Presumably, Islamic clerics consider women so inherently degenerate that they have less distance to fall, as it were.

Posted at August 14, 2006 2:40 PM in response to Qaradawi on Homosexuality

Nobody, I think, will claim that Napolean or the Wehrmacht had insufficient Will.

Well, *Hitler* claimed that the Wehrmacht had insufficient will, and that this lack was why they kept failing to beat the Russians in 1943, and 1944, and 1945 ....

The "will, dammit!" theory is not logically refuted by Hitler's being its big exponent, but still.

Posted at July 10, 2006 12:36 PM in response to The Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics

Wow. Wouldn't the better analogy be between the 1956 Hungarian uprising and the 1991 Shiite uprising?

The U.S. in both cases (1) encouraged the revolt, (2) sat on its hands after the revolt, and (3) watched the Forces of Evil destroy the revolt.

Posted at June 23, 2006 12:26 PM in response to Worst. Analogy. Ever.

See, that's just the thing. I'm *in* Mississippi, and I can't imagine Barbour's losing a single vote over this. Even the white Republicans are used to the Repenting Our Sins Of Yesteryear narrative, and this time we wouldn't even need to put any 80-year-olds on trial with transcript testimony of long-dead witnesses.

So I think, this time, the answer isn't so much "it's Mississippi" as "it's Barbour."

Posted at May 5, 2006 6:55 AM in response to Law and Order

Can't agree with you, Matt. So Robespierre killed fewer? That overlooks (1) the provincial Terror, which under the aegis of the Parisian gov't killed many thousands in the provinces;

and (2) the fallacy of scale, best illustrated by the old joke about the tycoon who offers a beautiful young lady $1M to sleep with him, and when she accepts, lowers the offer to $500.00. "What kind of woman do you think I am?" "My dear, we have already established what *kind* of woman you are; now we are merely haggling over price."

The example of Robespierre, Saint-Just, etc. was available to Lenin and his cohort. Worse murderers existed before & since, but that is no reason to let Robespierre off, or to deny him his seat in the Pandemonium of political murder.

Posted at April 23, 2006 1:21 PM in response to Sticking up for Robespierre

That's nothing. Western men have been outsourcing their 12-year-old-vagina needs to Thailand for, like, *years* now.

(Ewwww ... now I just *know* that I could google around and find some libertarian economist's argument against the age of consent. I hate these intuitions.)

Posted at April 21, 2006 1:44 PM in response to Outsourcing Wombs

I was citing James Fallows earlier in a vain attempt at hope, so let's hear Fallows on why our current threats are hopeless:

Perhaps the American and Israeli hard-liners know all this, and are merely bluffing. If so, they have made an elementary strategic error. The target of their bluff is the Iranian government, and the most effective warnings would be discreet and back-channel. Iranian intelligence should be picking up secret signals that the United States is planning an attack. By giving public warnings, the United States and Israel “create ‘excess demand’ for military action,” as our war-game leader Sam Gardiner recently put it, and constrain their own negotiating choices. The inconvenient truth of American foreign policy is that the last five years have left us with a series of choices--and all of them are bad.

In other words, either we're dolts at negotiating (not unlikely), or the sabers are rattling because we're getting ready to unsheath them.

Posted at April 5, 2006 3:11 PM in response to Want Another War?

I hope Arnold's right.  I keep clinging to James Fallows's cover story for the Atlantic on what to do about Iran--the conclusion appeared to be "military action won't work, but scaring the Iranians might."

 Arnold is probably also right, however, that the Iranians won't scare.  It's a win-win for the leadership whether we bomb or not.  And a land war would be *bad craziness.*

Posted at April 5, 2006 7:04 AM in response to Want Another War?

Y'all are forgetting the President's Article II power to suspend such deadlines when they would have politically damaging results, because anything that embarrasses the President is also helping the terrorists win.

Posted at April 3, 2006 12:58 PM in response to The Missing Report

I think "metonymy" is what we're going for here?

Posted at January 21, 2006 2:21 PM in response to Syndecdoche Strikes Again!