-
Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down, has an excellent
article at Opinion Journal on the treatment of enemy prisoners. He
brings a needed breath of moral complexity to an issue on which
too many people are full of passionately-intent certainty.
Laws and rules are vitally important, but enforcing them requires good soldiers and strict, vigilant leadership. Even in an ideal situation, say, in a civilian prison in peacetime that is well-funded and well-run, and where the guards and prisoners share the same language and culture, abuse can at best be minimized.
War is the exact opposite of an ideal situation.
It's a good essay written from a tragic-vision viewpoint.
- At Tech Central Station, Bryan Preston has an article containing a do-it-yourself debunker that deflates the Bush-lied meme. It's a Google search for … well, click it yourself. (A shorter version of the same thing is on Bryan's blog.)
- But what's Tim Russert's excuse?
-
For the libertarians out there, Mark Steyn has an article
that ought to be on the reading list of everyone who was ever
sympathetic to the egalitarian/communitarian impulse:
… nothing makes a citizen more selfish than socially equitable communitarianism: once a fellow's enjoying the fruits of government health care and all the rest, he couldn't give a hoot about the broader societal interest; he's got his, and if it's going to bankrupt the state a generation hence, well, as long as they can keep the checks coming till he's dead, it's fine by him. "Social democracy" is, in that sense, explicitly anti-social.
Read the whole thing. Steyn takes Europe as his example case, but certainly this explains why Social Security is near-impossible to fix here in the US as well.
- And finally: Bruce Schneier is the go-to guy for information on the efficacy of tinfoil hats as a mind-control/mind-reading inhibitor. Not that you, dear reader, would be in need. Of course not. But you might have friends that are.
Nov
14
2005
![[The Blogger and His Dog]](/ps/images/me_with_barney.jpg)
