What’s Wrong with the World

The men signed of the cross of Christ go gaily in the dark.

About

What’s Wrong with the World is dedicated to the defense of what remains of Christendom, the civilization made by the men of the Cross of Christ. Athwart two hostile Powers we stand: the Jihad and Liberalism...read more

« June 2008 | Main | August 2008 »

July 2008 Archives

July 4, 2008

God bless America

A joyful Independence Day (July 4) to my fellow Americans and friends of America and W4. If someone wants to suggest a cool image for this post and tell me, in easy instructions for the techno-challenged, how to imbed it, I'll be grateful.

Only positive comments allowed. No gloom.

By the way, it's a lovely day in my part of the world. I can't remember having such a beautiful July 4 before in the entire thirteen years I've lived here. It's sunny but not hot. (That's what a Yankee thinks of as a lovely July 4.)

Abortion, Torture, and Ferocity of Opposition

The argument has often been made that we should basically shut up about torture as long as abortion is legal, since the legalization/normalization of abortion on a large scale is more grave than the legalization/normalization of torture on a small scale. Both are evil, and both ought to be opposed in principle, but we should basically shut up about torture until we can say 'mission accomplished' on abortion.

Needless to say, I find this argument unconvincing. We can't say everything all at once, and we have an obligation to oppose the legalization/normalization of both torture and abortion ferociously, in general.

There is an underlying truth though, a truth which is being misused in this argument, which is not so easily dismissed. That underlying truth is that the legalization/normalization of abortion on a large scale is in fact more grave than the legalization/normalization of torture on a small scale.

What follows from this should no doubt make progressives and those with progressive sympathies uncomfortable. Progressives tend to be rather squishy on the compelling need to treat abortion legally as a form of murder, and to ferociously advocate for such treatment. Indeed "ferocity", if it applies at all, usually applies to their efforts to undermine the point and reverse the objective priorities. As a result they have a credibility problem when it comes to torture, precisely because of the obviously upside-down priorities. And that credibility problem does a great deal of damage to making the case against torture.

When it comes to opposing torture in the company of those who are soft on making abortion illegal, the old adage 'with friends like these' comes to mind.

(Cross-posted)

July 5, 2008

Prayers to Allah come to UK Public Schools

As you've probably seen elsewhere on the blogosphere, two boys in a public school in the UK were punished with detention for refusing to kneel down on prayer mats and pray to Allah as part of a "religious education" lesson.

But although you've no doubt seen it elsewhere, you haven't heard my two cents, so I might as well give you those two pennies, unasked, just because you were kind enough to drop by W4.

Continue reading "Prayers to Allah come to UK Public Schools" »

July 8, 2008

The feminine mind and the culture of assessment

C. S. Lewis said that women are fidgets and men are lazy.

I find that there is a fair bit of truth in this, though both can be either. (I'm frightfully lazy myself, and a fidget, which explains why I blog.)

But it occurred to me that Lewis's evaluation of male and female traits might have some relevance to a recent fad from which some of you may have suffered--the assessment craze.

Continue reading "The feminine mind and the culture of assessment" »

July 14, 2008

Writing and voting for abortion laws with exceptions

If and when, God willing, that blot on the moral and legal landscape Roe v. Wade is fully overturned and the states are free once more to protect unborn babies, what sort of legislation may pro-lifers write or vote for?

There has been an interesting discussion of this question on our own Zippy's blog through several threads, here, here, and here. I added a bit of my own here, besides many long bits in the comments threads at Zippy's place.

As a preview, I will just say that the main disagreements turned on whether a) it would be morally wrong or morally legitimate to write/propose abortion legislation including exceptions, where one does not actually think that those victims should be unprotected in law, but where the legislation would pass only with these exceptions and would protect more children in law than had been protected before, and b) whether there is a crucial difference in such a situation between the legislator who proposes the legislation and one who votes for it.

The one rather sad thing is that I'm just getting around to mentioning this to our W4 readers as Zippy, who has been central to the whole discussion, is by his own statement going "AWOL for a couple of weeks." We shall miss him, and meanwhile, I will be interested to see what W4 readers have to say. Feel free to refer to threads on varying sites in threads on other sites. (That isn't confusingly worded, is it?)

July 15, 2008

P.Z. Myers Thinks Like a Bronze-Age Pagan

Via Tom Piatak, writing at Taki's, it would appear that Myers has befouled a comment thread over at Rod Dreher's blog, averring that


The point of desecrating the host isn’t to make people angry--it’s to demystify and desanctify nonsense. It’s how we wake people up--by showing that their beliefs are powerless.

