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Hullabaloo on technicalities
and executing innocent people:

Please, law and order types, please spare me any more whining about somebody getting off on a technicality. You live by technicalities, whether it’s conflicting deadlines for counting votes or arbitrary cut-off dates for claims of actual innocence. And worse, you do it in the name of efficiency. At least the laws protecting defendents are in place to keep the country from turning into a lawless police state. You guys just want to make the trains run on time.

David commenting on
an Eschaton post about “the anti-war
left not being serious”, cuts right through the bullshit:

It has become a tenet among the “I’m a reasonable lefty” crowd to say that the left needs to deal “seriously” with foreign policy. No more knee-jerk opposition, people; hunker down and admit that sometimes ya gotta kill some (not white) folks to be serious. Talking Points is like this, as is Tapped, as is, it sounds like CalPundit. Someone needs to stop this crap. It’s a quarter step from apologizing for the liberal media. There is nothing serious about Condi Rice lying about aluminum tubes (or airplane attacks, for that matter) and there is nothing unserious in suspecting that the consequences of delusional Bush administration imperialism weigh heavily against supporting war with Iraq. Everybody who says “the left” needs to get serious about foreign policy is a dupe of the O’Reilly tough guy brigade, and I’m pleased Atrios that you call them on it.

Hear, hear. Any leftwinger who supports this administration’s war with Iraq is at best an “useful idiot”. No matter how high minded your arguments are for invading Iraq, you should know that the administration doesn’t share them!
War will not bring democracy to the Iraqi people, because Bush and co aren’t interested in that.

The Road to Surfdom hits the nail on his head: dissent is a right, not a priviledge.

But the flipside of that claim is this: that freedom wouldn?t be worth a toss unless people like those who marched against a war with Iraq, and who argue against it and demand answers of those in power and who do not simply trust Bush or any other government merely to do what they like, such freedom would be meaningless unless dissenters of all types were willing to put up with all the insults and the accusations of treason and of being unpatriotic and actually get out in the streets to put that freedom to use.

Those who sling this accusation??you couldn?t protest if you lived in Iraq?–have the whole thing exactly backwards, or at the very least, haven?t thought it through.

Far from being the lucky recipients of a free society that allows them to protest, those who go out and protest are its guarantors, the only ones who put those freedoms to the test and make sure that they actually mean something. Without their willingness march, the much vaunted freedoms would be wistful abstractions, just as they were in Soviet Russia, a state that possessed one of the lovelier paper guarantees of democratic freedom.

Hullabaloo on the real liberal media and why celebrities speaking out on politics is good:

Oh, and for those who think that celebrities speaking out on politics is silly, think again. It certainly isn’t any more inappropriate than bloggers like us spouting our political opinons all over the blogosphere. We’re a bunch of citizens sufficiently engaged and informed that we feel the need to express our opinions and join the debate. The difference is that celebrities have audiences of millions and I guarantee that the only people who’ll really criticize them for speaking out about politics are those who disagree with them. Frankly, from the level of political discourse I hear on cable news these days, the professional pundits sound so tired and programmed that even I can’t listen to it anymore it’s so boring. Time to change the channel.

Some sucker dragged up The Bell Curver again and Eschaton has to deal with it:

Good researchers, liberal and otherwise, do plenty of work looking at racial differences in achievement. There’s plenty of work looking at the role of parental characteristics, as well as environmental factors, and the degree of their influence on various outcomes. Liberals don’t shy away from these subjects, they just shy away of people who play the little rhetorical game of focusing on intelligence, and the implied immutability, as well as people for whom The Bell Curve is a starting place for this discussion. There is intrinsic racism in both of these, so if liberals shy away from this conversation it’s simply because they’re shying away from bigots. Even some of their detractors fell for this rhetorical game, praising them for their ‘bravery’ for broaching these ‘sensitive issues.’ These issues aren’t sensitive, they’re needlessly and deliberately insensitive in the way that they’re being addressed, and the assumptions implicit in them.

(The premisse of The Bell Curve and similar works, that “intelligent people” are in danger of being swamped by the dull, moronic and stupid is one that has a great attraction to (techno) libertarians, to judge from personal experience. Being part of a subculture that highly praises intelligence and independence, often having experiences of being bullied by the dim and brutish in high school, is it any wonder that The Bell Curve appeals?)