Niall Ferguson apologized today for recently making a series of bizarre “off-the-cuff” comments about John Maynard Keynes that were publicized and pretty much universally decried:

I had been asked to comment on Keynes’s famous observation “In the long run we are all dead.” The point I had made in my presentation was that in the long run our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are alive, and will have to deal with the consequences of our economic actions.

But I should not have suggested – in an off-the-cuff response that was not part of my presentation – that Keynes was indifferent to the long run because he had no children, nor that he had no children because he was gay. This was doubly stupid. First, it is obvious that people who do not have children also care about future generations. Second, I had forgotten that Keynes’s wife Lydia miscarried.

My disagreements with Keynes’s economic philosophy have never had anything to do with his sexual orientation. It is simply false to suggest, as I did, that his approach to economic policy was inspired by any aspect of his personal life.

This is a promising apology from a prominent person who made a public misstep, which (as readers of my Terrible Apologies blog well know) is pretty rare. But then Ferguson goes and messes it up:

As those who know me and my work are well aware, I detest all prejudice, sexual or otherwise.

With this sentence, Ferguson effectively excuses himself rather than waiting for the people he offended to excuse him after he has apologized. Others might have said, “We forgive you because you’ve issued a compelling apology and because, of course, we know from our interactions with you or your work that you detest all prejudice.” Or they might not have. But nothing good can come of someone who says something prejudiced then proclaiming that he isn’t at all prejudiced. It just rings impossibly hollow when someone says, “I’m obviously not racist …” or “I am well known for having a high opinion of several Jews ….”

Whatever comes next is bound to be bad news.

If you’ve done something wrong, it’s best to simply say, “I’ve done something wrong and I’m terribly sorry for it” rather than to explain that you’re really not the sort of person who does these wrong things. If you’re really not that sort of person, you either wouldn’t have said the sort of offensive thing you said or people who know you would be rushing forward to explain that you’re really not this sort of person.

In short, excusing yourself in the middle of “An Unqualified Apology” really just provides a big qualifier for that apology.

The geniuses at Breitbart.com are proud of Ben Shapiro for defending his lack of understanding of the undercurrent of fear and hatred of the Other in America in an interview with Piers Morgan the other day. They’re so proud they put it on their website with a transcript. Here’s the quote that really sums up the whole interview:

SHAPIRO: I understand, I wear a yarmulke on TV, right? There’s a lot of anti-Semitism, there are people who are killed and anti-Semitic attacks. You know, per capita, as many hate crimes against Jews as as against gays in this country. America is not an anti-Semitic country and I’m not a hero for wearing a yarmulke. Being who you are in 2013 America is what America is about. It is not heroic to be who you are publicly. I’m glad for Jason Collins if it makes him feel like he’s going to have a happier life now. But, it does not make him a hero to be who you are because America is not a homophobic country.

A shorter version of this quote looks like this: ”There’s a ton of dangerous anti-Semitism in America but that doesn’t make America an anti-Semitic country; there’s also a ton of dangerous homophobia in America but that doesn’t make America a homophobic country. So Jews and gays shouldn’t worry about anything. Why? Because I say so.”

An even shorter version looks like this: “I feel comfortable being myself in public; this means that everyone else feels the same way about themselves.”

It apparently doesn’t occur to Shapiro at any point during this interview that he wrote an entire book about how conservatives can’t freely express themselves in public; the subtitle of that book is “How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences Americans.”

I wonder if Shapiro thinks conservatives who express their beliefs in public are heroes. Wait, we know he does.

And why does he think so? Probably because they aren’t afraid of being themselves in public despite the “Culture of Fear and Intimidation [that] Silences Americans.”

I wonder if hypocrisy is heroic for Shapiro?

Last month, three judges on the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit deemed a Virginia anti-sodomy law unconstitutional. The provision, part of the state’s “Crimes Against Nature” law, has been moot since the 2003 US Supreme Court decision overruled state laws barring consensual gay sex, but Virginia has kept the prohibition on the books.

Now Virginia attorney general and Republican gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli is asking the full 4th Circuit to reconsider the case. Cuccinelli wants the court to revive the prohibition on consensual anal and oral sex, for both gay and straight people. (The case at hand involves consensual, heterosexual oral sex.)

As someone who writes about heroes and heroism, it’s always challenging when a hero does something that so obviously tarnishes his legacy:

Lech Walesa, Poland’s communist-era democracy campaigner, said homosexuals shouldn’t demand more rights and gay legislators should sit “behind a wall” in Parliament, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Said Welesa: “They need to know they are a minority and adjust to smaller things instead of rising to the greatest heights, taking peak time, organizing the biggest provocations designed to spoil others or pick up people from the majority.”

He added that he refuses to accept public gay-rights marches that “coax my children and grandchildren.”

There is good reason for people to be angry with Walesa for his comments; they are offensive and narrow-minded. They might very well cause people to reevaluate what they think of Walesa today.

