Uncategorized

Top stories, Thursday 30 Jan

Hullabaloo on why Bush and co are so hard to pin down:

This gets to one of the most frustrating aspects of dealing with this administration. We keep expecting that they will be held accountable for lying, or breaking their promises or misrepresenting their policies or any number of other things we can file under the heading of WTF? But, because they are moving so fast and with such focus we simply cannot assess the damage before they are on to the next item.

They execute, they don?t plan. Their vision is a laundry list. They do not reassess their policy goals, ever, because they do not really have goals. They have an itemized agenda. And, they just keep moving. Like sharks. They don?t have regrets and they never question. They have faith that whatever their team is doing, it must be right and the most important thing is to GET THE JOB DONE.

Top Stories, Friday 24 Jan

Terminus
on the abortion debate:

To me, the abortion issue is so simple that it boggles my mind that we’re still stuck in this
hideously tedious debate. Oh, I know that the issue is complcated on a personal level, on a
moral level, and on a religious level. But on a legal/political level, it’s so simple. Who
chooses, government or pregnant woman? That’s the only issue. Most pro-choicers agree with
pro-lifers that abortion is an awful, awful thing which should be limited, ideally, to cases of
rape, incest, and medical emergency. Pro-choicers, however, understand that it is a complicated
moral issue with no easy answers, and that a woman should be allowed to choose for herself, on
the advice of her physician, how to handle her own body.

Mr Happy on why
the thesis that allowing ordinary citizens to carry concealed handguns lowers the crime rate
may be in trouble:

No, the real killer blow to Lott’s thesis is the recent Stanford Law Review paper by Ayers
and Donohue, Shooting Down the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis (available for download as
separate text and
figures from Ayers’
homepage). The authors show that Lott’s
result is an artifact of a highly unstable statistical regression, that it fails to predict
the subsequent trends in the time series on which it was based, and that Lott’s causal
arguments are contradicted by the data. In other words, it’s shite.

Antidotal on who is
better at promoting women’s rights, conservatives or feminists:

And I don’t understand exactly how Hymowitz thinks conservatives are doing a better job
promoting women’s rights in foreign countries. The standard conservative position on
this seems to be: we’ll liberate oppressed women throughout the world by taking a tough
line on the oppressive fundamentalist Islamic regimes and other illegitimate dictatorships
in which women are persecuted. I believe this to be true–at least as long as undermining
fundamentalist Islamic regimes is also seen to be helpful to American strategic security
interests. But if it becomes strategically useful to deal with these guys, do you really
believe, Lily, that the boys in the White House and Pentagon won’t trade away women’s rights
for the sake of diplomatic convenience in a Washington second? Or am I missing something about
the American relationship with states like Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan? In the 2000
elections, conservatives weren’t reticent about declaring that they didn’t believe in using the
U.S. military to promote any internationalist, human rights, women’s rights, nation-building mumbo
jumbo. We didn’t hear a damned thing about marching on Riyadh from the right back then. The U.S.
military, as Bush put it, should only be used to fight and win war. And the wars that guys like
Bush want to fight are only contingently in the interests of oppressed foreign women.

Top Stories Wednesday 22 Jan

Today is election day in the Netherlands, so few updates.

Junius addresses the
case against war:

The case for war against Iraq is very weak. It has two components, neither of which stand up to
serious examination. The first is that the US is entitled to make war as an act of pre-emptive
self-defence. This clearly fails both because no-one has established that Iraq represents a
credible threat to the US and because the putatively justifying doctrine, if generalized, would
permit states to engage in actions which no right-thinking person would wish to sanction. Most
obviously, a right of pre-emption as loose as that needed to justify a war against Iraq would also
justify either an Indian first strike against Pakistan or a Pakistani first strike against India.
(We philosophers would therefore say that this principle has counterintuitive consequences.)

[…]

The second main strand is the Saddam-is-evil/democratization argument. Saddam is evil, no question
about that. This is a much better set of arguments in principle, but fails because, given the
dramatis personae, there is no good reason to believe that the war will actually pursue democracy.
I’m not a supporter of the view that it is never justifiable to intervene in the internal affairs of
a sovereign state. Sometimes such intervention can certainly be justified. A case in point was the
ousting of Pol Pot by the Vietnamese (where did Dick Cheney stand on that one, by the way?). But an
intervention in the name of democracy or human rights has to meet a very high bar of justification:
after all this is a highly coercive use of state power which is certainly going to deprive many Iraqis
of their lives, liberties and estates and others of their limbs and loved ones.

…