Starting in two weeks, users from countries who don’t use the Latin alphabet will find using the Internet much easier, FT reports.

Latin script’s monopoly in internet domain names will end next month, a development that could usher in a fresh wave of internet usage from Bulgaria to China.

So far, finding web addresses has required some basic familiarity with Latin letters – a deterrent for many, particularly older users. Fully opening cyberspace to scripts ranging from Amharic to Tamil will also give even greater prominence to search engines, say experts. The country designation of addresses – such as .ir for Iran and .kr for South Korea – has always been written in Latin. But at a meeting in Seoul, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a non-profit group that co-ordinates website domains, said it would start from November 16 to take applications for national codes written in Cyrillic, Arabic, Korean and Chinese. Other scripts will follow and the first non-Latin domains will go live in 2010.

“This is only the first step, but it is an incredibly big one and a historic move toward the internationalisation of the internet,” said Rod Beckstrom, Icann’s president. “We just made the internet much more accessible to millions of people in regions such as Asia, the Middle East and Russia.”

About half of the world’s 1.6bn internet users are speakers of languages that do not use Latin script, said Icann. China has the world’s greatest number of internet users, estimated at 340m. “This is a huge and positive change in internet history. This will bring access for more people to get to know the internet without even a basic knowledge of English letters, for example many of our senior citizens,” said Wang Peng, senior project manager at HiChina, the country’s leading internet service provider

Changing two letters such as .cn may appear a small step, but computer experts say many people in China do not know how to switch the keyboard to Latin letters, instead finding websites by following links. Being able to type addresses themselves could take users to more minority interest sites, a factor with important political implications in China.

My initial reaction was that this will really undermine the connectedness of the Web, turning URLs into a Tower of Babel.  But, having never encountered a keyboard problem more significant than wishing there were an easier way to type umlauts, it never occurred to me how much of an inhibition the Latin alphabet was.  Having to switch between keyboard sets and having to recognize long strings of characters in foreign symbols is a rather huge barrier to entry.

UPDATE:  PC World’s Jacqueline Emigh points to some drawbacks, some of which occurred to me but go beyond my technical expertise.

Yet on the other hand, the new names carry risks for new security concerns and general user confusion. Some fear the Web might grow increasingly fragmented into areas easily accessible only to those conversant in local languages.

[...]

How will you be able to type the domain names of international Web sites when your keyboard doesn’t support their character sets? It would be logistically just about impossible for a PC maker to supply a keyboard supporting the Western “ABC” alphabet, along with the disparate character sets used in all of these tongues, for example: Japanese, Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Cyrillic, and the Central and European languages.

[...]

It looks as though we could see the development of a whole new class of Web domains that most people won’t be able to get to easily — even though they might be able to find those Web sites with a search engine.

Certainly language translation services and technology may be the biggest winners with today’s news. I predict both will flourish along with an international land grab for variations of the word “sex” dot-com.

Of the last, there’s not much doubt.

The gang at Esquire give some thought to a question that will soon be everywhere: How will we pronounce the year 2010?

Twenty ten Suggested.

Two thousand ten Eh.

Two zero one zero Amusing but impractical.

Two oh ten Come on.

Ten Nah.

Really, the first two are the only plausible options.  My preference is for the first.  During the last century, we pronounced years as nineteen-seventy, nineteen-eighty-four, and so forth and I’m guessing we’ll do that again now that the aughts are about over.

Aside from it rolling off the tongue somewhat more easily, this approach has another major advantage.  It’s been a decade since people advocating progress could exclaim, “It’s the nineteen-(insert-decade-here), for God’s sakes!”

A bipartisan NBC News poll shows that only 36 percent of Americans think “Barack Obama’s health care plan” is a “good idea” even though 51 percent approve of the job he is doing as president.  In the same survey, 43 percent favor “creating a public health care plan administered by the federal government that would compete directly with private health insurance companies,” which 47 percent oppose.

A new poll, conducted by SurveyUSA for hard left MoveOn.org, finds that 77% believe it extremely important (58%) or quite important (19%) that “any health care proposal” passed “give people a choice of both a public plan administered by the federal government and a private plan for their health insurance.”

Disclosure:  My wife is Chief Operating Officer for Public Opinion Strategies, which conducted the poll along with Hart Research Associates.  I have not discussed this poll with Bill McInturff or anyone on his staff and only discussed it with my wife to determine whether POS had issued any statement on this controversy; they have not.

