BELGIAN BLOGGER / LINGUIST MAARTEN SCHENK deconstructs Chomsky’s latest.
I’m glad someone is still bothering with this. Personally, I find myself adopting Tim Blair’s stance.
Archive for 2002
September 10, 2002
ANOTHER ARTICLE ON WEBLOGS, giving Bill Quick credit for coining the term “blogosphere” and mentioning the BlogCritics project.
September 9, 2002
THERE SEEM TO BE QUITE A FEW BLOGGERS OUT THERE who feel unjustly ignored, but only Colby Cosh could complain about the newly distant manner of his Nigerian spam-friends.
CHARLES MURTAUGH has a very interesting post on Steven Hatfill, and why he might have been “set up.” Go read it — it’s worth it for the post title.
SCOTT ROSENBERG is mocking the timing of the Administration’s PR offensive:
Time’s a-wasting — we must have “regime change” now. But, hey, we can delay everything for a whole month if that makes things more convenient for White House TV consultants, and for Bush’s ranch schedule.
Well, I suspect that the invasion is on its own timetable, probably waiting for these Marines to get where they’re going. A lot of Rosenberg’s commenters aren’t buying it either.
UPDATE: Reader Peter Stanley writes:
After Afghanistan, there was a shortage of precision weapons – cruise missiles, JDAMs, etc. Last fall, the gummint placed big orders with Raytheon, Lockheed and whoever else. We had enough again by June.
The reason we haven’t struck Iraq yet isn’t disorganization in the Bush administration or even troop movements. It’s the weather. No one wants to fight in a chem-bio suit in 110 degrees plus the shocking humidity of the Persian Gulf. We would have most likely more casualties from heatstroke than enemy action.
Good point.
SUMAN PALIT says that those who have made a career of mocking Americans for smugness and insularity will soon miss those qualities.
DANIEL PIPES has a list of Americans killed by Islamic terrorists and there are a lot:
In all, 800 persons lost their lives in the course of attacks by militant Islam on Americans before September 2001 – more than killed by any other enemy since the Vietnam war. (Further, this listing does not include the dozens more Americans in Israel killed by militant Islamic terrorists.)
And yet, these murders hardly registered. Only with the events of a year ago did Americans finally realize that “Death to America” truly is the battle cry of this era’s most dangerous foe, militant Islam.
In retrospect, the mistake began when Iranians assaulted the U.S. embassy in Tehran and met with no resistance.
Interestingly, a Marine sergeant present at the embassy that fateful day in November 1979 agrees with this assessment. As the militant Islamic mob invaded the embassy, Rodney V. Sickmann followed orders and protected neither himself nor the embassy. As a result, he was taken hostage and lived to tell the tale. (He now works for Anheuser-Busch.)
In retrospect, he believes that passivity was a mistake. The Marines should have done their assigned duty, even if it cost their lives. “Had we opened fire on them, maybe we would only have lasted an hour.” But had they done that, they “could have changed history.”
Standing their ground would have sent a powerful signal that the United States of America cannot be attacked with impunity. In contrast, the embassy’s surrender sent the opposite signal – that it’s open season on Americans. “If you look back, it started in 1979; it’s just escalated,” Sickmann correctly concludes.
I agree.
BJORN STAERK says that Swedish police aren’t taking terrorism seriously.
A PRO-PALESTINIAN RIOT forced Benjamin Netanyahu to cancel his speech at Concordia University in Montreal:
There was a long standoff between the pro-Palestinian demonstrators and the students who had come to hear Netanyahu speak. The demonstrators were pleased they had stopped him talking.
“There’s no free speech for hate speech,” said Palestinian activist David Battistuzzi.
Robert Fisk will be speaking at GMU, and Hanan Ashrawi will be speaking at Colorado College, on September 11. It’s unlikely that they’ll be silenced. It’s doubtful that they’ll even be asked tough questions about their support for terrorists and terrorism.
Yet dissent is supposedly being crushed in America.
UPDATE: Here is a first-person account, which I found via Charles Johnson.
STEPHEN GREEN has a great post, and it’s an answer to Jim Cramer. Key excerpt:
We can’t go on letting barbarians kill our people. We can either wage and win this war in our enemies’ lands and (eventually) hearts and minds, or we can simply defend ourselves at home.
If we fight and win, we carry American values past our shores, and liberate trampled lands. If we retreat behind our borders and play defense, then we’ll lose our American values — freedom, privacy, trade — in the attempt to make ourselves safe.