That's quite right. In this enlightened age, we do not settle religious and philosophical questions of inestimable importance by reasoning, examining the historical evidences, or any such recondite activity, but by subjecting the participants, or symbols dear to them, to the ordeal, to the end that Fate, the womb of possibility, the numinous power of whatever, might speak and deliver its verdict. We may as well bind the participants and cast them into a river, declaring the one, if any, who survives, the victor. Or, perhaps, we could emulate the Muslims, and associate the claimed veracity of the message with the world-conquering potency of its armies: it is true if it conquers. In fact, why don't we have a grand civilizational throwdown between the remnants of Christian reaction and the avatars of enlightened, secularist atheism - it's not as though we've not already had one of those, you'll recall, with the Evil Empire, the Poles, the Pope....

Yes, but such an appeal to history, even recent history, by way of demonstrating the incompatibility of militant atheism with human dignity, would lie beyond Myers comprehension, presumably, as he would prefer to have the 'truth' established by means of his contrivance: let a singular communion wafer represent the entirety of the Christian claim, and let his sacrilege represent the claims of enlightenment, and if no bolt of lightning or pillar of fire descends from the heavens to smite him, Christianity stands exploded as rank superstition. Let us be forthright about what such presumption is: it is not merely indicative of a mental imbalance, an obsession or mania, but expressive of mental primitivism. Truth is established, not by reasoned discourse upon evidences and arguments, but by what amount to tests of strength, defiance, and pride. Might makes right, by the infernal glow of impudence. And mankind undergoes a spiritual and intellectual regression of some score of millenia.

July 16, 2008

The Strategy of Openness, Revisited

Via Glenn Greenwald, Tom Friedman ruminates on the strategic rationale for the Great Mesopotamian Quagmire Near Eastern War of Democratic Liberation:

Friedman's astonishingly puerile and uncouth exposition features a choice piece of verbal legerdemain, which begins with a mention of the Open Society and our willingness to defend it, and concludes with a vulgar peroration, which has American servicemen (and women, of course, for one mark of our civilizational superiority is that we send our women to bleed and die in our wars) going door to door between "Basra and Baghdad", telling anyone who might oppose the Open Society to "Suck on this." I mentioned a piece of legerdemain, by which I mean an unthinking attempt at esotericism. Friedman, of course, commences by discussing the Open Society, and then avers that no border controls, no clever INS officials - in summation, no declensions from the (utopian) conceit of the Open Society - could possibly suffice to protect us from further terrorist assaults, leaving as the inevitable conclusion the imperative of converting the recalcitrant of the world to our visions of global order. But, of course, this standard line is a farrago of nonsense. The firm proscription of certain Islamic doctrines, the cessation of Muslim immigration, beginning with the abolition of the Visa Express programme and student visas for nationals of countries which contribute disproportionately to the jihad, and rising to the encouragement of Muslim emigration from the West, would, over time, mitigate the threat of jihad, and all without the perceived imperative of wars of (democratic capitalist) imperial conquest. What, therefore, Friedman really means is that we cannot maintain simultaneously the Open Society and measures inhibiting the social and economic intercourse of the Western and Muslim worlds; we can undertake either, but not both, and, inasmuch as the latter is simply unthinkable - a form of apostasy, in reality - we must opt for the former by means of war. The exoteric rationale is that we cannot defeat "terror" save by waging wars of "liberation"; the esoteric reality is that our elites cannot preserve the politico-economic articulation of their class interests save by waging wars of "liberation".

Glenn Greenwald takes Friedman's utter self-delusion, his incomprehension at negative global perceptions of the U.S., and nails it to the wall:

Continue reading "The Strategy of Openness, Revisited" »

Lincolnian ambivalence.

Allen Guelzo of Gettysburg College is emphatically not of two minds about the Abraham Lincoln. Writing in The Claremont Review of Books, he laments Conservative ambivalence about, and castigates Conservative antipathy for, this same Lincoln who bulks so big in our history. While I share Guelzo’s impatience with Lincoln-hatred, it just won’t do to conflate ambivalence and antipathy. He cites, for instance, Willmoore Kendall’s judgment (argued most extensively in Basic Symbols of the American Tradition) that Lincoln “derailed” the American political tradition by replacing the Constitution (i.e., self-government) with the Declaration of Independence (i.e., equality) — and, what’s more, with a single passage from the latter document, at the expense of the rest of it. This would seem to locate Kendall among the Lincoln-haters, a strange place to locate a man who also named Lincoln as standing among Shakespeare, Milton and Burke — the great masters of the English language and rhetoric.

