So, the Muslim murderer of French soldiers and Jewish schoolchildren, goes down in a haze of gunfire. Too bad they couldn’t catch him and interrogate him to find out more about his contacts, but when a mass murderer of children is shot to death, I can’t find it in me to pity the guy. Your mileage may vary.

Mark Steyn, on the Toulouse Jewish school massacre:

Look, pace Ed West, isn’t it just a teensy-weensy little bit to do with Islam? Or at any rate the internal contradictions of one-way multiculturalism? No, it’s not a competition. Most times in today’s Europe, the guys beating, burning and killing Jews will be Muslims. Once in a while, it will be somebody else killing the schoolkids. But is it so hard to acknowledge that rapid, transformative, mass Muslim immigration might not be the most obvious aid to social tranquility? That it might possibly pose challenges that would otherwise not have existed — for uncovered women in Oslo, for gays in Amsterdam, for Jews everywhere? Is it so difficult to wonder if, for these and other groups living in a long-shot social experiment devised by their rulers, the price of putting an Islamic crescent in the diversity quilt might be too high? What’s left of Jewish life in Europe is being extinguished remorselessly, one vandalized cemetery, one subway attack at a time. How many Jewish children will be at that school in Toulouse a decade hence? A society that becomes more Muslim eventually becomes less everything else. 

That’s an interesting remark, the last line, which I’ve highlighted because I’d like to discuss it. In one sense, the statement is meaningless. A society that becomes more Christian eventually becomes less everything else. A society in which more people become alike is a society that becomes more uniform. This is a tautology.

But what Steyn is getting at is the claim that Muslims are uniquely resistant to the ideology of pluralism, which is the glue that holds a multicultural society together. The totalizing claims of Islamic religion, and the fierceness with which many Muslims hold to them, cuts through liberal society like a hot knife through a stick of butter. If Steyn is right, then the degree to which contemporary Muslims become reconciled to modern liberal society is the degree to which they become less authentically Muslim.

I generally agree with Steyn, if only because it’s clear that not every religion or ideology is capable of being absorbed by liberal capitalist society. This is actually in some ways a compliment to Islam. Sayyid Qutb may have been a murdering fanatical totalitarian, but he was not entirely wrong about the way modernism and capitalism would radically transform Muslim societies that embraced them. (Whether or not those Muslim societies so threatened could stand some modernization is a different question.) I wonder, though, to what extent Europe’s experience with its Muslim minority is a local problem. Though we have a problem with the Muslim Brotherhood leading American Islamic institutions, we haven’t seen remotely the problem here that Europe has had. I think this is partly because the US has attracted a far greater percentage of educated Muslims than Europe. It’s partly because they’ve come in much lower numbers, which makes them easier to absorb. And it’s partly because America has a more fluid and open society than European societies. To restate, my  hypothesis is that America has had fewer Muslim immigrants than Europe, and was better able to assimilate the ones we have had. Relatedly, Europe’s problems may stem from the fact that it has had a different class of Muslim emigre (e.g., the Netherlands has been overrun with Moroccan rednecks, not educated middle class Moroccans), has had far more of them to try to absorb than America, and has had fewer cultural resources to facilitate that assimilation.

Thus have the multiculturalist policies of various European countries failed, because the culture of Islam that many of Europe’s Muslim emigres brought with them has proven highly resistant to the pluralist mindset living in contemporary Europe requires. Discuss — and please, resist the urge to resort to Manning’s Corollary:

Manning’s Corollary to Godwin’s Law: In any online conversation about an incident of violence perpetrated by adherents of Islamic fundamentalism, the conversation will inevitably devolve into claims that Christians commit the same type and degree of violent acts, regardless of how demonstrably false that is; further, the claim will be made that past historical violence involving Christians means that present-day Christians are morally incapable of denouncing current violence involving Muslims.

Spotted in the parking lot of the Whole Foods Market in Baton Rouge. You may not be able to see it well enough, but there’s a Confederate flag sticker on the lower right of the back glass, and a sticker for Beretta handguns at the top. Plus rubber boots. Don’t mess with this good ol’ boy’s tofu!