But what people shouldn’t do is revise history to change the way they think about Walesa’s activism in the 1970s and 1980s. Walesa’s actions in Poland at that time were heroic and his behavior today doesn’t make them any less heroic, even if they make him less desirable a figure for us to celebrate today.

The problem of heroes is not — as my old friend Michael Tofias says — that they don’t exist; in some sense, it’s that they keep existing. We would have an easier time with our heroes if they did some impressive deed and then simply vanished.

Walesa acted heroically, accepting a great deal of risk to push for democracy in Poland, but he remained very much in the public eye thereafter. It would be fantastic if he was, today and on every issue, just as heroic and forward-thinking as he was many years ago on a single issue. But, clearly, he isn’t. As an advocate for human rights, shouldn’t he know better? Of course he should. The best of our heroes, the ones for whom we yearn, are those who are always in the right about everything.

But a list of those heroes is very, very short.

For months now, the French-language twittersphere has lit up with a rash of racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic tweets using the hashtags #UnBonJuif (a good Jew), #SiMonFilsEstGay (if my son is gay), and #SiMaFilleRamèneUnNoir (if my daughter brings home a black guy).

Last fall, under pressure from French advocacy group Union of Jewish Students (UEJF), Twitter agreedto remove some offensive tweets. In October 2012, at Berlin’s request, Twitter also suspendeda German neo-Nazi account based in the city of Hanover, the first time the company had responded to such a government request.

However, at the time, the UEJF also wanted identifying information of the perpetrators, which Twitter was not prepared to give up. So the group went to court to force the issue.

On Thursday, the Grand Instance Court in Paris ordered Twitter to identify the authors of anti-semitic tweets by creating a mechanism (Google Translate) to alert French authorities to “illegal content,” on its French site “in a visible and easily-accessible [way].”

In the U.S., of course, this would be a complete non-starter. If you want to write racist, homophobic, or anti-Semitic things on Twitter, we think you have the right to do so without fear of punishment by the government. Some people in the U.S. think that’s insufficient protection and that there shouldn’t be any consequences at all for hate speech online. They’re wrong, of course; people are free to write whatever they’d like online and I’m free to repost their words or write about what they’ve written.

But in Europe, freedom of speech isn’t sacrosanct … or, to be more specific, hate speech isn’t protected there in the way that it’s protected here. And so we see the French courts are now ordering Twitter to turn over information about those who use the social network to spread racist, homophobic, or anti-Semitic messages, presumably to prosecute them.

It’s not our way to deal with hate speech … but it’s certainly a way to do it. American racists, homophobes, and anti-Semites are no doubt breathing a sigh of relief as they take to Twitter today.

HT: Jordan Soliz.

Dean Chambers, the man who garnered praise from the right and notoriety on the left for his “Unskewed Polling” site, admitted today that his method was flawed. 

“Nate Silver was right, and I was wrong,” Chambers said in a phone interview.

No word, though, on whether Chambers now believes Silver to be “a real man.”

Shorter Dean Chambers in the Arlington Conservative Examiner: Nate Silver is wrong about polling because he’s not a real man:

Nate Silver is a man of very small stature, a thin and effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice that sounds almost exactly like the “Mr. New Castrati” voice used by Rush Limbaugh on his program. In fact, Silver could easily be the poster child for the New Castrati in both image and sound. Nate Silver, like most liberal and leftist celebrities and favorites, might be of average intelligence but is surely not the genius he’s made out to be. His political analyses are average at best and his projections, at least this year, are extremely biased in favor of the Democrats.

HT: Justin Green.

Former boy genius and current Breitbart.com columnist Ben Shapiro has figured out why things went so terribly wrong in Libya and, taking some time away from facing “the political liberals head-on” and “exposing the leftist tilt of the professoriate on college campuses,” he helpfully published his findings at Townhall.com:

Ask any sane person in America whether it would be a good idea to send our ambassador in Libya to Benghazi without a security team. They’d tell you immediately that we need security around our ambassador in a hellhole like Benghazi. Obama knew that. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton knew that.

But they didn’t care. They thought it was far more important to make nice with the native population than to keep our ambassador safe. They thought that the Arab Spring was a nice, happy little uprising, complete with gay bodyguards to apply to protect the ambassador. Really. An ad placed in Libya — Libya! — for the ambassador’s security team made it clear that members of a same-sex marriage would be accepted.

No gay men applied. But the Libyan security team did tell the terrorist mob just where to find the ambassador. And now he’s dead.

No, seriously. The reason that Christopher Stevens was murdered was because the Obama administration allowed gay men to apply for his security team. Of course, no gay men applied … but obviously just mentioning gay men is sufficient to spur terrorists to action.

As David Frum points out, “Some days you read something where you can only whistle and salute. This is one of those days.”

In all seriousness, does Shapiro not have a single honest friend who will read his writing before he publishes it online and tell him he might want to rethink his thesis? Not one?