In short, there is hatred of Lincoln, which Guelzo rightly censures; and there is ambivalence about him. The two are not the same; and the project to establish a rigid orthodoxy of unqualified approbation is one unworthy of Prof. Guelzo. In my admittedly amateur judgment, Lincoln, like many a great man, is too much of an enigma to merit unqualified anything. One writer (could it have been our own Zippy, some years ago?) once referred to Honest Abe as a “Calvinist agnostic.” The phrase alone, which only appears facile, is a virtual treatise on the mystery of the statesman and the man.

I’ll conclude this mere sketch of an argument with a little anecdote. Some years ago I called my wife over to read through an essay I had just completed, which included a long quotation from Lincoln’s Lyceum Address. I believe the topic was the rule of law — in the context of judiciary usurpation or immigration or something like that. She read it carefully, paused, and said, “pretty good, Paul, but I like Lincoln’s part best.”

So do I. So do I.

July 17, 2008

Gun Control and the Holocaust of the Particular

Unfortunately for those of us who would prefer to leave behind the moral preening caterwauling that followed upon the Supreme Court's decision in Heller, there are those who cannot let it go, and insist upon drawing our attention to the infantile tantrums of Europeans who know next to nothing about American history, law, and government. And who, apparently, pen, with apparent ingenuousness, such luminous analyses as this:


The Second Amendment states that the armed forces ought to be armed.

Allow your mind to absorb the penetrating critical interpretation of the Constitution: the Army should be... The Army! The implication must be, of course, that Eighteenth-Century Americans were so stupid - or positivist - that unless they stipulated in their Constitution that armies should be armies, some of them might assume that armies exist for those who like to wear snappy uniforms. Who knew that tautology was the veritable apex of textual interpretation?

While I do not wish to dwell upon this subject at any great length, it is worth noting, in connection with a recent display of grotesquely bestial conduct, which was precipitated by the refusal of a father to permit his adolescent daughter to suffer molestation at the hands of one of the glowering men depicted in the Star Tribune article, that not even the abolition of firearms can obviate the necessity, and imperative, of defense, whether of others or of self. By what principle of ethics should a lone man, attempting to defend his womenfolk, be left deprived of potential strategic leverage against their depravities? It will be said that security personnel and police exist for this purpose, but the success of such assaults proves only the obvious: that these public servants are neither omnipotent nor omnipresent.

It is worth observing, further, that none of the assailants was armed; their limbs were their weapons of choice - well, their limbs and the earth itself. So, it is not merely a matter of wishing for some candyland from which firearms have been banished - and prudent minds will shudder at the thought of what manner of government in the U.S. would be necessary to disarm the populace - but a question of what relation ought to obtain between the ordinary citizen and the predators among them. Once more, the notion that a relation of formal equality ought to obtain, such that ordinary people, not accustomed to aggressive action, should be compelled to confront barbarians long accustomed to such acts, upon an imaginary level field, is positively perverse.

Continue reading "Gun Control and the Holocaust of the Particular" »

July 21, 2008

Chorus Mysticus

I have committed another YouTube Video:

Continue reading "Chorus Mysticus" »

Conservatism In Exile

Rod Dreher poses the question, by way of commenting on a NYT article on conservative reconsiderations and Andrew Stuttaford's dismissal of the hypothetical benefits of a stint in the political wilderness:


Do you find it more depressing to think that we might be in the political wilderness post-November, or that we might not be? Explain your reasoning.

