Thomas Friedman of the New York Times has another attractively barking column up (potted summary: There’s nothing wrong with Mexico that couldn’t be cured with a combination of “real leadership” and vast amounts of money from America. Well I suppose it worked for Chile). But once more, he salts the sauce with plenty of good old Globollocks. Due to time constraints, I haven’t been able to carry out a full Globollocks analysis. But I picked up this gem, which will serve as an indicator of the sort of thing the New York Times will print these days.
Following Fallujah, I see that liberal and leftie bloggers who are pro-war (such as “Oliver Kamm”:http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2004/04/hitchens_is_ans.html , “SIAW”:http://marxist-org-uk.blogspot.com/2004_04_01_marxist-org-uk_archive.html#108102268775079976 and “Norman Geras”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/04/falluja_3.html ) have been linking to “a WSJ piece by Christopher Hitchens”:http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110004903 which argues that the disgusting behaviour of the Fallujah mob vindicates the decision to go to war. (If we hadn’t acted now, the whole of Iraq would have become like this, in time ….) I have to say that my reaction to their reaction is somewhat sceptical. If the people of Iraq are happy and peaceable (as claimed by some opinion pollsters) then this is supposed to vindicate the war; if they are rioting and murderous, then this also vindicates the war! One has to wonder whether there is _any_ development in Iraq that Hitchens wouldn’t use as confirming evidence for his worldview and which wouldn’t then be cited in this way by pro-war bloggers! Perhaps the news of increased antagonism from a section of the Shia will make new demands on Hitchens’s ingenuity?
[Lest this post be taken as more hostile to the pro-war bloggers than intended, I’d add that it seems appropriate to ask of everyone who seems certain of the rightness of their position on the war, whether there are any developments that would lead them to say, “OK, I was wrong.” For instance, if there is a functioning and independent Iraqi democracy within two years, which lasts for at least a further five, then I think that ought to shake the convictions of hardened opponents. But I don’t think that’s likely.]
It seems that the top-ranked site on Google if you search for “Jew” is an anti-semitic site. So this is CT doing our googlebombing best to correct this by linking to the Wikipedia entry for “Jew”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew instead. (See “Norman Geras”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/04/joogle.html for more details).
We’re on an “Evolutionary”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001628.html “Psychology”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001629.html kick here at CT. It seems most of our commenters are more enamored of it than some of our contributors. This is maladaptive for the CT meme, because the realization that we disagree will cause traffic to our site to drop. Unless it’s actually adaptive, because the disagreement means traffic to our site will rise. While we’re on the topic, I mean meme, I want to know how my 12-week-old daughter’s emerging desire to put everything that comes her way into her mouth is either evolutionarily adaptive or individually rational. I’ve also spent the day variously exposed to something else realist-types tend to explain, according to taste, as a matter of “adaptive fitness”:http://faculty.wm.edu/lakirk/evo_rel.html or “rational choice”:http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m0SOR/1_61/61908759/p1/article.jhtml, namely religion.[1]