Category: Uncategorized

Oh dear, I forgot that it’s Iran’s turn to be Hitler:

More than 70,000 Afghans who were in Iran illegally have been returned in the past month, the United Nations said on Monday, as talks were under way between the neighbours over the controversial deportations…. The talks in Iran were to focus on how the deportations were carried out and also the treatment of deportees, it said. There have been reports of returnees being separated from their families in the drive to get them out. Tehran has said it wanted one million Afghans repatriated by next March. The 70,000 who have been sent back started returning from April.

70,000 per month = 840,000 per year = 6.7 million in eight years. Obviously there’s no evidence whatsoever that George Bush’s statement that deportations are “unrealistic” is false.

Other than, you know, the mass deportations taking place right now. And incredibly, it’s being done without the mass slaughter that some have insisted is inherently a part of any such involuntary mass transportation, the daily busing of 23.5 million American school children notwithstanding.

On a tangential note, doesn’t it strike you as just a little bit strange that one million Afghans should prefer the very hellhole of Islamic repression that happens to be the neocons’ preferred next target of liberation occupation instead of the shiny new US-installed democracy?

UPDATE – Thomas Sowell shares his thoughts on what is “unrealistic”:

Back in 1986 it was “unrealistic” to round up and deport the three million illegal immigrants in the United States then. So they were given amnesty — honestly labeled, back then — which is precisely why there are now 12 million illegal immigrants.

The question that no one is either asking or answering is this: if deporting 12 million aliens in eight years is unrealistic, then precisely what number is realistic? I note that an affirmative answer of any number above zero means that deporting 12 million aliens is merely a function of time.

What else is new:

Even after the complete falsehood of her charge against Paul was pointed out, and acknowledged by her, Malkin still did her best to wriggle out of it by trying to weave a very tenuous connection between Paul and the Truthers.

What’s interesting about this isn’t the fact that Me So Michelle never bothers to do her homework – that’s not exactly news – but what it demonstrates about her priorities. The regulars here who happen to like Malkin always point out that she’s anti-migration, which is certainly to her credit, but notice here that she was going out of her way to attack one of the foremost anti-migration Republican presidential candidates, either because she is more pro-occupation than anti-migration or because she’s more interesting in licking the boots of those who are more likely to win the nomination than support a candidate who shares her position on migration. Either way, it’s not exactly edifying.

Faux conservatives often attack libertarians and genuine conservatives as being left-liberals; I started getting emails accusing me of being a liberal Democrat from the first time I criticized the Bush administration. But merely understanding the concept of blowback does not indicate any specific political ideology.

Fighting terror through financing terrorists:

It is a little-known fact that international aid to the Palestinian territories has actually risen since Palestinians elected a Hamas government in January, 2006. According to International Monetary Fund and UN figures, the Palestinian areas received a total of $1.2 billion in official aid in 2006, up from $1 billion in 2005.

America’s contribution rose from $400 million in 2005 to $468 million in 2006. Aid from the European Union and other international organizations also increased handsomely, and the UN has called for still greater increases in aid in 2007.

I wonder if George Delano’s double-secret plan to install democracy the Middle East will work as well as his double-secret plan to push through a conservative domestic agenda. And you know, I kind of think it will. Apparently we’re now fighting terrorism by giving the terrorists so much money that they’ll start eating rich and fatty foods that will cause their early deaths from heart disease.

I also wonder if all the purple-fingered occupation enthusiasts will be any less enthusiastic about democracy when the Iraqi people vote the local equivalent of Hamas into power… assuming they haven’t already done so.

I continue to find this sort of hysterical Medvedian reaction to be most amusing:

When the Nazis regime is the only regime you can think of to compare to your present situation, red flags should go up. It’s hard to separate the lesson Vox thinks we should learn from the Nazis from all of the other “lessons” that led to this one. And if we’re really learning the lesson of Nazi deportations, then we’d have to pay attention to how they did it: placing people in cattle cars so crowded that it was not possible to sit, much lay down, and transporting them for days, sometimes even for weeks, without food or water.

Okay, so if we know it takes four years to identify and transport six million people in inhumane conditions, how much longer will it take to do it in air conditioned, beer-and-pizza provisioned comfort? 50 percent longer? 150 percent longer? The point is that it can be done. And how is it hard to separate one lesson of the National Socialist regime from another, does this emo-brain also have the impression I’m advocating an invasion of Poland, launching rockets at London and a Non-Aggression Pact with Stalin’s corpse?

This guy doesn’t even seem to realize that he has EXPLICITLY conceded my point, his paroxysms of outrage notwithstanding. THE HISTORICAL EXAMPLE OF THE NAZI MURDERS SIMPLY PROVES THAT WHAT GEORGE BUSH SAID WAS IMPOSSIBLE IS, IN FACT, POSSIBLE. That doesn’t mean that Americans harbor any desire to hurt anyone and it doesn’t even mean that we have to transport people like the Germans did. In fact, that wouldn’t even make any sense, since we don’t want to harm any aliens, we just want to send them safely home.

If we’re going to not do things simply because the National Socialists did them, then I suggest that we begin by not financing public schools and not invading other countries. And I note with no little amusement that if George Bush or anyone else claims that mass deportations are impossible, this must, by definition, make them Holocaust Deniers.

UPDATE: “That may be a rational argument, but I can’t imagine it’s one anyone wants to make.”

Yes, it’s much better to make an irrational one. “It’s unrealistic to transport millions of people because the Nazis did it and they were bad people and we’re not bad people so therefore we can’t.”