I must offer my apologies in advance of my response, inasmuch as I am unwell, and exceptionally enervated, and thus exceedingly irascible, but what I find most depressing, above all else politically, is that only the prospect of the Republican party being thrown out of power is sufficient to prompt some conservatives to contemplate the political state of being-in-the-world that is exile. I don't intend this as criticism of Dreher; far from it - I've defended Dreher's approach to conservatism since the publication of his book. No, my complaint is that mainstream conservatives have so closely identified conservatism with the electoral fortunes of the GOP, that only the possibility of an electoral apocalypse can stimulate the thought that conservatism might not be represented in the corridors of power. The Republican party has strangled the small-government policy program in its crib, replacing it with a tawdry emphasis upon a select blend of upper-bracket tax reductions, coupling this program with a world-historical deficit-spending bender; identified economic conservatism with a regressive and debilitating package of corporatist and neoliberal economic policies that threaten to render trade imbalances and deficits permanent and structural; papered over the instabilities with a profligate monetary policy, which itself reinforced the other insalubrious trends; established as a principle of American governance that any profits accruing to financiers in consequence of these policies would be valorized as the triumph of the American way, while any losses would be socialized, so that avarice need never receive its recompense; embarked upon a foreign policy that even Woodrow Wilson might find audacious and hubristic, in the process ordaining unjust war and torture as central precepts in the right-wing catechism; sought to legitimize an unprecedented demographic and economic experiment upon the American body politic, all at the behest of the narrow coterie of corporate interests who cut the campaign finance checks; cynically deployed "social issues" as instruments of voter mobilization, then snickered behind the backs of the salt-of-the-earth folks who voted for them on the basis of those issues (revealing that they really do think as they were portrayed by Thomas Frank), dropping those initiatives in favour of grand schemes of policy reform that hadn't a snowball's chance of seeing enactment; formed ranks behind a President poised to violate campaign pledges regarding judicial nominations, when he wished to nominate his incompetent cronies and lickspittles to the Supreme Court - need I continue? Has the culture become one infinitesimal measure less mephitic, to lay aside nakedly political considerations?

In truth, conservatism has been in exile throughout the Bush administration, and, I would argue, for many years preceding the inauguration of this unfortunate presidency. Conservatism will be in a barren and waste place in the event of a McCain triumph, because it is already in that place. More's the pity that so few comprehend this, imagining that either a McCain victory, or a bit of tinkering at the margins of policy, might deliver conservatives, and conservatism, from its season in the abyss.

July 22, 2008

Are we 40% radicio?

Wesley J. Smith executes a karate chop on the genetic reductionists. He quotes an article that says,

Consider the fact that chimpanzees share about 98 percent of our genetic makeup....Of course, the reverse is also true: We are 98 percent chimpanzee.

Responds Smith:

Nonsense. This is reductionism writ large. We are no more "98% chimp" then we are 40% lettuce because we share about that percentage of genes with radicio.

For me to add anything would be gilding lilies.

July 24, 2008

Scaremongering and Muslims as ciphers.

Over at Vox Nova, everyone’s favorite ultramontane Liberal singles out this website for its “scaremongering” and “stupid jihadism rhetoric.” The very strong implication of the post is that we have little to fear from Islam, and that “humanitarian relief,” “more visas to study and work in the US, and better trade links,” along with a cessation of “anti-Islamic bombast,” and “domestic xenophobia,” will mitigate whatever minor troubles we do face.

The peculiar thing here is that Morning’s Minion shares with his Neoconservative opponents an assumption which we fundamentally reject: namely, that the character of Islamic doctrine and practice depends upon the actions of the West. It is our view that this is only true on the margins. America led by an Obama administration could pursue each of the goals Morning’s Minion has laid out — an end to reckless wars and rhetoric, more humanitarian relief, more of those precious student visas — and still the doctrines of Jihad, Sharia and Dhimma would remain. In short, Minion joins with those he professes to oppose in regarding Muslims as mere ciphers for Western policy disputes, mere automata responding solely to external stimuli.

The force of this assumption prevents a true appreciation of the antiquity and endurance of these doctrines, and thus the persistence of their influence on the world. The Jihad has taken many forms; it has assumed the guises of every age, reflected the character of the peoples it inspired and impelled to war; it has adapted and adjusted to times and place: But in its essentials it has remained unchanged. As Chesterton so wisely put it:

A void is made in the heart of Islam which has to be filled up again and again by a mere repetition of the revolution that founded it. There are no sacraments; the only thing that can happen is a sort of apocalypse, as unique as the end of the world; so the apocalypse can only be repeated and the world end again and again. There are no priests; and yet this equality can only breed a multitude of lawless prophets almost as numerous as priests. The very dogma that there is only one Mahomet produces an endless procession of Mahomets.

It will not do to understand Islam and its doctrines of Holy War and Holy Subjugation exclusively through the lens of Western politics. Nor will it do to conflate warnings about the peril of these doctrines with support for the democratic imperialism that has characterized much of our post-9/11 foreign policy.

They Get You Coming...

And they get you going.

Therefore they get you.

Case in point:

In 2007, the EEOC sued the Salvation Army when it tried to enforce its "English-only" rule - i.e., its rule requiring employees to speak only English while on the job - in its Thrift Store in Framingham, Massachussetts.

