Traffic at Instapundit is holding steady at 3.5 million page views for the month, although he suspects it’ll go down some now that the war is over. I think he should stick with it, though. Heh.
Update: Unless I get another 9,000 visits in the next three hours, I will fall short of last month’s high. It’s sad to peak in one’s second month of blogging. Clearly, the war spiked my traffic much moreso that Glenn’s, which isn’t surprising.
A phenomenon I started to notice a lot during the war, when I was doing a lot of posting on Command Post, was that a lot of the wire services posted as “new” stories that were sometimes several hours old but with maybe a sentence or two changed. This one is a classic example: Pakistan Captures Key al-Qaida Suspect, which I noticed on PoliBlogger dated a couple hours ago, is stamped “8 minutes ago” on AP/Yahoo!News. That’s rather misleading.
The news here is pretty good, though: The guy we think was behind the attack on the USS Cole is the captee.
The latest victim of PC idiocy, use of the word ‘brainstorming’ for fear of offending people with epilepsy.
The term “brainstorming” has become the latest target of political correctness, according to a charity.
Trainee teachers are being told to avoid the word for fear of offending pupils with epilepsy. Instead they are being advised to use “word storm” or “thought shower”.
Dostoevsky must be rolling in his grave.
Since his accursed B*S archives don’t work and this was several posts down, I just copied it all. Go visit him anyway. ;)
Update: Kieran Healy points out that, if you read the rest of the article, it turns out not to be that big a deal. Well, allow me to retort: It’s a lot more amusing John’s way.
Just checked back with the Patio Pundit: Iraq playing card checklist. I have been interpreting it all wrong, in terms of poker. It now appears we’re actually playing Bingo. 9H, 8H, and 7S is all I have left on my card. I’m not sure what the prize is, though.
Stephen Green takes Stanley Kurtz to task for his opposition to gay marriage on the grounds that it undermines the culture.
While I support gay marriage, largely for the reasons Stephen and his first commenter Seth lays out, I don’t have a major problem with Kurtz’ argument.
It’s one thing for society to say that homosexuals have a right to, well, be homosexual. It’s another for it to place its imprimatur on the relationship and say, “We endorse this and put it on par with heterosexual marriage.” Marriage, especially with the current easy divorce laws, is really nothing more than a social stamp on a union. It also conveys certain advantages in terms of taxation (although not always), property rights, and the like. But we grant those priviledges because we as a society have decided that we want to promote the institution. The main rational basis for which is the protection of children. Given that the vast majority–although a shrinking one–of society believes homosexual relations are repugnant, I don’t think they have to give it a ringing endorsement.
So, why do I support it? While I’m not enthusiastic about the idea, I think the argument for homosexual marriage is ultimately the same as for heterosexual marriage: monogamy is better than promiscuity. Not that monogamy isn’t possible without marriage or guaranteed by it. But it does seem more likely. While homosexuals, presumably, aren’t going to have a spate of out-of-wedlock pregnancies from their promiscuity, they are spreading disease. (Also true of promiscuous heterosexuals, although not at the same rate–and heterosexuals can get married under current law.)
So, on libertarian and practical grounds, I think government should get out of the way and legislate on a rational basis. But the conservative argument here isn’t just outdated nonsense, either.
With Elizabeth Smart and her parents looking on, President Bush on Wednesday signed a far-reaching child protection bill that creates a nationwide system to help find kidnapped children and imposes tougher penalties on child abusers, kidnappers and pornographers.
I certainly support the goal of the bill and am not sure it is particularly objectionable in its substance, although I’m not really sure it’s within the scope of what the federal government should be doing.
Also, I find “Amber Alert” to be a bit confusing given the Homeland Security Alert Code system. So, we’re currently signing Amber Alert into law but are currently in Condition Yellow, down from Orange.
NYT reports that Spam Sent by Fraud Is Made a Felony Under Virginia Law. Interesting. I have no idea how this could possibly be enforceable unless both the sender and recipient resided in Virginia and am clueless as to how it would be technically feasible even then. Indeed, since the Internet is the epitome of interstate commerce, I’m not sure how the several States derive the power to regulate this anyway. Aside from that, a great idea.
