digamma.net - notes

Instapundit approvingly links to this post and quotes this paragraph:

The really interesting thing about the Alibhai-Brown piece lies elsewhere: in it, and in the dismissive response it provokes in some of us, we can see a deep clash, at some subterranean level, of great tectonic plates in our moral thinking.

I wish he hadn’t stopped there, though:

On the one hand, there is the very powerful combination of multiculturalism and the discourse of human rights, which has dominated so much of our thinking about how we as individuals, and also the state, should treat members of the various groupings which make up a diverse society like our own. And, on the other hand, there are the needs and demands of the whole of a liberal-democratic society, including its need to be protected from those who seek to undermine or destroy it. On the one hand, the insistence on protecting the individual’s rights regardless of the common good; on the other hand, the desire to protect all of us from deadly threats.

That’s as good a definition of libertarianism vs. statism as any. Self-proclaimed libertarian that he is, it’s obvious which side Reynolds must be on.

Right?

Can it?

America’s future has become an Orwellian nightmare of ultra-liberalism. Beginning with the Gore Presidency, the government has become increasingly dominated by liberal extremists.

In 2004, Muslim terrorists stopped viewing the weakened American government as a threat; instead they set their sites on their true enemies, vocal American conservatives. On one dark day, in 2006, many conservative voices went forever silent at the hands of terrorist assassins. Those which survived joined forces and formed a powerful covert conservative organization called “The Freedom of Information League”, aka F.O.I.L….

The New York City faction of F.O.I.L. is lead by Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North, each uniquely endowed with special abilities devised by a bio mechanical engineer affectionately nicknamed “Oscar”. F.O.I.L. is soon to be joined by a young man named Reagan McGee.

This has the potential to be the greatest comic book ever.

(Via Tom Tomorrow.)

Ladies and gentlemen, Neal Boortz:

Members of the black community in Miami are outraged at a news release advertising a “Ghetto Style Talent Show” that featured a water melon eating contest. Will they be similarly outraged if their kids don’t speaking proper English, get good grades and stay out of trouble? Probably not.

Emphasis mine.

What are we going to do about this crisis of literacy in the white community?

Who is the latest cultural renegade to visit Iraq and complain that the media aren’t telling the full story of how horrible the situation is there?

You guessed it: Jessica Simpson.

Ben Shapiro is a deeply confused young man.

So most Americans were perfectly willing to go along with law enforcement officials who suggested that bags should be searched at subway stations in Washington, D.C. and New York. Yes, we’d prefer that police target those of Muslim religious persuasion for searches: After all, bombers tend not to be middle-aged white women from Kansas or elderly Asian men. Random searches are worse than useless, because they provide the illusion of security.

I was with him through most of that paragraph, but then….

But that doesn’t mean we should resist police enforcement or lobby against further enforcement.

We shouldn’t lobby against furthering policies that are…. worse than useless?
The rest of it isn’t funny, just sad.

If we live in a safe, secure country – if we rid ourselves of threats domestic and foreign – there is no need for harsh safety precautions. Habeas corpus was restored after the Civil War. Free speech protections were strengthened in the aftermath of World War I. Japanese internment ended after World War II. Temporary safety measures remain in force only as long as safety is threatened. If civil libertarians undermine such measures, they threaten our safety – and temporary measures become more and more permanent. The only way to fully restore civil liberties is to defeat our enemies.

The Civil War ended when the South surrendered. World War I ended when the Cental Powers surrendered. World War II ended when the Axis Powers surrendered. This “war” will only be over when the government says it is. Or when there’s no one in the whole world who wants to set off a bomb in the US.

No, wait - the war is over! All that’s left is a “struggle". Can I get on the subway in peace now?

This isn’t worth it. From now on, I’m only reading Ben Shapiro if he’s talking about sex.

Radley Balko has the full list of food products warned against by the dreaded Center for Science in the Public Interest.

In this piece, I can only conclude that Cathy Young is being intentionally obtuse about antiwar arguments.