Ted is frustrated:

You must be very lonely? I say that as one who spends every spare minute criticizing Bush from the right – and I have no friends left at all. Conservatives simply will not condemn the one man responsible for the entire mess, and I find that infuriating. He’s the one who has ruined the country, and the people I talk to hold it against me for being so critical.

And just after I read your column, I read one by some talk show host in Palm Beach who is also critical of Bush. His name is Andy Martin, and this nut’s inital step in rectifying the problem is:

“First, Republicans should ever so politely jettison the religious right, and let some religious adherents migrate to the Democratic Party. Why not give Democrats a few headaches with ‘values voters’?”

Now I’m not Christian, but I’m not insane either, and I’m starting to believe that a whole lot of conservatives are just as insane as liberals.

This just proves Scott Adams’ point: people who don’t need people are the HAAAPPPIEST people. Seriously, politics is not the personal and it isn’t life either. If you spend all of your time criticizing Bush, I wouldn’t want to hang around you either and I’m probably in complete agreement.

While Cedarford would no doubt agree with Mr. Martin’s take on the situation, it’s completely stupid. The religious right accounts for 23 percent of the TOTAL electorate and accounted for 35.2 percent of Bush’s support in the 2004 election. Republicans not only can’t win without them, they can’t survive as a party without them.

And this is exactly why 2008 would be an excellent time for them to withdraw en masse from the Republican Party.

Not indoctrination:

First it was his world history class. Then he saw it in his economics class. And his world issues class. And his environment class. In total, 18-year-old McKenzie, a Northern Ontario high schooler, says he has had the film An Inconvenient Truth shown to him by four different teachers this year.

Just in case you needed another reason to homeschool your kids. Although Gore’s secular apocalyptic flick clearly can’t be very effective propaganda if it needs so many showings in order to take. It brings to mind the old adage about the lady protesting too much.

It occurs to me that this sort of thing never seems to come up in discussions of why women appear have a greater tendency to hit a professional wall after a while:

Michelle Haltigan, a highly successful advertising executive known throughout the San Diego area for her striking physical attributes, will continue to get by on looks for six more years, it was reported Monday.

Sources report that the 23-year-old Huntington Beach native will be able to coast effortlessly until late 2004, when her appearance will no longer be sufficient to guarantee preferential treatment in her professional and personal life.

I know several women who have always gotten a leg up in their personal and professional lives because of their physical attractiveness; you probably do too. But now that we’re all getting older, that attractiveness is rapidly fading in relative terms and so they’re no longer likely to get the benefit of the doubt that they’ve always received, even if they haven’t necessarily depended upon it.

This obviously doesn’t apply to all women, there’s no shortage of ladies with unfortunate appearances who have not only had to succeed on their own job-related merits but also overcome the handicap of being unattractive as well. I just wonder if this might partially account for the tendency of some previously successful women to hit a wall in their professional lives in their mid-thirties.

Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. But it’s an idea worth contemplating, anyhow.

Government can taketh away:

Once the state has dipped its enormous beak into the stream of your wealth and possessions they are allowed to flow from one generation to the next. Though they may be divided and diminished by inflation, imperfect investment, a proliferation of descendants and the government taking its share, they are not simply expropriated.

That is, unless you own a copyright. Were I tomorrow to write the great American novel (again?), 70 years after my death the rights to it, though taxed at inheritance, would be stripped from my children and grandchildren. To the claim that this provision strikes malefactors of great wealth, one might ask, first, where the heirs of Sylvia Plath berth their 200-foot yachts. And, second, why, when such a stiff penalty is not applied to the owners of Rockefeller Center or Wal-Mart, it is brought to bear against legions of harmless drudges who, other than a handful of literary plutocrats (manufacturers, really), are destined by the nature of things to be no more financially secure than a seal in the Central Park Zoo.

This is a woefully incompetent argument. First, copyright is a government invention, so it is worthless without the force of government law behind it. Second, government doesn’t expropriate the copyright, it merely eliminates the legal fiction of its existence.

Reason discovers a connection between Christianity and libertarianism:

The Christians coming down on the small-government side of these arguments are fiscal conservatives but seldom consistent anti-statists. They are also at a disadvantage without a theological tradition robust enough to compete with the Social Gospel on the left or Christian Reconstructionism on the extreme right. Olree’s book is an early step toward furnishing one, exposing evangelicals to the arguments of a nascent Christian libertarian movement.

Libertarianism is extremely and fundamentally Biblical. The entire foundation of Christian theology is the concept of a Creator God who has the power to act as an autocrat, but elects not to due to His respect for the liberty of His creations.

Because God refuses to dictate right behavior through force, Christians are morally bound to do likewise except in the specific situations where God has commanded otherwise. Being freed from the Law by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, Christians are not bound to stone adulterers and other sinners, but rather to present them with the Good News. Because the wages of sin are death, those who reject it and prefer their sin will be punished in good time without the interference of the Christian.

Conventional conservative Christianity is a trap. It seems to make sense, but it is an inherently worldly view which contradicts the Bible in much the same way that liberal utopianism does, by attempting to create Heaven on Earth through Man’s efforts. This is, I think, precisely why Jesus Christ spoke so disparagingly of good intentions and their ultimate destination.

Jesus Christ promised to set Man free, not to give him a life in the suburbs with good public schools, reasonable taxes and low crime rates defended by a powerful military. Any political ideology which focuses on the material world at the expense of human liberty is not only not Christian, it is likely to eventually transform into something altogether anti-Christian.

Well, at least there’s one idea for my next non-fiction book: Freedom in Church and State.