the means to the end. They too are useful for these manipulations. But somehow this harnessing and exploitation of the individual makes the world "a kinder place."

It's not kinder to think about human individuals this way. Our deepest sexual urges are not ludicrous. They are fundamental to the beauty and meaning of our lives. To ridicule our minds and bodies like that and to throw away what is most basic and real because it seems possible to extract more charitable giving and service, that is beyond ludicrous. It's evil.

"Apropos of nothing, you have never seen a man in shorts until you have seen Bill Murray in 'The Lost City.'"

Writes Bob Boyd, in the only comment on yesterday's Amazon post. (Here's "Lost City" on Amazon, in case you've got a yen to see Bill Murray in shorts, perhaps wandering lost in some city or perhaps knowing exactly where he is in a city that somehow finds itself lost.)

This makes me realize that I need to make a list of men in shorts movies (and TV shows). I think of "The Big Lebowski," but what else? There's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," where Johnny Depp plays the role of Hunter S. Thompson. Help me out here. Don't cite examples of men in bathing suits. Despite the similarity of men's bathing suits to shorts, it's not what we're looking for here. And don't include movies where the men are wearing sports uniforms/gear, e.g., "Hoosiers" and "Breaking Away." It must be a major character who is opting to go about in shorts in a situation in which women like me would think: That man should put on a pair of pants because those shorts make him look like a large boy.

By the way, speaking of titles that begin with "Breaking," the TV series "Breaking Bad" begins with the image of an empty pair of pants flying through the air. We never see the main character, Walter White, wearing shorts. Even when we see him with his pants off, in his underpants, the underpants are not undershorts but tighty whities. When not naked or in his underpants, he's wearing long pants like the long pants seen in that opening empty-pants shot. I think the series is a man's search for his lost masculinity. The lost masculinity is symbolized by the flying empty pair of pants.

So let's also work on a list of men-in-pants movies (and TV). Simply wearing pants is not enough for a pants-wearing-man to make this list, nor is looking great in pants enough. There needs to be some Walter-White-level importance to the pants, the kind of meaning expressed in phrases like "wearing the pants in this family" or "put on your big-boy pants."

In a game of favor exchanging, "players did not perform favors because of what happened in the past, but because of what they anticipated would happen in the future."

"It is entirely possible for an individual to perform a favor without having received any favors in the past... as long as the individual was not supposed to have received any favors in the past."

The current favor economy achieves at least some of its power from our ever enfeebled immunities to shame. When everyone is forced to become a brand, everyone requires relentless promotion. So you tweet the accomplishments of distasteful colleagues because if you don’t, they might not tweet yours, and somehow, despite your resistance, you’ve been sold on the notion that you ought to take measure of yourself in terms of 140-character assessments made by people you only vaguely know.