Here in the United States, the initial wave of sympathy and outrage was quickly followed by attempts to pin the blame on the West, and on America in particular. In a letter to The New York Times published on July 9, one New Yorker proudly described his comments to a Dutch television news crew that interviewed him on the New York subway immediately after the bombings. When asked if he believed New York would be attacked again, he replied in the affirmative. Why? “Because the US is hated now more than ever. Even some of our allies sort of hate us.” And why is that? “We invaded Iraq, which has never attacked us or declared war on us.”

In other words: If we’re attacked again, it will be our fault (just as, presumably, the London bombings are the fault of British Prime Minister Tony Blair for lending his support to the war in Iraq).

If you leave your door unlocked, you increase the chances you’ll get robbed. If you get robbed, it isn’t your fault, and I don’t sympathize with your robbers. But I still suggest strongly that you lock your damn door.

Maybe Young should have read the anti-American rantings of these radical leftists:

New investigations by the Saudi Arabian government and an Israeli think tank — both of which painstakingly analyzed the backgrounds and motivations of hundreds of foreigners entering Iraq to fight the United States — have found that the vast majority of them are not former terrorists and became radicalized by the war….

An analysis of 154 foreign fighters compiled by a leading terrorism researcher found that despite the presence of some senior al-Qaida operatives, “the vast majority of non-Iraqi Arabs killed in Iraq have never taken part in any terrorist activity prior to their arrival in Iraq.”

As Matthew Yglesias notes, if we ever get finished in Iraq, we won’t have killed all of these fighters. Where, I wonder, does Young think they’ll go after that?

A lot of anti-Bush blogs have linked to this list of quotes from 1999 by Republicans criticizing the Kosovo operation. The most notable is probably this one:

“You can support the troops but not the president”
-Representative Tom Delay (R-TX)

Democrats are right to point out the hypocrisy of Republicans who nowadays accuse anyone skeptical of the war in Iraq of treason. But the thing about hypocrites is that they’re always right at least once.

To what, I wonder, was Delay’s statement a response? In the golden age of free expression we experienced under President Clinton, surely no one would intimate that opposing his war was a failure to support the troops!

Secretary of State Madeline K. Albright said she was particularly upset that “somehow the rules that have existed for many years about criticizing the president when he’s abroad seem to have been broken.”

“I found that very unseemly and unbecoming to members of Congress,” Albright said….

Sen. Robert G. Torricelli (D-N.J.) said lawmakers who raise doubt about Clinton’s motivation are inviting further defiance by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. He called their remarks “as close to a betrayal of the interests of the United States as I’ve ever witnessed in the United States Congress. It’s unforgivable and reprehensible.“

Well, okay, but surely no one would equate opposition to the Clinton administration with sympathy with terrorists!

LESLIE STAHL:

[Ms. Stahl had spent the day with the Michigan Militia.] What I kept hearing from the militiamen there, and I gather this is true among all these so-called “patriots", is the Waco incident. It seems to be their battle cry, it’s their cause. They say that the feds went into a religious compound to take people’s guns away. They say no federal official was ever punished; no one was ever brought to trial.

I’m just wondering if you have any second thoughts about the way that raid was carried out?
BILL CLINTON:
[irate] Let me remind you what happened at Waco and before that raid was carried out. *Before* *that* *raid* was carried out, those people *murdered* a bunch of innocent law-enforcement officials who worked for the federal government. Before there was any raid, there were *dead* federal law-enforcement officials on the ground.

And when that raid occurred, it was the people who *ran* their “cult compound” at Waco who murdered their own children. *Not* the federal officials. *They* made the decision to *destroy* all those children that were there.

And I think that to make those people heroes after what they did – *killing* our innocent federal officials and then *killing* their own children – is evidence of what is *wrong*…

I cannot believe that any serious, patriotic American can believe that the conduct of those people at Waco justifies the kind of outrageous behavior we’ve seen here in Oklahoma City, or the kind of inflammatory rhetoric that we’re hearing all across the country today. It’s wrong. [emphasis mine]

When Clinton starts his response, “The Branch Davidians did bad things", it’s his own version of George W. Bush’s classic non-sequitur “We were attacked on September the 11th.”