I think the city of New York should just encircle Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood with a fence and call it a zoo. New York magazine reports:

An artist from the Pacific Northwest whose grandfather supposedly released nutria rats into the wild there has made a short animated film defending the hated pests from the ire of the locals. If you’re from Louisiana, where these SOBs live and tear up levees, you won’t be able to watch this thing without cruelly laughing. The filmmaker contends that Washingtonians ought to live and let live with the nutria, because hey, the people who live in the region aren’t native to it either, and are destructive in their own ways. What kind of person anthropomorphizes a destructive pest, and then deploys multiculturalism to defend the varmints?

It is hard to overstate the idiotic sentimentality of this guy’s position. Nutria are voracious and reproduce quickly. They destroy levees and wetlands, the latter by eating even the roots of aquatic plants, eliminating crucial habitat for other species. According to The Nature Conservancy,  “There really isn’t anything good to be said about nutria in the United States. They eat themselves and a lot of other critters out of house and home.”

Plus, they allegedly attack people at Wal-Mart.  The state of Louisiana is trying to get people in Louisiana to develop a taste for them, but I wouldn’t touch the meat of this nasty thing with a gold-plated gumbo spoon. Apparently, though, you can get certain Manhattan editors to swallow anything.

Gawker’s John Cook is ticked at This American Life over the Mike Daisey thing — and grinchily points out that the iconic (and brilliant) radio program has broadcast stories from David Sedaris and the late David Foster Wallace that contained admitted fabrications from their authors. Cook:

Sedaris, Wallace, and Daisey harnessed the power of actuality—the inherent force generated by saying, “I saw it with my own eyes”—to drive their stories. To the extent that they did not actually see it with their own eyes—no matter how internal or inconsequential or funny those stories are—they are liars. And even if the inventions are at the margins, those exaggerated little details are the very moments that lodge in our minds, and make us say, “Hey, did you read that David Foster Wallace piece?” That’s why the David Wain it’s-true-except-when-it-isn’t argument doesn’t wash. If the false parts are essential to making the whole thing work, then the whole thing doesn’t really work. Shave those little cheats out of the “narrative,” and Wallace’s artful accounts of neurosis in the heart of consumer culture lose their edge. Sedaris’ escapades become commonplace. And Daisey’s indignation becomes sanctimony. And if the false parts aren’t essential—why are they there?

I don’t remember when I decided that David Sedaris made things up. I just know that one day, it occurred to me that nobody can have lived a life in which so many funny and weird things happen to them, and in just such a way. I’m still a big fan — he’s a terrific storyteller — but I quit believing that he was anything but a fabulist a long time ago. It turns out that the writer Alex Heard actually fact-checked some of Sedaris’s stuff five years ago, and established that yes, Sedaris really does make significant portions of his stuff up. Which, says Heard, is fine — but there’s a word for this stuff, and it’s called nonfiction. Sedaris is cheating.

I guess it’s strange that this didn’t bother me more. Should it have? Unlike the Daisey attack on Foxconn and Apple, nothing really was at stake in those stories (except, as Heard point out, for the few people maligned by Sedaris’s fabrications). Still, it’s the principle of the thing. As Heard says:

Whether Sedaris understands the difference between fiction and nonfiction is moot at this point–he could label his next book “hallucinations” and it would sell–but the principle still matters. The editors and radio producers who packaged Sedaris’s earlier work certainly understood the difference. They knew that, in our time, nonfiction is bankable in ways that fiction is not. What bugs me is that they milked the term for all its value, while laughing off any of the ethical requirements it entails.

This is something I deal with personally nearly every day. I’m writing a non-fiction book about my sister Ruthie. Almost every time I sit down to work on the narrative, and start sifting through interview notes and my own memories, I run across an occasion in which I wish Ruthie had said this or done that, because it would have made a better story. But, well, she didn’t, and I don’t have license to make this stuff up, even if it better illustrates a truth of her life or her character. I’m really grateful that I chronicled so much of the drama on my blog, because I don’t have to rely on my memory for much of it. There was one key incident that I would have sworn on a Bible happened one way, but that actually did not — and I know this because I wrote down what happened on my blog, the day it did. This kind of thing has been really helpful to me. I have been checking quotes with those quoted, because even though I’m operating almost entirely from transcripts of recorded interviews, I want to make sure I have this stuff right. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect everyone to remember everything with 100 percent accuracy, but I want them, and I want myself, to make every effort to get this as close to accurate as possible. We are presenting this to the public as non-fiction, and I owe it to those who will buy my book, and to the memory of my sister, to tell the truth about what happened, to the best of my memory. If, after it’s published, somebody is able to prove that some event I recount didn’t quite happen that way, I must be able to say with a straight face that it was an honest mistake I worked hard to avoid.

