re: "Willful Blindness"

Rand Simberg at Transterrestrial Musings summed-up Andrew McCarthy's thinking (at National Review).

Money quote(s):

"You can't win a war when you pretend that you're not in one." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

But you can certainly lose one..

12/15

re: "Heresy In Old Blighty"

Rand Simberg at Tranterrestrial Musings mourned the passing of one of "the Rights of Englishmen."

Money quote(s):

"The right to self defense is a fundamental Anglospheric human right, going back to the Magna Carta. It is only in the last few decades that it has been abandoned in the place of its birth. It is shameful."

And so it goes. There are reasons why this is so, just as there are reasons why "the Rights of Englishmen" linger still in places where no one thinks of themselves as English (and hasn't for generations).

8/10

re: "Hama Doesn’t Forget"

Rand Simberg at Transterrestrial Musings asked a couple of fundamental questions.

Money quote(s):

"Are we going to do anything to people who kill Americans? Apparently not. The Bush administration never did — it would be pretty foolish to expect this gang to."

There are a lot of folks, individuals and organizations, out there in the great abroad who've made a sideline (or worse) in killing my fellow citizens.

And, if truth be told, the case can be made that we (the U.S.) have actively rewarded that behavior set as often as we've punished it.

"Iran is at war with us. Are we at war with Iran? In fact, they’ve been at war with us for over three decades, but we continue, administration in, administration out, to pretend otherwise."

Iran, like a lot of places, is a special case.

Persians, as people, generally are a relatively likeable lot. Iran, on the other hand, deserves at least a five-page essay just to scratch the surface.

The mullacracy that runs the joint can best be understood as a cabal of messianistic death-worshippers whose morals compare disadvantageously with The Sopranos and who are hag-ridden by both a civilizational inferiority complex and delusions of imperial grandeur.

U.S. policy regarding Iran evidences a major strain of wishful thinking and has for decades.

7/12

re: "The President Is No Churchill"

Rand Simberg at Transterrestrial Musings ("Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!") noted some language deficiencies.

Money quote(s):

"Democrats are like the French in The Simpsons, for whom “victory” isn’t in their vocabulary, unless it applies to their domestic enemies."

Exiting (i.e., "retreating") as in "exit strategy" is not "winning."

As Chas. Sheen might add: DUH!

"To these people, wars are for “ending,” not “winning.” It was something that I and others noticed in the debates in 2008, but not enough others noticed. The funny thing is, I suspect that they even realize that we notice, but they just can’t bring themselves to use the word."

This speech defect is much older than merely 2008 vintage. I believe it was Sec. Rumsfeld who had a mini-tantrum where he spelled out that what was in fact appropriate was a "victory strategy."

re: "More Foreign Policy Insanity"

Rand Simberg at Transterrestrial Musings ("Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!") is unable to embrace the absurdity.

Money quote(s):

"There must be some reason, but I doubt if it’s a good one."

re: "A “Troubled Marriage”?"

Rand Simberg at Transterrestrial Musings ("Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!") calls them like he sees them.

Money quote(s):

"Pakistan is essentially at war with us, and has been for many years."

I'm not going to argue this one way or the other, but I am going to note that the "nation" of Pakistan is a geopolitical fiction. There's a territory on the map by that name, but it's really two or three different "nations" (for values of nationhood). There are definitely major factions (tribal, religious, political, combinations of the preceding, &tc.) at war with the West, with Western Civilization, with Christendom, and indeed with the United States.

"It would be an impossible military task to conquer the country, absent massive carnage, but I wonder if there would be some way to take away the nukes?"

That's a great question and I'm just going to quietly hope that there are some folks on the payroll who've given this some thought.

re: "Muslim Rape Culture and Lara Logan"

Daniel Greenfield at Right Side News ("The Right News for Americans") puts the assault on Lara Logan into cultural and historical context.

Money quote(s):

"When Lara Logan traveled to Egypt to cover the Tahrir Square protests, she was unaware that she was going to be working in a country where sexual harassment rates of women and especially foreign women are so high as to be universal. In a politically correct profession, such truths are politically incorrect. And even now all of the coverage studiously avoids mentioning one dangerous word. Islam.

Muslim rape culture did not begin in Tahrir Square and it won't end there. Not when it actually began in the year 624 when Mohammed came up with an ingenious means of rewarding his followers. In addition to the trophies of war, he made it legal for them to capture and rape married women.

Previously that would have been considered adultery. Now it was an incentive to become one of Islam's Holy Warriors. It doesn't take much to imagine how ugly and awful the camp of Mohammed's followers was for a woman. That's why the Burka was invented."

Sex slavery. It's not a bug: it's a feature.

"In a tribal society, rape is a crime against property and honor. To a father, his daughter's virginity is a valuable item that increases her market value. Marrying her off is way to build a relationship between two families. To a husband, his wife's chastity maintains the value of his property and insures that the offspring is his. To assault a woman is to commit a crime against the communal property of a family. But a woman herself has no rights over her body that any man is bound to respect. As Lara Logan discovered in Tahrir Square."

Once upon a time I held to the theory that the Old Testament was a useful cultural survival manual for a herding and farming culture a couple of thousand years ago. And by "cultural survival manual" I meant that it was a manual which, if followed by a culture, would enable it to survive as a culture.

The Koran, in some respects, is a similar work. Only the type of culture whose survival (and expansion) it instructs is somewhat different.

