Omar at Iraq The Model posts an interesting conversation with an Iraqi doctor about Abu Ghraib.
There are other interesting posts there about Iraqi and Middle Eastern reaction as well.
Sauce For The Goose
Of the people baying for Don Rumsfeld’s head now, I’ll take the ones seriously who were demanding the same of Janet Reno in 1993 after Waco.
[sound=”crickets chirping”]
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Omnipotent and Omniscient?
This kind of obnoxious demagoguery is one of many reasons that I cannot pull the lever for Kerry for president.
Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said Thursday if he were president he would not be “the last to know what is going on in my command…”
Like most or all of Kerry’s promises, there are scant details on how he thinks that he could make such a guarantee.
Supersized Agenda
I heard an interview on NPR last night with the guy who ate McDonalds for a month to prove that it wasn’t healthy to do so, and had many of the thoughts that Jacob Sullum expresses about it.
I wouldn’t enjoy eating exclusively at McDonalds for a month straight, but I could certainly do so and remain healthy (or at least as healthy as I am now). This clown went out of his way to eat as unhealthily (and otherwise live unhealthily) as possible, and then blame the fast food industry for the fact that he gained twenty-five pounds. As Jacob says:
Spurlock easily could have eaten three meals a day at McDonald’s while staying below the 2,500 calories his doctor said he needed to maintain his starting weight of 185 pounds. For instance, an Egg McMuffin, orange juice, and coffee for breakfast; a grilled chicken bacon ranch salad and iced tea for lunch; and a double cheeseburger, medium fries, and diet Coke for dinner total fewer than 1,800 calories. By contrast, Spurlock says he consumed some 5,000 calories a day, while deliberately avoiding physical activity. In short, his experiment proves nothing but basic physics.
It’s The Sex, Stupid
Charles Krauthammer explains why what happened at Abu Ghraib was such a huge setback (hopefully not permanent) to our cause.
…the torture pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib prison could not have hit a more neuralgic point. We think of torture as the kind that Saddam practiced: pain, mutilation, maiming and ultimately death. We think of it as having a political purpose: intimidation, political control, confession and subjugation. What happened at Abu Ghraib was entirely different. It was gratuitous sexual abuse, perversion for its own sake.
That is what made it, ironically and disastrously, a pictorial representation of precisely the lunatic fantasies that the jihadists believe — and that cynical secular regimes such as Egypt and the Palestinian Authority peddle to pacify their populations and deflect their anger and frustrations. Through this lens, Abu Ghraib is an “I told you so” played out in an Arab capital, recorded on film.
Jihadists, like all totalitarians, oppose many kinds of freedom. What makes them unique, however, is their particular hatred of freedom for women.
I continue to be amazed that the left, so supposedly solicitous of women’s rights, continues to support these people. It brings to mind the idiocy spouted by Sunera Thobani during the Afghan war. Apparently there are no evil acts unless they’re acts by the United States, and then they’re evil simply by dint of the fact that we commit them.
And of course, to repeat what I said last week, it’s hard to imagine how the morons in that prison could have done more harm to our prospects for a free Iraq than what they did. The sad thing is that it looks as though a lot of them were simply carrying over business-as-usual habits from being prison guards stateside, which is a devastating commentary on our own penal system.
[Update on Friday morning]
As I said, morons. I don’t know if Rumsfeld should resign over this, but somebody should.
It’s The Sex, Stupid
Charles Krauthammer explains why what happened at Abu Ghraib was such a huge setback (hopefully not permanent) to our cause.
…the torture pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib prison could not have hit a more neuralgic point. We think of torture as the kind that Saddam practiced: pain, mutilation, maiming and ultimately death. We think of it as having a political purpose: intimidation, political control, confession and subjugation. What happened at Abu Ghraib was entirely different. It was gratuitous sexual abuse, perversion for its own sake.
That is what made it, ironically and disastrously, a pictorial representation of precisely the lunatic fantasies that the jihadists believe — and that cynical secular regimes such as Egypt and the Palestinian Authority peddle to pacify their populations and deflect their anger and frustrations. Through this lens, Abu Ghraib is an “I told you so” played out in an Arab capital, recorded on film.
