How will we know if the attempt to reconstruct Iraq is failing? This is a serious question. With as much hysterical anti-Iraq-war, anti-Bush-Administration fabrication going in the media as there has been, it’s tempting for a rational person to dismiss every negative report as just another load of Michael Mooronism and dismiss it. That would… Continue reading Kurds in the Coal Mine
Month: July 2005
Love and Severus Snape
OK, I’ve read “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” and enjoyed it I have a theory about what will happen in Book 7. Potential spoilers about Book 6 follow!.
Sowing Dragon’s Teeth
David Lucas’s op-ed in the Knoxville News-Sentinel combines with this story about active-duty military personnel criticizing Edward Kennedy and Dick Durbin’s “gulag” rhetoric about Guantanamo Bay to suggest something interesting about the long-term political impact of the Iraq War. Historically, one of the major byproducts of American wars is politicians. While it’s rare for a… Continue reading Sowing Dragon’s Teeth
American Empire Redux
A respondent to my previous post on American Empire said “For non-Americans, the concern is not necessarily “does America behave like an empire?”, but “can we trust it not to act like one when the chips are down?†(e.g. if oil supplies dwindle to the point where the US economy is at real risk). The answer… Continue reading American Empire Redux
American Empire
The American Left, and some of the Buchananite/isolationist elements of the American Right, have spent a lot of time and rhetorical energy fretting about the “American Empire”, and/or the “global system of American hegemony”. Lee Harris has written a very informative essay on Hegemony vs. Empire in which he points out that these two words… Continue reading American Empire
The Hollywood Left is from Venus?
David Koepp, the screenwriter behind the current blockbuster movie War of the Worlds has said: “the Martians in our movie represent American military forces invading the Iraqis.” As InstaPundit observed, you just can’t make this stuff up. It’s hard to lampoon the Hollywood left any more, because they keep uttering inanities that venture beyond far,… Continue reading The Hollywood Left is from Venus?
Gayness is hard, lesbianism soft
Fascinating. This NYT article bears out a suspicion I’ve held for a long time about the plasticity of sexual orientation. The crude one-sentence summary is that, if you go by physiological arousal reactions, male bisexuality doesn’t exist, while female bisexuality is ubiquitous. I’ve spent most of my social time for the last thirty years around… Continue reading Gayness is hard, lesbianism soft
Punishment, Coercion, and Revenge
Because I’m both both a libertarian and famous for conducting a successful propaganda campaign, libertarian activists sometimes come to me for tactical advice. During a recent email exchange, one of these criticized me for wishing (as he thought) to “punish” the Islamist enemies of the U.S. and Western civilization. I explained that I have no… Continue reading Punishment, Coercion, and Revenge