So why not, you may ask? Isn't that just being nasty? If you have employees who are more comfortable communicating with one another in Spanish, then why not let them? Who does it hurt?

Continue reading "They Get You Coming..." »

July 25, 2008

How Planned Parenthood Empowers Women

Via Dawn Eden, a sampling of PP's posters.

This one gets my vote for the worst.

You don't have to be a heavy thinker to get the message: "We know that your boyfriend is merely using you sexually and will certainly not take responsibility if you get pregnant. Be sure you don't lose him by telling him that you're pregnant. We can help you to hold on to such a boyfriend by making sure you never get pregnant or are made swiftly un-pregnant if necessary."

How many inner-city women will say, "No thanks" to that sort of empowerment? And how is it possible to fight that message?

America and the walls of particularity.

My old friend (and proprietor of the precursor to this website) Josh Trevino hits the nail on the head. Reflecting on Senator Obama’s extravagant public appearance in Berlin yesterday, he writes that the speech “was very much in the rhetorical tradition of one George W. Bush. In listening to it, the recollection was not of the oft-cited JFK or Ronald Reagan, but of the current President’s Second Inaugural Address.” That would be the “end of tyranny in our world” and “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands” speech.

“The central themes,” Josh continues, “are quite nearly the same: a wholesale reversal of John Quincy Adams’s formulation of American foreign policy, which stated that America ‘goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.’”

Continue reading "America and the walls of particularity." »

Vacation Photo

I'm still mostly AWOL from the online world, at least relatively speaking. But I thought I would share a vacation photo, taken earlier today at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Enjoy.

July 30, 2008

Piling On

Clark Stooksbury went on a political dumpster-diving expedition, and returned with a fulsome Limbaugh rant, in which the world-historical shill truth-detector comedian delivered himself of the opinion that economic growth being of such paramount importance, and growth depending upon the use of energy, the government should undertake everything in its power to reduce the costs of using more and more of it, perhaps even to the point of subsidizing gasoline:


Folks, I don't know what the price of gasoline is in China and I don't know to what extent, if any, it is subsidized -- okay, it is subsidized. See, the ChiComs need their economy growing. They need people driving around, moving around. They need people to be able to afford fuel, so they're subsidizing fuel. They're not bailing people out of stupid home mortgage messes. They're buying their gasoline for them, because they need an economy. Know what energy means to this, the whole subject of economic growth. So meanwhile, the ChiComs, a country certainly growing, certainly on the rise, but it ain't the United States of America. How does it make you feel that Zhang Linsen has a big Hummer with nine speakers blaring as he pulls out into a four-lane road with so much smog he basically can't see the car in front of him, and you are trading in all of your cars and trying to go out and find basically a lawn mower.

Daniel Larison and Rod Dreher have contributed to the most condign rhetorical flagellation of Limbaugh. Conservatism, on such an implicit conception, no longer - if ever it did, which increasingly seems arguable - entails, well, the relationship between the right ordering of the soul and the right ordering of the polity, but entails the liberation of appetites from the bridles that a just man will place upon them, and the reconstitution of the polity as the mirror of limitless desire. In fact, reality itself is to be reduced under servitude to this fathomless abyss of passions, as government has an apparently solemn obligation to facilitate such consumption - and consumption is the appropriate metaphor for the sociology of the passions, which, being intrinsically ephemeral, disappear - are consumed - as they attain their transitory objects. This, Limbaugh considers the most desirable societal state, because it facilitates growth, which, in turn, facilitates more crapulence, ad nauseum: a closed circle of negational nothingness, a social imaging of hell, everyone turned in upon his own inner void.

Am I piling on? Possibly. But there is a lesson here, beyond the precis of the liberal ontology of the passions, and that is that, well, contemporary pop-conservatism is manifestly nothing more than a modulation of liberalism itself. Classical liberalism valorized a certain set of freedoms because they enabled men to fulfill a certain set of desires. As the democratic revolution proceeded apace, and the franchise was expanded, political economy was modified to enable a greater percentage of the population to fulfill these same desires - desires for material abundance. This is the transition from classical to modern liberalism, and Limbaugh is fully within this tradition; the only distinction to be drawn is between the sets of desires Limbaugh wishes to liberate, and the sets his ostensible adversaries wish to liberate. But if one accepts the ontology, the debate is utterly pointless: desire is, and is protean.

Popular conservatism just announced its bankruptcy.

"I have become a symbol..."

Hilarious: President Obama Continues Hectic Victory Tour.