Jihadists, like all totalitarians, oppose many kinds of freedom. What makes them unique, however, is their particular hatred of freedom for women.
I continue to be amazed that the left, so supposedly solicitous of women’s rights, continues to support these people. It brings to mind the idiocy spouted by Sunera Thobani during the Afghan war. Apparently there are no evil acts unless they’re acts by the United States, and then they’re evil simply by dint of the fact that we commit them.
And of course, to repeat what I said last week, it’s hard to imagine how the morons in that prison could have done more harm to our prospects for a free Iraq than what they did. The sad thing is that it looks as though a lot of them were simply carrying over business-as-usual habits from being prison guards stateside, which is a devastating commentary on our own penal system.
[Update on Friday morning]
As I said, morons. I don’t know if Rumsfeld should resign over this, but somebody should.
It’s The Sex, Stupid
Charles Krauthammer explains why what happened at Abu Ghraib was such a huge setback (hopefully not permanent) to our cause.
…the torture pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib prison could not have hit a more neuralgic point. We think of torture as the kind that Saddam practiced: pain, mutilation, maiming and ultimately death. We think of it as having a political purpose: intimidation, political control, confession and subjugation. What happened at Abu Ghraib was entirely different. It was gratuitous sexual abuse, perversion for its own sake.
That is what made it, ironically and disastrously, a pictorial representation of precisely the lunatic fantasies that the jihadists believe — and that cynical secular regimes such as Egypt and the Palestinian Authority peddle to pacify their populations and deflect their anger and frustrations. Through this lens, Abu Ghraib is an “I told you so” played out in an Arab capital, recorded on film.
Jihadists, like all totalitarians, oppose many kinds of freedom. What makes them unique, however, is their particular hatred of freedom for women.
I continue to be amazed that the left, so supposedly solicitous of women’s rights, continues to support these people. It brings to mind the idiocy spouted by Sunera Thobani during the Afghan war. Apparently there are no evil acts unless they’re acts by the United States, and then they’re evil simply by dint of the fact that we commit them.
And of course, to repeat what I said last week, it’s hard to imagine how the morons in that prison could have done more harm to our prospects for a free Iraq than what they did. The sad thing is that it looks as though a lot of them were simply carrying over business-as-usual habits from being prison guards stateside, which is a devastating commentary on our own penal system.
[Update on Friday morning]
As I said, morons. I don’t know if Rumsfeld should resign over this, but somebody should.
Thoughts on the War
A grab bag of thoughts and observations on the news of the past week or so:
(1) The administration still doesn’t seem to fully grasp the seriousness of the damage done by the revelations of abuse in Iraq. For one thing, Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya have been on the case since last year, while administration spokesmen have been denying that anything bad was happening. These revelations give credibility to news sources we are trying to undermine, quite apart from the direct damage of pushing literally hundreds of millions of muslims further into the arms of the islamists. Bush has finally said the word “sorry” but it’s not clear he’s taking any other effective action to undo the damage.
Depressing
Joanne Jacobs has a bunch of testimonials from her readers as to just how worthless high-school, and even college diplomas have become. Particularly dismaying was the inability of young people to do computation without a calculator, or to recognize that an answer was absurd.
Many college students hang on to their calculators much as a young child hangs on to a blanket for security. In my first calculus test, when the professor wouldn’t let calculators used, five of 25 students walked out and 10 other students never came back to class. We ended up with nine students at the end of the semester. I have seen the same problem in chemistry, physics and other courses. When courses get hard, most students just drop instead of studying harder.
Momentum
The X-Prize finally has a name (as did the Orteig Prize). It will now be called the Ansari X-Prize, after immigrant Iranian entrepreneurs who have made a major donation to the foundation. They made the announcement today, the forty-third anniversary of Alan Shepherd’s first suborbital flight and first flight of an American into space.
[Hat tip to Clark Lindsey]