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - the next time a a Democratic president gets us into a pointless war and takes away our civil liberties in the process, I really hope Democrats are as upset as they are now.

Like TAP’s Mark Leon Goldberg, I’ve stayed one block from the exact spot in Tavistock Square where the #30 bus exploded last week. In fact, I was able to dig up a picture of myself and a friend with the devastated block in the background. As my dad wrote in a tongue-in-cheek email about our family’s connections to all the bombed locations, “I take these attacks personally.”

Goldberg makes some great points in his post:

The point is that the people who want to kill me by bombing my city’s subway will likely be the children of Muslim immigrants to Western Europe. For, like Bouyeri (and the Madrid bombers, for that matter), those guilty of the mass murder in London last week were home-grown children of Muslim immigrants to Western Europe. Thus, the loose talk that Matt’s been flagging by champions of the Iraq War about how the appropriate response to London is to invade this or that Middle Eastern country is not only idiotic, but patently dangerous.

Rather, a more appropriate course would be to talk about demographic trends in Europe and the complicated process of integrating generations of Muslim immigrants into the fabric of mainstream society. Incidentally, this is something that the United States handles with generally greater ease than Western Europe. And while it may not earn conservative pundits the knee-jerk plaudits from their sycophants, raising these questions will have a far greater impact on American security than the number of countries we invade in the Middle East.

One would think American conservatives would take heart in the idea that the US does a better job than Europe at assimilating immigrants from diverse cultures, in part due to our relative lack of a welfare state, and that this assimilation makes us safer from terrorism. But then again, America doesn’t seem to have any conservatives anymore.

Unlike most of my fellow ideological travellers, I didn’t really have a problem with the Kelo v. New London decision. Make no mistake - I’m against eminent domain. But bad policy can be constitutional and good policy unconstitutional.

I saw Kelo as not only about a state government’s power to seize property, but also about the federal government’s power to tell states what they can and can’t do. Had the decision gone the other way, it would have disempowered the state of Connecticut, which would be good, but only by empowering Washington, which would be bad.

Now via Reason’s Jacob Sullum, I see that the governor of Connecticut and some of its legislature are calling for a moratorium on eminent domain for economic development projects while they consider changing the state’s laws.

If the laws get changed to restrict eminent domain powers, then Kelo will have been a success after all - a good constitutional decision provoking a good public debate leading to good policies.

I want to know who wrote this and this, and I want to know what he has done with Paul Krugman.

I am not one to expect leftists to denounce every idiotic statement from every Ward Churchill. But Paul Krugman is America’s premier Democratic pundit. He is proposing god knows what laws to control our diets (using the anti-smoking campaigns as a positive comparison), and there’s not a word on the subject from a single one of my favorite leftist blogs (and at this stage, Hit and Run is about as far right as my sympathetic blog-reading gets).

No, wait. One of them refers to “a delicious side of pork ribs.”

I smell a corporate shill for the food industry!

Michael C. Dorf, in the American Prospect:

The liberals were joined in Raich by Scalia and Kennedy, who had previously sided with Rehnquist, O’Connor, and Thomas in reading the scope of congressional power to regulate interstate commerce more narrowly. Although many liberals were dismayed by the bottom line in the medical marijuana case, liberal Court-watchers were relieved, for we understood that the states’ rights counter-revolution that Rehnquist had started would no longer pose much of a threat to the Endangered Species Act and other environmental legislation.

That sense of relief will be short-lived if the Court overturns Roe and then relies on the medical marijuana precedent to uphold congressional power to ban abortion nationwide, even in the states that permit it.

Boy, unlimited government sure seemed like a really good idea at the time, didn’t it?

For the first time in my adult life, I’m not spending the 4th of July in the US. I am, however, in the country that created the statue of Liberty, so that has to count for something.

America, fuck yeah.