As a nation, we could probably become safe and neutral as Switzerland — just with a bigger, fascist Army, and strip searches to get into the Post Office. But as a people, we could never accept the retreat and humiliation.
We can fight them there, or fight ourselves here. The choice is that stark. The outcomes are that drastic. It comes down to oppressive homeland security, or bashing the bad guys until they cry uncle.
This is exactly right. Print it out and fax it to your Senators.
TAPPED pleads a gnome shortage. Hey — Kuttner! Moyers! — Hire some gnomes!
UPDATE: Say, you don’t think the gnome shortage stems from TAP’s budget problems, do you? As several bloggers have remarked before, the blog is the best part of TAP’s online operation, which itself is better than TAP’s dead-tree operation. Somehow I doubt Kuttner and Moyers are hip enough to realize that.
BILL MCGURN IS SAVAGING BILL O’REILLY for “colluding” with the Saudis.
SWEDEN UPDATE: Alterman’s blasting me with pro-Sweden emails now. I think he’s going to post something more later. This Sweden stuff seems to have hit a nerve. I don’t think he or his readers would respond to charges against the United States with such indignant fervor. . . .
Hell anything that can get him to post more than once a day counts as an achievement in my book.
UPDATE: One thing that Alterman hasn’t mentioned, but that someone might, is that some of Sweden’s trade with Nazi Germany was, according to Charles Higham’s book Trading with the Enemy, actually trade by U.S. companies that was laundered through Sweden. Higham’s charges may well be true (I’ve never seen anyone refute them, though I’ve never given the subject deep study) but remember: the original topic was whether Sweden was a “beacon of light.” Evidence of misbehavior by America or Americans doesn’t do anything to make Sweden’s light brigher.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Okay, it’s late enough that I’m not going to get to a post tonight. But here’s an article by Johan Norberg on Sweden’s economic problems. And Swedish blogger Martin Lindeskog, who would like to become an American citizen, seems to think I’ve got it right.
JIM CRAMER is mad as hell about September 11.
UPDATE: I was in a rush when I posted this, so all I put up was a pointer. But here’s what bothers me about Cramer’s post:
I now regard our great bulwark of laws that protect individual rights against the right of a potential intrusive government as a plaything of our enemies.
No, it’s not. But as I’ve said before, I think that these sentiments are why it’s very important that we win this war abroad, and soon. If we play defense and rely on homeland security to protect us, we’ll face a ratcheting-upward of dumb and intrusive rules, with no real prospect of victory. And when the terrorists set off a nuke in Houston, or Detroit, or Pittsburgh, more people will feel like Cramer.
JONAH GOLDBERG says that this fall’s election should be about the war.
ANN SALISBURY emails a link to this disturbing article. Excerpt:
After Richard Colvin Reid was arrested for allegedly trying to detonate explosives in his shoes on a U.S.-bound airliner in December, federal officials never searched electronic transportation incident reports to determine if this was a new pattern of terrorist activity.
The reason is simple and distressing: The Department of Transportation’s computer system doesn’t allow those reports to be searched by key words like “shoe” and “bomb,” a function most computer users take for granted.
And this is far from the worst case of information-technology impotence in the war on terrorism. The Department of Transportation’s Web-based “Activation Information Management” system is actually state-of-the-art for the federal government — it uses the Internet, not glacial mainframe computers, and is accessible to employees in all the department’s 12 agencies, a rarity among the fiefdoms of Washington. . . .
“Virtually every corner you turn, you see problems,” said Mark Forman, associate director for information technology and e-government in the White House Office of Management and Budget and the top IT official in the Bush administration.
Jeez. Can’t they hire Dave Winer, or Nick Denton, or somebody? Apparently not:
Complicated government contracting requirements have left many small high-tech firms with cutting-edge technologies unable to sell their products to the federal government. A long-held culture of protecting agency turf and funding, combined with the lack of a coordinated governmentwide IT strategy, has created a sea of unconnected islands of information technology throughout Washington that threaten the nation’s ability to fight terrorism.
If this weren’t so pathetic, it would be almost funny. As I’ve said before, the terrorists have had a better learning curve. That needs to change.
A BUNCH OF PEOPLE HAVE SENT EMAILS saying “I know you’ve wrapped up Sweden, but. . . .” I think this issue has been done to death, but maybe I’ll do one more post tonight or tomorrow if I can find the motivation.