Of course, since most of the West trends (or used to) towards the Christendom end of Judeo-Christianity, the New Testament's supercession of the Old Testament frees the Western world from an outdated model that would encourage cultural stasis.

(But I'm no theologian.)

"Like all social rules, they don't apply equally. The daughter of a wealthy and westernized urban family will enjoy an immunity from them, that the daughter of a poor family in a village will not. The wealthy daughter will attend the London School of Economics, use Twitter and serve as an example that her country and Islam are really very liberated. The poor daughter will be a second wife to some bored fat merchant and be considered lucky if he doesn't beat her to death when she loses her looks.

Meanwhile the young men will roam the streets bored and frustrated. They will steal anything not nailed down, join protests and sexually harass women. When Western reporters poured into Cairo to report on a pro-democracy movement, they surrounded themselves with what they thought were pro-democracy protesters. What they were actually doing was walking into one of the largest overcrowded cities in the world, where gangs of protesters had smashed the police, and created an open state of anarchy. Muslim rape culture did the rest.

As far as her attackers were concerned, Lara Logan had no rights they were bound to respect. She wasn't the wife or daughter of anyone they knew. She wasn't even a Muslim. They had no bond of kinship with her. Which meant that just like the uncovered in Mohammed's camp, she didn't belong to anyone. And that meant she was fair game."

Political correctness blinded media personalities like Lara Logan (and others) to the real dangers to be found in a Middle Eastern city during an uprising. I'm just glad she wasn't more badly injured.

"In Muslim rape culture, a woman cannot actively decline a man. She can only passively demonstrate that she is off limits by defeminizing herself. Lara Logan hadn't done that. But even if she had, it wouldn't have done much good. Previous gang assaults on women in Cairo a few years back had targeted even those covered from head to toe. To add fuel to the fire, came the chants of, "Yahood, Yahood." "Jew, Jew". Mohammed's ruling had made it legal to capture and rape Jewish women. The association may not have been directly made, but indirectly it was there. Lara Logan had been marked as a member of an enemy tribe.

The reasoning is awkward, but Islamic jurisprudence is the product of such awkwardness. It derives from the will of Mohammed whose only consistent principle was to do whatever he wanted. As a prophet he frequently made and broke his own laws, and then made new ones. Four witnesses are required for an act of sexual immorality, because at one point three witnesses accused Mohammed's own wife of such an act. Prior to that Mohammed had taken action based only on a single witness.

Mohammed modified the law to allow him to marry his son's wife and to shift the turns of his own wives. After Mohammed had received another urgent 'revelation' allowing him to do as he sexually pleased, his wife Aisha said, "O Allah's Apostle I do not see but that your Lord hurries in pleasing you." There you find the whole of Islamic jurisprudence. It was a code that existed only to please Mohammed's sexual impulses."

_____

Hat tip to Rand Simberg at Transterrestrial Musings ("Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!").

re: "My Goals For Our Libyan Adventure"

Rand Simberg at Transterrestrial Musings ("Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!") sets realistic goals.

Money quote(s):

"I don’t really care who wins, as long as Colonel Whathisname loses. I think that attempting to influence the outcome of events beyond that are far too problematic, with poor prospects for success, and large prospects for quagmire."

Goals should be realistic and achievable. Check.

"He needs to be reminded that actions have consequences — something that he seemed to have forgotten in the transition from Bush to Obama — and if he doesn’t live long enough to learn the lesson, then his successor(s) needs to know it. If we are to rid the world of tyranny, we have to get the proper incentives in place, and one of those lessons should be, if you want to enjoy a comfortable retirement, you don’t slaughter your own people when your rule is challenged."

Ridding the world of tyranny isn't anywhere in our founding documents; ridding America of tyranny (and maintaining that freedom) definitely is.

re: "The Country’s In The Very Best Of Hands"

Rand Simberg at Transterrestrial Musings ("Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!") bundles some smart analysis and then brings the snark.

Money quote(s):

"It makes me long for the robust, intelligent foreign policy of Jimmy Carter."

Re: " “There Is No Birth Certificate In Hawaii” "

Rand Simberg at Transterrestrial Musings ("Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!") muses about recent non-developments and non-discoveries by the governor of Hawaii.

re: "Good Question On Wikileaks"

Rand at Transterrestrial Musings ("Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!") shares some left-handed praise.

Money quote(s):

"(I)t’s nice to see that the administration and State Department aren’t as utterly clueless in private as they are in public."

re: "Mindless"

Rand at Transterrestrial Musings ("Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!") puts the smackdown on a dolt from my alma mater.

Money quote(s):

"(W)hat’s wrong with “reactive” as a fall back when “preventative” doesn’t work (as it clearly didn’t in Blacksburg)? Particularly when “preventative” seems to consist of putting up “unarmed victims heregun-free zone” signs?

Whatever he learned, or how fast he learned it, he didn’t learn it from these students, who disarmed a gunman up the road from his school back in 2002."

&

"(T)hey have difficulty finding any actual examples of this to justify their bizarre paranoia. And they don’t seem to live in fear of the psychopaths among them who ignore the “gun-free zone” signs, who are the only ones with guns under their setup."

_____

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit.

re: "The New Brown Shirts"

Rand Simberg at Transterrestrial Musings ("Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!") nicely ties together pro-Hamas demonstrations and media coverage of Gaza.

Money quote(s):

"Jihad has come to America’s streets"

&

"As Glenn Reynolds often notes, they’re not anti-war. They’re just on the other side."