HuffPo’s Sam Stein correctly notes that the key word here is “choice.”

While arguments about what type of language best describe the public option persist –”choice” is considered a trigger word that everyone naturally supports — it seems clear that the framing of the provision goes a long way toward determining its popularity.

Question wording is one of the factors that clearly matter in these things.  Previous iterations of the NBC/WSJ poll included the word “choice” but pollsters Hart and McInturff decided two cycles ago to drop the word, resulting in a rather steep drop in support.  Recall, though, that Peter Hart is a very prominent Democratic pollster and the two have teamed up for the survey precisely for the purpose of ensuring that the surveys weren’t tilted to favor on side’s views over the other.

It strikes me that “choice” here is loaded and likely to skew the results.  The new wording describes exactly what the policy change would be:  ”creating a public health care plan administered by the federal government that would compete directly with private health insurance companies.”  The public plan run by the government is what’s new.  Further, it competes with private insurance.  So, the choice is prominently mentioned without using the word “choice.”

Conversely, “give people a choice of both a public plan administered by the federal government and a private plan for their health insurance” is essentially a double barreled question, a classic error in polling.  Why?  Because one could quite reasonably both vehemently oppose a public plan and yet think it important to have the choice of keeping their existing plan were a government plan to emerge. Many opponents of the public option, then, might give an affirmative answer to the question on that basis.

“Australia has pledged 7.8 million US dollars this year to help save more than 100 indigenous languages which are in grave danger of dying out,” AFP reports.

Arts Minister Peter Garrett said the money would be spent on translation services, tests for children and a feasibility study for a national centre for Aboriginal languages. “These languages are… a significant part of Australia’s heritage and we must ensure they are protected for the benefit of future generations,” Garrett said. “A focused and coordinated national approach is critical to safeguard indigenous culture and save these unique languages.”

Australia has 145 languages and dialects with 110 at risk, according to a 2005 report, as they are often spoken only by small groups of over-40s. About 30,000 people are currently studying indigenous languages around the country.

Why?  These languages are dying out because they’re no longer useful, presumably because the tribal cultures have assimilated into Australia’s English-speaking culture.

I’m all in favor of historical preservation.  It would be worthwhile to preserve any of these languages that exist as written languages for the sake of future historians and anthropologists.  Ditto recordings of native speakers speaking their language.  If that cost $7.8 million equivalent, it would probably be a good investment.

But spending the money for the sake of having dying languages continue on as inefficient secondary means of communication strikes me as horribly counterproductive.  Much better to learn both English and a second actually-spoken language (Chinese comes to mind given Australia’s geography).

I was able to find the exact text of the plebiscite that Manuel “Mel” Zelaya wanted to proffer to the citizens of Honduras this past Sunday. The text and a photo of the ballot that was to be used can be found here.

The odd thing, and a fact that hasn’t made it into a lot of press accounts or snap judgments about the situation, is that the language in question is not about re-election, but rather would have asked whether or not the public wanted to have a referendum in November about whether or not to call a constitutional convention to write a new constitution. As such, it is unclear to me at the moment why the accusation was that Zelaya was seeking immediate re-election, as even if his plebiscite had been approved, I cannot see how it would have led to be him being on the ballot in November (which is when the next presidential term, which starts in January, is set to be filled). I will continue to research that issue.

More discussion at the link above.

Stanford neuroscientist Lera Boroditsky passes along the consensus in her field that “people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world.” She provides a fascinating example:

Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like “right,” “left,” “forward,” and “back,” which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space. This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like “There’s an ant on your southeast leg” or “Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit.” One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is “Where are you going?” and the answer should be something like ” Southsoutheast, in the middle distance.” If you don’t know which way you’re facing, you can’t even get past “Hello.”

The result is a profound difference in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers of languages that rely primarily on absolute reference frames (like Kuuk Thaayorre) and languages that rely on relative reference frames (like English). Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. What enables them — in fact, forces them — to do this is their language. Having their attention trained in this way equips them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human capabilities. Because space is such a fundamental domain of thought, differences in how people think about space don’t end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build other, more complex, more abstract representations. Representations of such things as time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality, and emotions have been shown to depend on how we think about space.

Via Norm Geras, who is “skeptical of the notion that all human awareness and perception is shaped by language” but thinks it “completely obvious that language must shape thought to some extent.”

The who article is worth a read, as it provides several other examples including the many connotations of the verb “read,” for which other languages have multiple words to describe the degree to which one has engaged with the text.

