Quick Roundup 48

Rand-om Encounter

I was returning to my car after a celebratory quaff when my eye caught the cover of a slick magazine in a newspaper rack, causing me to laugh out loud.

The title of the magazine? Envy.

Its subtitle? "The comprehensive guide to modern culture."

And why did I laugh? Because Ayn Rand once wrote an essay on modern culture called "The Age of Envy".

I don't think the publisher of this magazine is aware of this fact. Rand's use of the term is not flattering, although she would probably agree that the title is appropriate.

Amit Ghate on VDH

Awhile back, I learned of a Victor Davis Hanson article on Iran which carried in it the following dire warning for Madman Ahmadinejad.

Ever since September 11, the subtext of this war could be summed up as something like, "Suburban Jason, with his iPod, godlessness, and earring, loves to live too much to die, while Ali, raised as the 11th son of an impoverished but devout street-sweeper in Damascus, loves death too much to live." The Iranians, like bin Laden, promulgate this mythical antithesis, which, like all caricatures, has elements of truth in it. But what the Iranians, like the al Qaedists, do not fully fathom, is that Jason, upon concluding that he would lose not only his iPod and earring, but his entire family and suburb as well, is capable of conjuring up things far more frightening than anything in the 8th-century brain of Mr. Ahmadinejad. Unfortunately, the barbarity of the nightmares at Antietam, Verdun, Dresden, and Hiroshima prove that well enough.

So far the Iranian president has posed as someone 90-percent crazy and 10-percent sane, hoping we would fear his overt madness and delicately appeal to his small reservoirs of reason. But he should understand that if his Western enemies appear 90-percent children of the Enlightenment, they are still effused with vestigial traces of the emotional and unpredictable. And military history shows that the irrational 10 percent of the Western mind is a lot scarier than anything Islamic fanaticism has to offer.

I liked the bit about the foolishness of raising the ire of the West, but something about it did not sit well with me for some reason. I filed it away, but never got around to it again.

But Amit Ghate did. I thought he did a good job of getting down to what is wrong with the above.

[T]he key to morally evaluating a war is not by how devastating one side may be, but to decide whether it is fought as a war of aggression or a war of self-defense. The former is to be criticized as irrational and evil, the latter exhorted for its rational recognition of reality. Clearly any US attack on Iran would be one of self-defense, as Iran has been fighting and threatening us since (at least) 1979, and such an attack by the US would therefore be rational and moral, not a reversion to some savage latent tendency.

I concur. And along those lines, I once again recommend this John Lewis essay on the American use of nukes in Japan during World War II.

But I'd Rather Say Something...

As an aspiring opinion writer, I sometimes am astounded at what people can get paid to write. Take this long, blathering piece about redistricting. Wow. Another plan for redistricting that would make incumbents win perhaps less than 98 per cent of the time -- until the politicians figured out how to subvert it. And why? So we can hope to trade in a Republican who favors the welfare state for a Democrat who favors the welfare state?

So long as it remains legal (and popular) for the government to confiscate property and redistribute wealth, politicians will be in a position to dispense favors and so both (a) have a strong interest in promoting the status quo (i.e., their death grip on elected office) and (b) be in a good position to subvert any redistricting scheme. Separate shop and state, so to speak, and redistricting would no longer loom as a major issue.

It's an unpopular view I know, and I'd get paid less by the word. But still. I think my head would explode if I even attempted to write something that gets lost in so many side issues when the central issue is not really all that complicated.

(This is not to say that something interesting about the relationship between such institutionalized vote-buying and incumbency could not be written....)

LA Times: Isolate Hamas

Ed Morrissey notes that the recent murder-suicide in Tel-Aviv has caused even the Times to advocate an aid cutoff to Hamas. From the Left Coast Times:

The horror of Monday's suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, which killed the bomber and nine other people and wounded scores more, presented Hamas with an opportunity to break from its history as a supporter of terrorism. Instead, a spokesman for Hamas, which formed a Palestinian parliamentary government last month, described the attack carried out by another group, Islamic Jihad, as an act of self-defense.

If there was any lingering doubt that the U.S. and Europe were right to ostracize the Hamas government and cut off economic aid, it has been dramatically dispelled. It remains part of the problem, not part of any Arab-Israeli solution.

Morrissey notes further that:

The Times also endorses the security barrier, although it issues the standard concern about the Palestinian innocents that will suffer as a result of the extremists. They neglect to mention that the Palestinians voted for the extremists, the very people who now celebrate the suicide bombing of that oh-so-threatening falafel stand as an act of "self-defense". The Hamas position reveals the triangle-offense strategy about which I wrote yesterday, where at least one of the three powers in the territories remains free to conduct these attacks while providing political cover for the other two as they cluck their tongues but do nothing to disarm the radicals in all three movements. In this case, Hamas can't even bring itself to cluck its tongue, and the Times notes that this bodes ill for the entire notion of the cease-fire that Hamas supposedly respects. This is the leadership that the Palestinian "innocents" selected, and they now will have to deal with the consequences of that choice.

He disagrees with the notion of Israel re-occupying Gaza, which I think it should so after first laying waste to it. The next best thing would be a total blockade of the Hamastani territories and a total withdrawal of foreign aid, something that I have noted (scroll down) is already being undermined by Western governments, including our own.

Yeah. This is an accurate description.

How to give your cat a pill -- in only 18 steps! (HT: Adrian Hester)

Why ...

... I don't drink to excess, and never have. (May not be work-safe in the Bible Belt. HT: Michael Gold)

Off-the-Cuff

I must say that I think I made some decent off-the-cuff comments yesterday on immigration fences. (Scroll up for the original question.)

-- CAV