Daniel

We’ve posted on this one before, but I’m a believer in the vital importance of audit. And it is troubling me somewhat that in carrying out my audit, I cannot find any news reports about atrocities committed by the Sadrists during their period of control of Najaf, which are dated later than 28 August, the day after the siege ended. Reports filed during the course of fast-moving events are often unreliable, and it strikes me as odd that there has been no follow-through at all on this story. Could anyone steer me in the direction of any more information, or is there some obvious reason I’m missing?

By way of a break from everything about the US elections in the blogosphere, here’s a post about the US elections.

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With apologies to The Poor Man, an application of this strategy to an issue which appears to be confusing surprisingly many surprisingly intelligent minds in the British Isles:

Why are people so keen to ban fox-hunting when (fishing, battery farming, meat eating in general, mousetraps etc) are responsible for much more animal death and suffering?

Because hunting foxes with dogs is a sadistic pleasure.

Next week, I may tackle the question of why the Beslan siege appalled us more than the ongoing deaths of children through malnutrition and disease in Africa. Or I may not.

Imagine that one day, a big bloke with wings taps you on the shoulder. It’s OK, he says, Brian sent me. To offer you this potential wager, on behalf of God, who has more or less given up on the human race except as a subject for philosophy conundrums.

In the envelope in my left hand, he says, I have a number, called X. At some point in the recent past, X was drawn by God from a uniform distribution over the real numbers from 0 to 1 inclusive. You can have a look at it if you like.

In my right hand, he says, I have a mobile telephone which will allow me to receive a message from God with another number, Y, which will also be drawn by God from a uniform distribution on the line 0 to 1 inclusive.

The wager is this; if you accept the wager, and X and Y are equal, then every human being currently alive on the planet earth will be horribly tortured for the next ninety million trillion years and then killed. If you accept the wager but X and Y are not equal, then a small, relatively undeserving child somewhere, will be given a lollipop.

So, do you take the wager or not?

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An article over at Harry’s Place gives what I think is probably the most eloquent version of the pro-(that)-war-(then) Left’s take on current events in Iraq. My main point of disagreement would be that I don’t think we’re making matters better by staying there (I also think that it’s probably a mistake to regard the anti-US forces as monolithic and undifferentiated “terrorists”). But it makes a number of good points which need to be taken seriously.

I suspect that the results of Chris Lightfoot’s estimation quiz (trailed by Chris a while ago) will prove to be the Dead Sea Scrolls of the subject for years to come; there is ample evidence for both sides here. I would just like to get my oar in first by saying that it provides definitive support for my views. Well it does.

It appears that the bomb outside the Australian Embassy in Jakarta (which killed 20 (Update: latest figure is more like 8) people and injured about 170, almost all of them locals and therefore presumably Muslims) was set by Jemaah Islamia, the Al-Quaeda offshoot that was responsible for the Bali nightclub bombing. This is yet another outrage in what is turning out to be a very grim month. What this the precise nature of this outrage tell us about Islamism?

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Here’s bit of bad news for my American Democrat friends; your candidate is dying on his arse in the Iowa Electronic Markets at the moment.

Here’s another bit of bad news; even at these prices, he’s still overvalued.

Note to readers. There is quite a lot of financial jargon in this post, because I’m dealing with quite a few issues that are only of interest to finance bods (and only marginally to them). The interesting stuff is toward the end.

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I realise that we at Crooked Timber are too ethereal, pointy-headed creatures to get involved in mere political mudslinging, but as the resident Morlock employee, I occasionally frequent obscure Democrat blogs like Eschaton. It is my professional opinion that this video clip is enough to make a cat laugh.

Andrew Smith has just resigned as the pensions minister. I’m not particularly interested in the political backstory to this; I’m much more interested in the opportunity it offers to undo one of the Original Sins of New Labour.

It was an appalling mistake to sack Frank Field and it is time to undo it.

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As Chris notes below, the hideous events in Beslan are the property of the people who lived there; I don’t feel comfortable commenting on them, or in getting involved in the blame exercise of what happened and whether things could have been handled better. All we can do here is offer the profoundest sympathy, and weblogs are a particularly poor medium for doing that.

There is, however, one facet of this tragedy that non-Russians do need to think about however, and maybe we should start. According to the local police, there were ten bodies in the wreckage from Arab countries. It’s just possible that these were mercenaries, but much more likely that the longstanding rumours are correct that the Chechen independence movement has Al-Quaeda involvement.

The key question is, what the hell should be done about this? In particular:
1) Ought people with the power to do something abut Chechnya to take a different attitude to the question of Chechen independence because of this?
2) Should we expect, going forward, that all other conflicts involving Muslims on one side will be similarly compromised, and what should policy-makers do differently because of this?
3) What the hell has gone wrong with the particular strain of Islam which apparently tells people it’s OK to kill children, and what can be done about it?

Finally, Chris’s post appears to have already attracted a nasty case of trolls. All I can really say to the people who appear to think that the most important thing about the massacre at Beslan is what it says about Crooked Timber’s posting priorities is first, have a word with yourself, and second, if you think our posts on Tariq Ramadan’s visa and on the siege at Najaf don’t have anything to do with the questions outlined above, think again.

OK gang, you know how much you love your mates at CT, now it’s time for you lot to do something for us. We need to get the Wisdom of Crowds to work to come up with an idea that will make us[1] all rich. There’s quite likely to be an election in the UK within the next twelve months, which means that anyone who wants big and lucrative government contracts needs to start donating to the Labour Party now.

Footnote:
[1]In case it’s unclear, I am not using “us” here in any sense that might include you lot.

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This probably doesn’t mount to all that much, but it’s been irritating me slightly for the last couple of days …

We all know that the second most dispiriting phrase in the English language is “Steve Milloy has a devastating critique …” (the first most dispiriting phrase is “My new column is up at Tech Central Station”.) The original reason why the Volokh post linked above irritated me was that it came the day after a post on Tim Lambert’s marvellous spot on the radians/degrees error in that global warming error. It rather irked me that Tim Lambert should get referenced with caveats (“Of course, that’s the claim; if there’s a rebuttal somewhere, please point me to it”) while Steven Milloy got three paragraphs of direct quotation with no caveats at all. Anyone wh knows even a little bit about the two chaps knows that Tim has always been tirelessly and scrupulously accurate, while Steven Milloy, proprietor of “junkscience.com”, is a bit of a hack, who got his start with a bit part towards the end of the single largest and most impressive work of intellectual dishonesty of the previous century[1], the effort to discredit the scientific work on the link between tobacco and lung cancer.

So I decided to take a look at the “devastating critique” to see whether it was really all that.

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Scott Martens looks into some of Daniel Pipes’ sources for the article on Tariq Ramadan linked in Ted’s post below, and comes up with a pretty appalling picture of misrepresentation and intellectual dishonesty. As Scott says in comments below, how the hell did Pipes think he was going to get away with this?