Photo: The Guardian

Hilzoy and Andrew Sullivan pass along this interesting tidbit from Slate’s Christopher Beam:

Post-election protests continued in Tehran for the fifth day on Wednesday. In many photos, riot police wear uniforms with the English word police on them. Ambulances, too, bear the word ambulance in English. Why not use Persian words instead of their English equivalents?

Because everyone knows English. Like many capital cities, Tehran has its emergency personnel wear markings that are internationally recognizable. Street signs, too, are translated into English, and police cars are generally inscribed in both English and Persian. That makes the city more tourist-friendly without sacrificing clarity for locals. After all, the Persian word for police is the same: polise. (Persian, or Farsi, is an Indo-European language that uses an Arabic script, but people will often use Latin lettering, also known as Penglish or Fingilish, especially when typing or texting.) It’s also the same word in French (police), German (polizei), Italian (polizia), Czech (policie), and many other languages. Iranian students are required to take English classes in high school. So using the English word for police actually maximizes the number of people who will understand it.

Police isn’t the only word Farsi borrows from English. There’s a long list of “loanwords” that have trickled into the language since World War II. For example, Iranians use the words computer, chat, and mobile (as in, cell phone) in the same way English speakers do. Hot dog isn’t a perfect translation, but it refers to a sausagelike sandwich popular in Iran. Persian slang often incorporates English, too. The phrase love terekkundan—literally, to burst with love—is slang for hooking up. Top means cool. And you can use the phrase trip zadan to say, “He’s tripping,” in a literal (i.e., drug-related) or figurative sense.

Yet more evidence that English is gradually becoming the world’s universal language.  Indeed, there are few major cities in the world where English speakers can’t get by quite comfortably.

If your native language is not English, then English is hands-down the obvious choice for a second language.  If you travel at all, it’ll frequently come in quite handy.  For that matter, even if you don’t travel, it’d be useful in watching movies.   Conversely, if you’re a native English speaker, it’s not at all obvious what second language you should learn.  Unless you routinely travel to a specific place or live in an area with a large immigrant population, you’re unlikely to use it with enough regularity to be worth the effort in learning, much less keep your skills sharp.

NPR has an amusing bit on “Morning Edition” by Rob Gifford on Bloomsday, the annual festival wherein “Thousands of people descend on Dublin each June 16th to celebrate Joyce’s epic novel Ulysses by recreating the events in the book. The novel chronicles the passage of Leopold Bloom through Dublin on a single day — June 16, 1904 — a day, as Bloom says, that’s a ‘chapter of accidents.’”

The upshot is that the language and structure of the book is so inaccessible to modern English readers that most of the celebrants admit to never having read the book or to having tried but given up.  

Ulysses, it seems, is a book people want to have read.

There’s nothing wrong with that, I suppose, and any excuse to travel to Dublin for a day of merrymaking is likely as good as any.  But it’s an amusing concept, nonetheless.

What other books fall into this category?

In “Born Yesterday,” Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America was famously revealed to be such a book.  The Bible, perhaps?

UCSB political scientist Aaron Belkins‘ HuffPo piece “Obama To Fire His First Gay Arabic Linguist” has drawn quite a bit of blogospheric attention.

Dan Choi, a West Point graduate and officer in the Army National Guard who is fluent in Arabic and who returned recently from Iraq, received notice today that the military is about to fire him. Why? Because he came out of the closet as a gay man on national television.

[...]

I spent a day with Dan Choi last month, and he is not someone we want to fire from the military. He loves the armed forces. He served bravely under tough combat conditions in Iraq. His Arabic is excellent, and he used his language skills to diffuse many tough situations and to save lives, both Iraqi and American. All of his unit mates know he is gay, and they have been very supportive of him. But he doesn’t want to live a lie.

Belkins anticipates my rejoinder:

Some readers might think it unfair to blame Obama. After all, the president inherited the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law when he took office. As Commander-in-Chief, he has to follow the law. If the law says that the military must fire any service member who acknowledges being gay, that is not Obama’s fault.

He responds:

A new study, about to be published by a group of experts in military law, shows that President Obama does, in fact, have stroke-of-the-pen authority to suspend gay discharges. The “don’t ask, don’t tell” law requires the military to fire anyone found to be gay or lesbian. But there is nothing requiring the military to make such a finding. The president can simply order the military to stop investigating service members’ sexuality.

