KATHY KINSLEY writes about terms that have lost their meaning.

What I find amusing is that many people who complain constantly about “fascism” seem to have trouble recognizing it in an objectively fascist state like Iraq or Syria.

PAUL WRIGHT says that the antiwar movement is suffering from the generational imperialism of baby boomers mired in Vietnam-era thinking:

The old revolutionaries need to keep an image in mind before they put their hand up: Eisenhower. No-one could fault his ability at war, his patriotism or his intellect. So outflank him call him outdated, out of touch, a relic. But consider: his war was only 25 years out of date when JFK ordered the troops into Vietnam. Your war is older than that, and much more obsolete.

Actually, it was closer to 15 years — but that only makes Wright’s point stronger.

PERRY DEHAVILLAND says that Jacob Hornberger is morally obtuse.

AIMEE DEEP reports that both Osama bin Laden and Michael Eisner are finished.

I’VE NOTICED the new developments in the Central Park jogger case, and I have to say that even after reading this article in the Village Voice I don’t feel that I have a complete handle on the issues involved.

Jeanne d’Arc has a post on the many reasons why the case is disturbing. It comes as no surprise to lawyers that the criminal justice system locks up innocent people. It’s an old and unfunny joke among prosecutors that “convicting guilty people is just your job — convicting the innocent is the real test of professionalism.” Like most dark jokes within the professions (for brain surgeons it’s “oops! there go the piano lessons!”) it’s mostly just dark humor, but like all of them it’s dark humor tinged with truth. Prosecutors say that their goal is achieving justice, not convicting people. But their conviction ratios are too important to their careers to ignore.

I think it was Thomas Jefferson who said that it’s much worse to convict an innocent person than to miss a guilty one — because when you convict the innocent, people perceive that obedience to the law is no protection. And I certainly don’t think that it’s okay — as some have apparently been saying — that no harm is done if a wrongly convicted person is eventually exonerated. Those years spent in jail are years lost forever, and pretty damned lousy ones at that.

Of course, any system run by humans is going to be imperfect. Even the old maxim, “better ten guilty go free than one innocent be convicted,” seems implicitly to suggest that if the ratio were 100-1 things might be different. (See Sasha Volokh’s already-famous law review article on this very issue.)

To my mind, the real test of a system isn’t whether or not it makes mistakes: by that standard, all systems will fail, since all make mistakes. The real test is whether the mistakes were made in good or bad faith, and whether the response to them, once they’re discovered, is marked by good or bad faith. What unfortunately happens in some criminal cases is that prosecutors try to block DNA tests, or hide exculpatory evidence, to keep a conviction from being overturned. I consider that sort of behavior to be the very worst sort of crime — because it’s not only wrong in itself, but undermines the whole system.

UPDATE: Here are some comments at Pundit Tree. And reader Tom Maguire points out that Max Power has been debating this with Uppity Negro for some time. And here’s something from Sisyphus Shrugged, which is also one of the better blog names I’ve seen lately.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Oh, and here’s one by Armed Liberal, who finds Jeanne d’Arc just a bit too “self-satisfied.” He adds:

I’m interested in why our three reactions are so disparate, and it cuts to one of my significant core issues, the alienation of many of us from our society and the overt disgust with all the instruments of government. In other words, the collapse of legitimacy.

I’m interested in why it is, when we correct the injustices of the past, and devise tools to ensure that it will be difficult to make the same mistakes again, we are dwelling on the “Oh, no, we were so bad” rather than the “we’re getting better”. See, I think that real liberalism…the kind that builds schools and water systems and improves people’s lives…comes from a belief in progress.

I think that this is a good point — though one question is, now that the system appears to be correcting its mistakes, how far will it go to make things right? I think a million bucks each is reasonable, though no more than reasonable, compensation if these guys turn out to be honest-to-God innocent. Think they’ll get that much?

And if the State of New York replies that compensating the wrongly convicted at that level is too expensive, given how often such things happen, well, that will tell us something, now won’t it?

