Govindini Murty has a nice little summary of how successful this year's Liberty Film Festival was. There are also a few nice details about the lame attempts of left-wingers to protest the event.

And, of course, she points out that there's irony to spare when David Horowitz gets up to talk about the need for diverse viewpoints in academia and is shouted down by people who yell that he has "no right to speak." This is what it means to be a "tolerant" progressive these days.

One of my proudest achievements this year—along with getting to talk to Larry Elder—was learning how to pronounce Govindini's and Jason's names properly. For Govindini's first name, you take the word "divinity," and merely replace the first syllable with "go." The trick is to place the greatest accent on the second syllable (like everyone else, I kept trying to pronounce it as if it were an Italian name; silly). And in Jason's last name, Apuzzo, the "u" is an "uh" rather than an "ooh" sound.

Seriously, this was a very successful event, with all of those "first time glitches" ironed out since the premier festival. One of the best things about it was that the panels—most notably, the discussion on Hollywood's blacklist in the 1950s—contained a broad spectrum of political opinion, including mainstream liberal and far left. Though the impetus behind this enterprise was the bald fact that a lot of libertarian and conservative ideas are shut out of the "respectable" entertainment industry, the conduct of the organizers was to keep their intellectual integrity by getting as many voices as possible represented when it's time to debate.

I'll have more write-ups of the films and discussions throughout the week, but Murty and Apuzzo truly hit it out of the park.

Posted by: Attila at 08:58 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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