An executive order would not get rid of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law, but would take the critical step of suspending its implementation, hence rendering it effectively dead. Once people see gays and lesbians serving openly, legally and without problems, it will be much easier to get rid of the law at a later time.

I know a little something about military law but am by no means an expert.  But homosexual conduct by members of the Armed Services is manifestly proscribed by federal law, the Uniform Code of Military Justice.  The procedures are clear.  It’s true that the current implementation, the so-called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, was implemented under Bill Clinton. It is not, however, a mere executive order — and thus subject to the whim of his successors — but rather black letter statutory law (Pub.L. 103-160 [10 U.S.C. § 654].).
By announcing that he’s gay on national television, Choi gave his commanders little choice but to investigate.  (Simply “being” gay isn’t a violation of UCMJ; it has to manifest by “conduct.”)

Regardless, it’s absurd to claim that Obama “fired” Choi.  That’s a decision made echelons down the chain of command and, again, one that was a fait accompli once Choi made his announcement. Further, for Obama to order the military to stop following black letter law might take “guts” but it would create a minor Constitutional crisis. Failing to break the law isn’t “cowardly.”

It is, however, perfectly fair to blame Obama for not having taken action to overturn existing law, as Matt Corley, GayPatriotWest, and Andrew Sullivan do.  But that’s what he needs to do:  Burn political capital and use his extraordinary popularity and huge Democratic margins in Congress to change the law rather than flouting it.  Is my memory faulty or were Democrats recently opposed to presidents ignoring laws they found inconvenient?

Obama, reasonably enough, wants to avoid Clinton’s mistake of dealing with this issue right out of the gate.  It’s politically charged, will generate tremendous opposition from retired generals and other veterans, and will be a distraction from more pressing issues.   Then again, as Matt Yglesias points out, “The fact of the matter is that on any given week, it’ll be more convenient to deal with this issue next week. But that just means you never get around to dealing with it.”

UPDATE: Upon re-reading the law, there may be a workaround more in keeping with Congress’ intent than simply ordering a suspension of investigations.  Again, IANAL, but the only loophole I see in the law is (e)(2), which provides that “Nothing in subsection (b) shall be construed to require that a member of the armed forces be processed for separation from the armed forces when a determination is made in accordance with regulations prescribed by the Secretary of Defense that . . . separation of the member would not be in the best interest of the armed forces.“  The only problem with this, really, is that adopting a broad policy of “the law is silly, so we’ll deem all enforcement to be against the best interests of the armed forces” is that it would be in clear contravention of the “Findings” that serve as the law’s preamble.

UPDATE II:  Glenn Reynolds quips, “You know, if someone asked me to go hire a a gay Arabic linguist, I wouldn’t know where to start. But the federal government seems to be firing them every time I turn around.”  A clever entrepreneur could likely put 2 and 2 together and start a service.

UPDATE III (Dodd): It’s true that we cannot countenance “a broad policy of ‘the law is silly, so we’ll deem all enforcement to be against the best interests of the armed forces’”. But what we can — and I think should — do is implement a policy that, all other things being equal, it is not “in the best interest of the armed forces” to summarily discharge service members with crucial skills (like, just to take an example totally at random, Arabic language skills) merely because they are gay. A review process that weighs the individual’s value to the overall mission would be in keeping with (e)(2).

Video via AllahPundit.

I mentioned Newt Gingrich’s article “Are You an Obama Winner? Or an Obama Loser?” at the tail end of Wednesday’s episode of OTB Radio (”Republican Party, RIP?“) but never got around to blogging it.  It is both a classic Frank Luntz-inspired use of obnoxious language to paint a dire picture of the Democrats — and thereby quite amusing — and yet a pretty decent argument against some of Obama’s policies.

The boldface Winners/Losers are very much the former.  Some examples.

Winners: The People Who Are Evading Responsibility for Chrysler’s Bankruptcy
Losers: Consumers Who Want to Buy Good American Cars

Winners:  Terrorists and Anti-Americanism Worldwide
Losers:  The New Neighbors of Terrorists and The American Tax-Payers

Winners:  Anyone the President Deems Deserving of Judicial “Empathy”
Losers:  Everyone Else

Winners:  Government Favored “Green Industries”
Losers:  Anyone Who Heats a Home, Drives a Car or Has a Job

The last is my favorite.  It’s hyperbolic to the point of absurdity.  But he follows this with an explanation that’s more reasonable:

I’m in favor of doing all we can to protect our environment, but I have a fundamental difference with Democrats on Capitol Hill and in the White House:  I believe in incentivizing Americans to produce the innovations that will protect our environment, not punishing Americans with taxes, regulation and litigation.

