On the dangers of crying wol(o)f

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:48 PM -0500 6/14/05, Mullins, Bill wrote:
>  > -----Original Message-----
>>  From: American Dialect Society
>>  [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Laurence Horn
>>  Sent: Tuesday, June 14, 2005 12:39 PM
>>  To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>>  Subject: On the dangers of crying wol(o)f
>At the risk of taking an already off-topic discussion further into the
>weeds, why should I be compelled, under threat of law, to pay for
>television and radio that I don't necessarily support?  Seems to be a
>free speech issue here that is often ignored.
>
Well, I'm not sure what the point is as to the free speech issue, and
I do acknowledge we're both swinging dangerously in an off-topic
direction, but I will take the opportunity to just

(i) advert to an editorial in today's NYT, posted at
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/15/opinion/15wed2.html
[excerpt:  "Republican lawmakers insist that the budget cuts are only
one of many sacrifices required for fiscal discipline - a truly
laughable contention from a Congress that has broken all records for
deficit spending and borrowing. The pending highway bill alone has
3,800 pet projects (cue Porky Pig, not Oscar the Grouch). These
include $2 billion-plus for two ludicrous "bridges to nowhere" in
rural Alaska, where, incidentally, station officials say public
broadcasting may fade from the air unless the Senate blocks the
House's spiteful cuts."]

(ii) note that it's a question of priorities--myself, I'd prefer
funding an effort to ease the slaughter in Darfur than funding public
broadcasting, prefer funding public broadcasting to funding billion
dollar bridges to nowhere (and similar "pork"), and prefer funding
the latter to funding the rather more costly Iraq war, but I don't
seem to have a line-item veto to delete various federal expenditures
that "I don't necessarily support", and I don't believe Tom DeLay and
his friends have earned one.

(iii) attempt to render this all slightly less OT by observing that
public television and radio support and make available to the public,
among other things, documentaries on American dialects and endangered
languages, programs on the nature of language, and such--in other
words, linguistics and dialectology.  More broadly, it might be
argued that maintaining a strong public broadcasting service is at
least as essential to a civilized community as the manufacture and
deployment of weaponry, sex education programs that mention only
abstinence, public school science courses that give equal time to
science and religion, policies toward energy and the environment that
are dictated by energy corporations,...  I won't argue that here,
however.

Larry



Larry