Robin Goodfellow provides a rather detailed explanation for why he feels we will see a radical poltical re-alignment by 2010. His piece is worth reading in its entirety, but his thesis is that, while two party systems tend to find a centrist equilibrium, right now both parties are grossly out of synch with the general public which, in Goodfellow’s view, is libertarian:
I predict that by 2010 the big political issues will be drug legalization, gun rights / control, big government vs. (truly) small government (with the difference in proposed sizes being in the neighborhood of a factor of 2, if not more, and a similarly dramatic difference in proposed levels of government power and regulation), public vs. private services (especially K-12 schools), and probably a renewed debate on immigration (namely, how much we should allow). That’s just a guess, but I am very confident that a major “axis shift” is in the works. It’s bound to be quite interesting times politically for the next few years.
While I share his desire for most of these things, this is just wishful thinking on his part. There is zero evidence that the public at large is libertarian, let alone that it will suddenly get energized to make this coup happen. Indeed, all indications are that we libertarians are in the vast minority: the public consistently votes for politicians who promise to give them free stuff and constantly demands more and more governmental action for even the most minor public policy matters. Witness the current spate of legislation to stop e-mail spamming and telemarketing.
While I hate it, most Americans want government to be much, much bigger even than it is now. Socialized medicine, for example, is almost upon us; we’re just doing it in baby steps rather than one giant one. While I predict we’ll eventually liberalize our laws on matters of sexuality, I do not see the day of widespread drug legalization any time soon. I’d like to see it, but there is virtually no momentum in that direction, save for maybe medical marijuana. “The era of big government is over” was just one of the lies Bill Clinton told us.
Last month, the Russians were opposed to war on the grounds that there was no proof Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. This month, the Russians are opposed to lifting sanctions on the grounds that there’s no proof Iraq doesn’t have weapons of mass destruction.
Not only that but
You don’t have to agree (though I do) with George Jonas that the UN is a fully fledged member of the axis of evil to recognize that there’s little point in going to war to install yet another branch office of UNSCAM. If the problem is America’s image in the Arab world, in what way does it help to confine the Stars and Stripes brand to unpleasant things like bombs while insisting all the nice post-war reconstructive stuff be clearly labelled with the UN flag? If the answer is that that’s the price you pay for healing the rift with Old Europe, that presupposes Old Europe is interested in healing it. Tony Blair may be keen, but the Continentals have different agendas. Will the Belgian government approve the complaint against Tommy Franks for “genocide”? The petition accuses the General of “inaction in the face of hospital pillaging,” which apparently meets the Belgian definition of genocide. Unlike the deaths of over three million people, which is the lowball figure for those who’ve died in the current civil war in the Congo — or, as I still like to think of it, the Belgian Congo.
Heh. There’s more where that came from. Go read it.
OTB has been blogrolled by Eric Dunn at SpaztiPundits, a site which just started today, and Tiger: Raggin’ and Rantin’, another fairly new blog. Thanks to both.
Washington Times reports, a day late, that the U.S. will pull all its out of Saudi Arabia by the end of the summer. While I agree with the move and think it will have a marginal impact on lessening tensions in the region, I find it rather ironic that this is, in effect, a win for al Qaeda. Their ostensible reason for the 9/11 bombings was to protest US military presence in the Holy Land. Now we’re leaving. I’m not suggesting that we stay in order to spite Osama, but it his victory is a rather unfortunate byproduct of the move.
The US has presented our Mideast Ëroad map” to Israeli PM Ariel Sharon. My guess is all parties will soon get lost and have trouble re-folding it. Plus, being men, neither Sharon, Arafat, Abu Mazen, or any of the other parties involved will ask for directions.
Megan makes some interesting arguments on the distinctions between these mindsets. While I agree with much of her argument, it falls apart in the final analysis. She holds economics up as the epitome of science and contrasts it not only with the study of literature, but with political science and sociology, which she incorrectly lumps in with the humanties.
This is a common argument and one that I often had to engage in when teaching the Intro to PoliSci course. While I agree that political science is in some sense a misnomer, it does employ the scientific methodology much more than Megan and others realize. Her analysis is true of political philosophy/theory, which employs rhetoric and can be rather normative, but it doesn’t apply to much of the rest of the discipline. If all one means by “economics” is econometric analysis then, yes, it is more scientific than most of political science simply because one can isolate far fewer variables. Further, by the standards of, say, quantum physics, economics is hardly a science, as its predictive value is minimal. The reason isn’t so much failure of methodology but, again, because economics is a hell of a lot more complicated than physics–way more variables. I’d argue that political science is more complicated than economics for the same reason. Indeed, economics is, in a sense, a subset of political science since economic variables have to be taken into account in a good deal of political analysis.