The Administration’s cap and trade legislation makes losers of the American people by imposing a $1 trillion-$2 trillion energy tax on an already struggling economy.  And the winners?  They’re the lobbyists for favored special interests and “green” industries who are already lining up in Washington to collect the spoils.

A little sketchy on the public policy prescription angle, to be sure, but the outline of a counter-argument.

Stephen Walt repeats the popular lament (and specifically Gareth Porter’s) that the United States Government employs a ridiculously small number of Pashto speakers and that this negatively impacts us in Afghanstan.   Pat Porter agrees but issues some important caveats:

1) Languages are extremely hard to develop at a sufficient level. Except for the most outrageously talented, most folk can study intensively for years and develop the language skills equivalent to a reasonably intelligent ten year old. Brokering deals amongst local leaders and conducting skilled diplomacy presumably demands skills far beyond this;

2) Prime Minister Anthony Eden was one of those outrageously talented people,  who spoke Farsi and Arabic, had a First Class Honours degree from Oxford in Oriental Languages (which was probably even harder than Cinema Appreciation). None of this was enough to prevent his blunder in the Suez invasion of 1956. In other words, there is no substitute for good strategic judgement;

3) Other than foreign mercenaries, most British troops were pretty fluent in the local language against certain mutinous subjects between 1775 and 1783;

4) How do you say ‘we are destroying your opium crop’ in Pashto? If policies are misguided, all the vocabulary and nuanced knowledge in the world may not win over the population.

Quite.

Beyond that, by the time we get people sufficiently trained in Pashto to be useful, they’ll be able to command far more money outside government — or as government contractors.  Not to mention that, unless we plan to remain for decades, it’s a skill set that with an expiration date in terms of the utility of having legions of them.

Barack Obama doesn’t know what the word for “wheeling and dealing” is in “Austrian.”

Naturally, this verbal faux pax is generating some good natured ribbing from Glenn Reynolds, Ed Morrissey, and others.  Kate McMillan awards Quote of the Week honors to Mark Steyn for “We now know that Barack Obama, who urged us all to learn a second language, does not speak Austrian.”

Morrissey observes that, “George Bush’s critics rightly roasted him for his tortured syntax and waterboarded grammar, and used it to make the claim that the graduate of both Harvard and Yale was an idiot.”  He’s responded by creating an “Obamateurism of the Day” segment.

While this sort of thing is mildly amusing, people — even smart people — make verbal gaffes quite often.  Public officials who make speeches several times a day, naturally, will make a lot of them.  Since these speeches are often videotaped and almost always attended by reporters, each of these slip-ups will be recorded for posterity.

They prove very little about much of anything but they’re nonetheless constantly seized upon by opponents as signs of, well, something.

Janet Beihoffer has a modest proposal for cutting federal spending and generally restoring some sanity to our financial life.

A simple but effective approach may be to include all the zeroes in these bills, current and future. Far too many people hear “million” and “billion” and “trillion” and simply don’t understand the magnitude of these numbers.

[...]

A wake-up call occurred with one of my former students who worked at the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis. His paper draft wrote numbers as: $4.6 billion, $972 million, etc. I asked him to put in the zeroes: $4,600,000,000, $972,000,000 etc. He showed his paper to his boss, a minimum of a 10 year veteran of the Federal Reserve System. His boss was stunned.

If someone working with that much money gets stunned by looking at the zeroes, maybe, there is hope that if we include the zeroes in all these government programs, we’ll wake up and take measures to protect our nation, its economy and, as Dems like to say, “the children.” For now, our kids are on the hook for a long time for irrational spending by their parents.

Looking at the numbers in all their digital glory does help emphasize how massive they are.  On the other hand, it radically reduces clarity for me in that I have to translate them into English.  Numbers are, after all, just another language.

Photo by Flickr user Rafael Chamorro, used under Creative Commons license.

Jeff Goldstein continues an ongoing debate with Patrick Frey as to whether those who communicate have an obligation to consider how others might misinterpret their meaning. Whereas Patrick takes a surprisingly politically correct view on the matter[*}, Jeff takes the extreme anti-postmodernist position:

To say that words can mean different things to different people even in the same context is to confuse a couple of important issues. First, for a word to be a word, it must have first been signified. Which is to say, we believe we are engaging words in the first place because we believe someone — some agency — has intended to communicate, and in doing so, he has turned a simple sound form (or, in the case of written texts, a squiggle or mark) into language by having attached to it a signified, the thing that gives the now completed sign its (fixed) meaning.

