Apr 24, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
If you really believe that all sexual activity between consenting adults should be legally permitted, you ought to object to laws against incest (when no child is involved) and polygamy too. (The adultery example doesn't really fit, since adultery involves a usually nonconsenting third party, the betrayed spouse.)
The real point here is that except for a few radical libertarians, hardly anyone actually accepts the principle that the government must never regulate private, consensual sexual behavior. What regulations one finds acceptable or desirable is a matter of custom and tradition as much as principle. And custom and tradition are subject to change. [James Taranto, "Best of the Web Today," 4/23/03]
See? There's no principle at all here; it's all abject second handedness. What's actually right or wrong, or what the facts are, is not important; just follow custom and tradition--i.e., what other people think. (The ad hominem shows only that he has no case of his own: as if sneering about "radical libertarians" or their alleged small numbers is at all relevant to the truth or falsity of the position he's criticizing.)
We have the Founding Fathers to thank for the fact that America was founded on the rejection of custom and tradition, and that it protected individuals' ownership of their own lives from the kind of morally empty majoritarianism Taranto is espousing here.
Apr 23, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
Anti-abortion activists who seek to turn the Laci Peterson tragedy into a trial on abortion are, at root, no different from the left-wing activists who seek to prosecute people for "hate crimes" as opposed to normal crimes.All that justice requires for Laci Peterson -- who was pregnant at the time of her murder -- is that her killer be tried, convicted, and appropriately punished. There need be no extra penalty for killing her fetus. The fact that her own life was terminated is enough reason to convict and punish her killer.
Anti-abortion activists are exploiting the murder of an innocent life to advance their "cause" in favor of unborn not-yet-life.
In a similar way, left-wing activists exploit the deaths of innocent victims at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan and others to advance their "cause" in favor of special "rights" for those in politically correct minority groups.
When will people learn? Murder is murder. You don't have to create special or nonexistent categories. Our justice system should not permit such irrational distractions.
Apr 22, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
This has got to make somebody's list of most idiotic proposals of the last decade:
An American-led international trusteeship would take control of the areas of the West Bank and Gaza now in the hands of the Palestinian Authority....Under the proposal, 10,000 British, Australian and Canadian troops, under American command, would take over the anti-terrorism operations that are now handled by Israeli forces in the West Bank and Gaza. The scenario is outlined by a man who served as Mr. Clinton's assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, Martin Indyk, in an article in the May-June 2003 issue of Foreign Affairs. [New York Sun, 4/22/03]
The Israelis can't do it, but we can? And are we, like Christ, to suffer in place of others--to take the terrorist attacks upon ourselves? Where are all the people yelling "Quagmire!" when you need them? This sort of thing is what comes from thinking that problems can be solved by means of self-sacrifice. And the result is: Sacrifice.Apr 22, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
Even as Errol Louis in the New York Sun today scornfully dismisses Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction as a "rationale" for war that is being undercut by "the fact that no such weapons have yet been found," we get this--and it's in the New York Times to boot:
A scientist who claims to have worked in Iraq's chemical weapons program for more than a decade... led Americans to a supply of material that proved to be the building blocks of illegal weapons, which he claimed to have buried as evidence of Iraq's illicit weapons programs. The scientist also told American weapons experts that Iraq had secretly sent unconventional weapons and technology to Syria, starting in the mid-1990's, and that more recently Iraq was cooperating with Al Qaeda, the military officials said.
The Americans said the scientist told them that President Saddam Hussein's government had destroyed some stockpiles of deadly agents as early as the mid-1990's, transferred others to Syria, and had recently focused its efforts instead on research and development projects that are virtually impervious to detection by international inspectors, and even American forces on the ground combing through Iraq's giant weapons plants....Military officials said the scientist told them that four days before President Bush gave Mr. Hussein 48 hours to leave Iraq or face war, Iraqi officials set fire to a warehouse where biological weapons research and development was conducted.
The officials quoted him as saying he had watched several months before the outbreak of the war as Iraqis buried chemical precursors and other sensitive material to conceal and preserve them for future use. The officials said the scientist showed them documents, samples, and other evidence of the program that he claimed to have stolen to prove that the program existed. [New York Times, 4/21/03]
It's almost as if reality is withholding the spectacular proof just long enough to get the skeptics to make unmitigated fools of themselves once again.Apr 22, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
[I]t's not entirely clear Eason Jordan's get-along policy with Saddam didn't kill as many people as it protected. For example, the butcher's psycho boy Udai told Jordan that he intended to murder Saddam's two sons-in-law, who'd defected. Jordan felt he couldn't tip off the guys because it would have jeopardized the life of CNN's translator, who was also present at the meeting. So the sons-in-law returned to Baghdad and were promptly killed. ''I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me,'' whimpers Jordan. But it's not really a ''story,'' is it? It's some other fellow's life. Did Jordan tell his bosses? Was it a corporate Time-Warner decision to go ahead and let these guys get whacked...?
Throughout this period, instead of acknowledging the open secret that he couldn't report fairly from Baghdad, Jordan huffily insisted that he could. If news is the issue, CNN didn't need to be in Iraq. The truth of what was going on was easily ascertained from talking to Iraqis in Amman, Kuwait and London. But that doesn't work for CNN. They sell themselves as a global brand and it's more important to them to be seen to have a Baghdad bureau than to have any real news emerging from that bureau. What mattered to CNN was not the two-minute report of rewritten Saddamite press releases but the sign off: ''Jane Arraf, CNN, Baghdad.'' As Jordan acknowledged, this squalid tradeoff cost real lives. Once the terms of doing business with Saddam were clear, they should have gotten out. But CNN willingly conceded the right to report any news for what it saw as the far more valuable right to be allowed to continue to appear as if it were reporting the news.
CNN's slogan is ''The Most Trusted Name In News,'' which rings a little hollow now. I like the counter-slogans doing the rounds on talk-radio: ''No Blood For News.'' [Mark Steyn, Chicago Sun-Times, 4/20/03]
Apr 21, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
After Mr. Aristide, at the time a Catholic priest of the Order of the Salesians, got dressed for the momentous meeting with Mr. Clinton, "Sister Anne"--that's Anne Auguste, his personal voodoo priestess--went into a trance. She took both hands of the president as she invoked her gods for "the boy," before she dispatched him to the White House. After she blew a mist of an alcohol-laced solution in his face, she said: "Go now, my boy, you are ready." A former Aristide supporter who was in attendance at the ceremony that day said, "Most of those present believed that the voodoo tricks of Sister Anne would have an effect on determining President Clinton's attitude toward their chief. So far they think they were right." ... [Raymond Joseph, New York Sun, 4/18/03]
Joseph still doesn't get it, though: "However, the question remains in the mind of many: Does voodoo really work? To which a philosopher responds: Perception is more important than reality."
Which philosopher is that, and what evidence is there to support that claim?
No, Mr. Joseph, reality ultimately governs perception. That's why there's a difference between honesty and dishonesty; all the dishonest people in the world are impotent to make one lie true. All the fantasy of Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf couldn't create an alternate reality or keep American tanks from rolling into Baghdad. The only thing that gives the witch doctors power is the willingness of others to play along, or, like Mr. Joseph, to play along with those who play along.