No, it's not The Onion. It's Dana Milbank, writing in the Washington Post:

Continue reading ""I have become a symbol..."" »

July 31, 2008

Simplicity and Becoming.

It is clear enough that one of the pressing issues of the day is the explosive and beguiling one of the American identity. Who are we, we Americans? What is our character and destiny as a people? The emotion and bafflement surrounding this question are evidence of its importance.

The acute observer will perceive two large camps or categories of people, out there in the Republic, who are prepared to expound a thoughtful answer to the question. We must leave aside the thoughtless; as our subtle pollsters demonstrate, like diviners or magicians, hardly anyone is reluctant to give an opinion. But thoughtful opinions, informed by experience and reflection, are rarer jewels.

Continue reading "Simplicity and Becoming." »

Is "Jesus rose from the dead" a self-committing proposition?

In his massive and intensively researched book The Resurrection of the Son of God (pp. 714-717) N.T. Wright states that the proposition that Jesus rose from the dead is a self-involving proposition. If it's true, he says, it matters.*

While I agree heartily with Wright that if this proposition is true, it matters, I'm concerned about a confusion that could arise from calling it "self-involving," much less (as he does on p. 717) "self-committing." And I think it is a confusion to which we at the beginning of the 21st century are particularly prone.

The confused reasoning runs approximately like this:

If Jesus rose from the dead, then the Christian God exists. If the Christian God exists, we have to love and obey him. Therefore, to believe that Jesus rose from the dead is to believe that we have to love and obey God. Therefore, to believe that Jesus rose from the dead is to be something very much like a Christian. So belief in the proposition that Jesus rose from the dead already involves being committed to God. So how is it possible to be led to believe that Jesus rose from the dead by anything like neutral evidence? The conclusion is itself not "neutral" but rather self-committing, so one can come to believe it only through self-commitment, not through an objective evaluation of evidence.

In this way, the idea that this proposition is "self-involving" or "self-committing" comes to seem like a challenge to an evidentialist approach to Christian belief.

Continue reading "Is "Jesus rose from the dead" a self-committing proposition?" »

Words Fail Me

Words fail me, but it certainly appears as though there is endorsed in this thread over at Vox Nova, concerning the departure of an estimated 1.3 million illegal immigrants since the (glorious) failure of Comprehensive National Dispossession Immigration Reform, something tantamount to vigilantism: private citizens undertaking to subvert the immigration laws of the United States, regarding their distinctions between American citizens and foreigners invidious and unjust, thereby substituting their judgments for those duly rendered by the people's representatives. An unjust law is no law at all, to be certain; but natural facts about the world, such as differences between peoples and cultures, for which reasons (in part) mankind is politically divided into nations, are not unjust.

Ironically, mass immigration is, economically speaking, one of the most regressive policies in the arsenal of the neoliberal/neoconservative/globalist establishment, one that not only adversely impacts the native-born poor and lower-middle classes, but instantiates that hoary principle of liberal political economy, namely, primitive accumulation - or, as we know it presently, the privatization of profits and the socialization of costs. The wealthy pay less for labour, and the rest of us pay for the aggregate burdens upon various social services, and often at higher effective rates than many members of the rentier class, who can avail themselves of the ultra-low marginal rates applied to capital gains. The top and the foreign-born-bottom wage war against the native born poor and middle.

Obligations radiate outward, in concentric circles, beginning with family and community and moving outward, attenuating as they go. And while what I am about to say is mere rhetoric, mere hyperbole, as I wish no ill upon anyone, the world would be a more just place were the last universalist to be strangled with the entrails of the last globalist.

On 'Illegal Combatants' and Target Practice at our Shoes

It occurred to me while reading this thread that if this person had been treated as a POW, rather than as a carefully non-categorized non-person, he would still be - perfectly legitimately - in custody, rather than wherever he is after having successfully perpetrated a suicide attack in Iraq. The nice thing about POW status (at least in my layman's understanding) is that you don't have to prove that the detainee committed a crime in order to continue to detain him until the hostilities in which he was involved cease. We can't torture him, of course, which is a bummer to some; but we can keep him in custody until hostilities are definitively over.

If it turns out that he is a criminal, at least as I understand it he can be turned over to the proper authorities when that comes to light. And his treatment as a POW, unlike extra-legal treatment as an 'illegal combatant', will not interfere with prosecution or lead to premature release.

It further occurred to me that that - his status as an indefinitely yet legally and morally imprisoned POW, had it been the case - would probably represent an intolerable outrage to both the anti-war Left and the pro-war Right.

(Cross-Posted)