It can be frustrating to be bound by the truth because there are times when I wish the story with my sister were more straightforward. But it turns out that these irritating bits that won’t allow me to tie up the narrative in a neat bow are actually essential to the story I’m telling. Was the way she dealt with cancer an example of unambiguous courage, or did it require a degree of self-deception? That is, was what we all saw as raw courage really the product of Ruthie lying to herself about the seriousness of her own condition? Even the people closest to her aren’t totally sure — or at least they aren’t unanimous in their judgment. And if Ruthie did deceive herself to a certain extent about how sick she was, how is that not still courage? Is a firefighter who runs into a burning building to save children uncourageous if, in order to motivate himself to do his duty in conditions of almost certain death, he tells himself that he’s going to survive the ordeal before him? I don’t think anybody would say so. It would have made my job as a storyteller so much easier if I had been able to say that Ruthie faced her cancer in total, stone-cold knowledge of the dismal odds of survival. But that wouldn’t have been true — and it wouldn’t have been true to the character of my sister, who found the courage to work with troubled children in the classroom every day because she ignored the plain and at times overwhelming evidence that particular kids were wrecks who weren’t going to amount to much no matter what anybody did. Ruthie always tried to see the best in individuals, and in every situation. It’s what kept her going when I would have given up a cause as hopeless.

If I didn’t feel bound by ethical restraint to keep pushing for the real story of my sister’s life, I could have told a simple story of inspiring true grit, and nobody would have complained. It would have given the reader a nice emotional lift, and the handful of people who knew better probably wouldn’t have complained, because the story in the end would have made Ruthie look good, and would have conveyed the deeper truth that she was an incredibly brave person. Instead, I get to tell a complex story of inspiring true grit. Ruthie still looks good, because, in my view, the facts lead you inescapably to the conclusion that she was an incredibly brave person. But by forcing myself to stay true to the facts as I’ve learned them, I’ve had to confront not only a certain mystery in my sister’s character, but also a complexity about human nature, and in the nature of courage. I think the story is going to be so much better for it. I hope so. In any case, whether it is or it isn’t, the book is non-fiction, and that means if I tell readers they’re about to read a true story, a story that’s literally true, then I have an obligation to write what happened, as straightforwardly as I can.

I’m not saying all this to pat myself on the back, but rather to make a point about the importance of truth-telling beyond ethical obligations. What made so many people who didn’t know my sister respond so powerfully (for example) to the story I told about her and the community that rallied to her side was the faith they had that the story I chronicled on my blog was true. And it was. I wish I had a big scene to put into the narrative in which Ruthie and I had cleared up all the messy sibling rivalry between ourselves before she died, but that didn’t happen. I wish I had had that scene in real life, but for reasons that will come out in the narrative, it only happened in a glancing, frustrating way. But that’s how life is, right? But that lack of closure has compelled me to ask questions about our relationship that I wouldn’t have otherwise done, and on two occasions uncovered things Ruthie never told me that reduced me to tears, and let me know that beneath it all, things were okay. That she never could bring herself to say these things to me strikes me as unbearably poignant, given what happened. Anyway, you’ll get all this in the book, if you buy it. The point is, the messy truth that I’ve uncovered is far more interesting, I think, than any neat, Sunday-school-worthy narrative. And I wouldn’t have found these things if I had allowed myself to be satisfied with turning the story of my sister’s life and death into merely a good story, in which, to quote a famous document of our time, “the facts were fixed around the policy.”

James Bamford checks in on what the National Security Agency is up to these days:

Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

In the process—and for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration—the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it’s all being done in secret. To those on the inside, the old adage that NSA stands for Never Say Anything applies more than ever.