ONE MORE UPDATE: Mark Kleiman weighs in with the voice of experience.

HOW THE BLOGOSPHERE CHANGES YOU: I’ve noticed this phenomenon myself.

FLORIDA NON-TERROR UPDATE: Donald Sensing and Reid Stott weigh in on false alarms. Here’s an excerpt from Stott’s post:

They didn’t do anything but what citizens have been asked to do repeatedly, especially in a week of heightened terror alert, on the anniversary of the death of thousands due to such terror. Law enforcement officials announced the tip to the media, not Eunice Stone. Only after the men had been stopped in Florida, and the story of her initial tip broken, did the media show up in droves outside Ms. Stone’s house. Did she hold a smiling press conference on her front lawn to boast of what she’d done? No, visibly uncomfortable with all the attention, she go into the family vehicle (followed by a family member politely chastising the media scrum in a true Southern manner: “Y’all mind if ah git in mah truck?”) She said as little as possible, and then left them there (admittedly, partially because Fox had scooped the hell out of everyone and somehow locked her up for a live interview).

And you know what? In the very first phone interview she did, one of the first things she said was ” ‘I hope I haven’t done something wrong,’ Stone had told Fox News. ‘I hope I haven’t caused someone problems that really didn’t do anything … At the same time, I thought, ‘What if they really are doing something and I stopped them?’ ” Does that sound like someone seeking to get others in trouble so that she might glory in the media?

And the media, even today, continues to get her story wrong, as Christiane Amanpour did this morning on CNN when she very snidely said the alert was due to the word of a “fast food waitress,” suggesting the whole episode showed America is out of control. Perhaps one should make certain of at least the known facts before one engages in speculative punditry before millions, like the fact the very very early reports that said the tipster was a waitress at Shoney’s were quickly debunked, long before we even heard the name of “Eunice Stone,” oh, and that little fact that our country had bumped up the alert status 48 hours beforehand. Of course, those facts would tend to tear down both sides of Christiane’s point, but no matter, she’s just a pro with a bully pulpit to millions. No need to get bogged down in accuracy, it dulls the rhetoric.

Well said.

UPDATE: Aziz Poonawalla is rather critical of Donald Sensing’s post. However, Rod Dreher seems to find the same anti-Southern prejudice in media coverage that Sensing complains about — though he concludes, after examining his own assumptions in the matter, that bias goes both ways.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Suman Palit writes that this is why TIPS was a bad idea: Garbage In, Garbage Out. Well, maybe. On the other hand, this was a credible report. The question is, are we better off examining these, or ignoring them? That’s not an easy question to answer, since it depends on the ratio of good to bogus reports, and the costs of acting and not acting. Certainly the tips from the Buffalo, New York muslim community that led to the arrests there seem to have been worthwhile. I do agree with Suman’s main point, though, which is that these defensive efforts are far less important than cutting off the head of the snake.

THE ARAB LEAGUE IS NOW URGING IRAQ to agree to Bush’s inspection plan. But the big item in this story is the following, from Bush:

“The U.N. will either be able to function as a peacekeeping body as we head into the 21st century, or it will be irrelevant. And that’s what we’re about to find out,” Bush said.

Either way, Bush wins. For a dumb guy, he winds up in this situation a lot.

SCOTT RITTER SAYS THAT “WAGING PEACE” IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN TRUTH:

[TIME] You’ve spoke about having seen the children’s prisons in Iraq. Can you describe what you saw there?

[Ritter] The prison in question is at the General Security Services headquarters, which was inspected by my team in Jan. 1998. It appeared to be a prison for children — toddlers up to pre-adolescents — whose only crime was to be the offspring of those who have spoken out politically against the regime of Saddam Hussein. It was a horrific scene. Actually I’m not going to describe what I saw there because what I saw was so horrible that it can be used by those who would want to promote war with Iraq, and right now I’m waging peace.

Typical. We saw the same unwillingness to discuss such things from those who defended the Soviet Union, Pol Pot, and many other evil regimes. Usually in the name of a “peace” that really meant “surrender.”

