Really, they only like science when it gives them the “correct” answers.
Category Archives: War Commentary
When Is No-Fly Zone…
…a no-fly zone?
Joe Pappalardo makes the case against one. I’m on record as supporting one (though of course, it was a quick blog post, and I always reserve the right to change my mind), but I was actually being more generic. While the points Joe makes are all valid, what I was really advocating was rendering Colonel Whathisname incapable of attacking civilians from the air. The scenario he lays out would do that just about as well, and at much less cost and risk.
A Hero In Pakistan
Death threats were a constant in Bhatti’s life for many years. He once told me that he had never married because he did not think it would be fair to a wife and children to subject them to this concern. His work was his life: At the end of each day, he left his government Cabinet office and headed over to his office at the All Pakistan Minorities Alliance, where he continued to help Pakistan’s persecuted minorities until late into the night.
“I personally stand for religious freedom, even if I will pay the price of my life,” he had said when he received the USCIRF award. “I live for this principle and I want to die for this principle.”
Sadly, he got what he wanted. I’d like to comfort myself with the thought that this was the work of extremists, but in Pakistan, the extreme is the norm. And they have nukes.
Gee, Ya Think?
Libyan sanctions don’t mean much.
Has there ever been an administration so completely lacking in feck?
[Update a few minutes later]
Useful Idiots
Then and now. Unfortunately, the supply seems to be endless.
Democracy In Egypt
Here’s an example of why there’s a lot more to democracy than voting:
Two million Egyptians jam Tahrir Square to chants of “To Jerusalem we are heading, martyrs in the millions.”
Goody.
He’ll Do That
Don Rumsfeld flummoxes Andrea Mitchell. There was nothing more entertaining during the war than Don Rumsfeld running circles around clueless reporters in the press conferences.
How Heinlein Became A Writer
An interesting anecdote from the thirties. I found this particularly interesting:
Political ignorance also may have hurt Heinlein’s campaign in two other ways. First, Heinlein believed that he was harmed by the fact that the Communist Party had endorsed him. Although a leftist himself at the time, Heinlein was very hostile to the communists in the 1930s, denouncing them as “red fascists” no better than the “brown fascists” of the far right.
As with Heinlein, it was clear to most at the time that fascism and communism were just two slightly different flavors of the same totalitarian political phenomenon, and much of the American left admired both. It’s only the modern left that has developed an amnesia about it (somewhat deliberately, by rewriting history in academia), declaring after the fact that they are political opposites on the simple-minded one-dimensional left-right spectrum.
I will say one thing that was worse, or at least different, about Nazism, though. This morning I heard someone from Libya saying that if reports coming out of there were accurate, that a “genocide” was going on.
No. That word has become devalued in recent decades (partly to minimize what happened to the Gypsies and Jews during the war, and as a way of reducing support for Israel). Killing lots of people is not genocide. Even ethnic cleansing in a region is not genocide. Genocide is the deliberate attempt to wipe out an entire “race” of people (while race is largely a social construct, in this case use it as shorthand for “group of people sharing a large genetic heritage”). Hitler was, I think, unique in his desire to do this. Well, except for modern Islamists.
Well, What Did He Expect?
The military is abandoning Colonel Gadhafy (how many ways are there to spell this homicidal lunatic’s name, anyway?):
The sources said Gadhafi could no longer rely on his military and much of his police. They said the remaining loyalists were his Presidential Guard and special units comprised of foreign mercenaries, many of whom are from the former Soviet Union.
I’ve never understood why, after decades of dictatorship, he never got around to promoting himself to general. No wonder they don’t respect him.
The Libyan No-Fly Zone
Another case made for it.
Oh, and just in case you were getting optimistic about the potential outcome from all the chaos in the Middle East, this might cure that.