If we didn’t assume such signification took place, we’d have no reason to assume we were dealing with language at all. Which is why when one argues that “words can mean different things to different people even in the same context,” one is really arguing that one can make signifiers do different things in a given context based on their own intent to mean — all the while, ignoring that what they are presuming to resignify by adding their own intent has already been signified by the author or utterer, and so already means.

In the simplest terms, taking someone else’s signs, ignoring their meaning, and then adding your own meaning in place of the original meaning, is NOT interpretation. Interpretation requires that the receiver attempt to decode the message sent by the author. It does not justify replacing the author’s message with one of your own creation and then pretending what you’ve done is anything other than engaged in a bit of creative writing.

My strong sympathies are with Jeff here.   It's both unreasonable and unhealthy for people to have to be constantly on edge whenever they speak or write for fear that some receiver will interpret words meant innocently in some malicious way.

At the same time, however, many words do in fact have mulitple meanings and the intent of the communicator is not always obvious to the receiver.  This is especially true in the written form, where emphasis and tone are much harder to communicate.   Sarcasm, for example, is much harder in writing than orally.

Mass communication is much more subject to misinterpretation than is personal communication.  When a friend, family member, or other individual with whom one has much experience says something, we naturally interpret their words through a contextual filter.  ( And, frankly, we often screw it up even with family members.)   We lack that sort of context with strangers, making it much easier to misunderstand their intentions.

This is something Jeff has undoubtedly experienced as a blogger; I certainly have.  We write individual posts with some expectation that they're being read serially by our audience.   Regular OTB readers can interpret my meaning more easily because they've got a good sense of my attitudes and what I've said about similar circumstances in the past.   But, despite a reasonably large regular readership, most readers of any individual post are likely one-offs or very occasional readers, having followed a link from somewhere else.

I don't have a solution for any of this.  In an ideal world, we'd give our fellow man the benefit of the doubt and presume, absence experience with the individual that he deserves otherwise.  Since we don't live in an ideal world, however, we should probably make reasonable effort to avoid misinterpretation and expect that others will nonetheless be unjustly offended on occasion.

*UPDATE:  Patrick clarifies his position in the comments thusly:  "[I]f you have two equally effective ways to say something, and you know one is likely to offend a reasonable person, you should choose the other way.” That’s pretty much my position as well.

Photo by Flickr user Darwin Bell under Creative Commons license.

I’ve followed the discussion about the Bill Moyers “scandal” (see, for example, today’s (WSJ piece “Bill Moyers’s Name Is Linked to J. Edgar Hoover’s Abuse of Office”) out of the corner of my eye for the last couple of days  and am having trouble seeing what the big deal is.

Basically, as I understand it:

• Back in 1964, then-30-year-old Moyers was an aide to President Lyndon Johnson who carried out orders to assist in some vague way an investigation by then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover about allegations that Motion Picture Association president Jack Valenti was a homosexual.

• Decades later, as a PBS talking head, Moyers is a preening lefty who has “gone on to promote himself as a political moralist, routinely sermonizing about what he claims are abuses of power by his ideological enemies.”

• This constitutes hypocrisy.

Am I missing some key point?

Because, if not, this doesn’t strike me as a particularly big deal.  People’s attitudes change between the time they’re 30 and 70.  They learn from their own mistakes and their other life experiences.  Furthermore, once-respectable views and attitudes become discredited.

In 1964, people trusted government much more than they would a decade latter, owing to Vietnam and Watergate.   So, “trust me, I’m the FBI director and know what’s good for the country” becomes “abuse of power.”

On the issue of homosexuality in particular, I often turn to a single, anecdotal example of how times have changed.   In 1967, lefty folk singer Arlo Guthrie, son of lefty folk icon Woody, released the Thanksgiving classic “Alice’s Restaurant.”  It contained the line, “And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they’re both faggots and they won’t take either of them.”  Within maybe a decade, nobody respectable would use the word “faggot” in public in this manner.  (Although, as frequently happens, the epithet eventually came back into vogue as shock language acceptable for use by people in the targeted group.)

It seems perfectly plausible that young Bill Moyers did something that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time that he’d condemn if it were happening in 2009.