UPDATE: Reader Jim Hogue emails: “Hell, keep it up!! I can hear left leaning liberals frothing at mouth and grinding their teeth all the way down here in Texas!!” Well, that’s not actually a goal here at InstaPundit, but it’s amazing the degree of emotional or political investment some people have in the idea of Sweden being a “beacon of light,” as a visit to Alterman’s page today will demonstrate. (Nobody’s mentioning the Nazis, or the eugenics, though.) I may do something later — and if you’ve missed anything, just go to the search window and type in “Sweden.”
Regardless, however, I predict that Sweden’s appeal will drop now that the whole wild-sex thing appears to be a myth.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Kevin Drum of CalPundit writes: “I wouldn’t blame you if you skipped another post on the Sweden thing. It’s probably not worth keeping something like this going.” Well, it does tend to resemble Usenet after a while. We’ll see how energetic I feel later.
ANOTHER GREAT HITCHENS COLUMN:
There’s no time to waste on the stupid argument that such a deadly movement represents a sort of “cry for help” or is a thwarted expression of poverty and powerlessness. Osama bin Laden and his fellow dogmatists say openly that they want to restore the lost caliphate; in other words, the Muslim empire once centered at Constantinople. They are not anti-imperialists so much as nostalgists for imperialism. The gang that kidnapped and murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl – and proudly made a video showing the ritual slaughter of a Jew – issued a list of demands on that same obscene video. One of those demands was for the resumption of US sales of advanced F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan. Only a complete moral idiot can believe for an instant that we are fighting against the wretched of the earth. We are fighting, as I said before, against the scum of the earth. . . .
If you remember, there were also those who warned hysterically of a humanitarian disaster as a result of the bombing: a “silent genocide,” as one Boston-area academic termed it. But to the contrary, the people of Afghanistan did not have to endure a winter with only the food and medicine that the primeval Taliban would have furnished them. They survived, and now the population has grown by almost 1.2 million, as refugees from the old, atrocious tyranny make their way home. Here is the first country in history to be bombed out of the Stone Age.
The piece is too good to excerpt, though I have. Read it all. (Via Porphyrogenitus.)
BIN LADEN DEAD? Interesting comment from this interviewer:
“Khaled let his tongue run away by referring to Bin Laden in the past tense,” wrote Fouda. “Something is not working well in the upper levels of al-Qaida. I used to think there was a 50% chance Bin Laden was alive, now I rather believe he is dead.”
I think he’s dead, too — though I suppose this could just be clever disinformation. But I don’t think he could keep his mouth shut for this long.
TOUCHING FAMILY PORTRAITS from Hamas. Here’s a response.
DUKE UNIVERSITY STUDENT Jesse Panuccio has some worries about his school’s 9/11 observance plans.
SKBUBBA has some interesting thoughts on last year’s reported decline in crime — maybe it’s because of 9/11:
Assuming the reporting period is through 12/31/2001 (the article doesn’t say but the full report is supposed to be out later this week) it would include a little over one quarter of post-attack statistics. Erosion of civil liberties notwithstanding (we’ll get them back eventually), law enforcement at all levels is on heightened alert which could be a factor. I also get a gut feeling that people are generally more vigilant and more alert to potential threats, and more willing to get involved. I think a lot more people are armed, too.
Interesting suggestion, though I have no idea whether it will turn out to be true. I think there’s not much question about this part, though:
Considering the Taliban ass whipping, a restructuring of our military to defend against future terrorist attacks, a critical and constructive reevaluation of our intelligence and law enforcement capabilities, people unafraid to get back on planes and go about their business and get on with their lives, and general world condemnation of radical extremists, I don’t think the terrorists got quite the response they expected.
No. But then, Jimmy Carter isn’t President now. I’d like to see more of that “critical and constructive reevaluation,” though.
TALKLEFT has an interesting post about an inmate who’s suing a prosecutor for blocking DNA tests that would have proved him innocent.
There are far too many cases of prosecutors covering up exculpatory evidence and doing other things that have more to do with winning cases than with seeking justice. I see no reason why they shouldn’t be held accountable.
ABSENT WITHOUT BLOGGING: It’s now past noon, and TAPPED still hasn’t posted anything. This continues a worrisome reduced-blogging trend on their part.
Come back, guys. I miss you, even if you are wrong about Sweden.