As Tony Adragna notes, though some people are saying that Ritter is being “demonized,” the truth is that he’s doing it to himself.

A TRAP SWINGS SHUT: Robert Musil writes that it’s rope-a-dope on several levels.

WHY THEY HATE US: Friedrich has an answer.

DAVID WARREN WRITES that those who say we’re embarked on an unending war are wrong:

For, contrary to the most pessimistic assessments, we will be able to know when the war against terrorism has been won. It will be when we see a phenomenon sweeping the Middle East, equivalent to what swept Central and Eastern Europe in the years 1989-91. (Though we may yet see the contrary in the meantime — Islamists overthrowing governments in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia.)

We are dealing with an enemy that is defeatable, but which is not small. And we are dealing with entrenched attitudes that penetrate far more deeply into Muslim society than into the societies that were freed in Central and Eastern Europe. There was in these latter, after all, no one left who genuinely believed in Communism. In the Islamic world there are great masses of people who genuinely believe in the most bellicose interpretation of the old Muslim concept of “jihad” or holy war. Dead or alive, Osama bin Laden does command armies of millions of sympathizers, people living an apocalyptic fantasy.

But we have faced that kind of thing before. The Nazis were living an apocalyptic fantasy; so were the fascists of Mussolini’s Italy, and the emperor-cultists of Tojo’s Japan. In many ways, the antebellum U.S. South once fell into such a collective fantasy, and behaved aggressively in a like way. Such enemies were never going to be won over by reason or negotiation, and every proposal for appeasement strengthened their hand. . . .

That is the hard fact of life. Only the infantile narcissism in so much of the post-modern West prevents us from seeing it plain.

Yet there are still appeasers out there, driven in large part by what Diane E. describes as anger against effectuality. At least, anger against Western effectuality.

For some similar thoughts, see this post from OxBlog.

UPDATE: NEXIS OF EVIL: Richard Bennett hits an antiwar (er, and antilogging, and anti-meat, and, well, you get the idea) activist where it hurts.

JEFF JARVIS has an excellent suggestion for the Chicago Tribune.

TONY ADRAGNA is still on the Scott Ritter story. And Will Vehrs has sympathetic comments on the arrest of Al Gore’s son for DWI, which I hadn’t even heard about. As Vehrs points out, that’s just as well.

UPI COLUMNIST JIM BENNETT WRITES, in a column explicitly inspired by this post on Samizdata:

Three years ago, I was present at a vociferous argument between Margaret Thatcher and a retired American general who was a strong Europhile. The general maintained that Germany was America’s strongest and most important ally, while Britain’s aid was essentially worthless. Today nobody could advance such an argument with a straight face.

Interestingly enough, Tim Hames, writing in the Times of London on Friday, summarized recent British poll results on Iraq. Opposition to Britain fighting is most concentrated in the trendy, higher-income brackets; support for fighting is strongest in Middle England. The Chelsea neighborhood so full of quiet proofs of solidarity on Sept. 11 was in fact the heart of the trendier, higher-income parts of England.

Perhaps the polls today are no more meaningful than the famous Oxford vote prior to the Second World War, a vote of the same sort of elites, not to fight Hitler. After all, the same Oxford students went readily to fight when it became clear that appeasement of thugs does not work.

I suspect that Sept. 11 and its consequences will be part of a longer-term set of changes in the world. The strength of the comments of a random set of Americans to an impromptu memorial by a random collection of Brits reinforces my belief that an emerging Anglosphere will be part of those changes.

Quite a few people are saying so.

DIANE E. describes “a generalized rancid, corrosive anger against any form of effectuality.” You do see a lot of that, thinly disguised as compassion or sensitivity by people who are in fact deficient in both.

STEFAN SHARKANSKY says America’s middle east problems are all about oil. And he’s got an appropriately leftist solution.

UPDATE: Sharkansky is surprised I’ve called his solution leftist. But it’s about redistributing “unearned” income: sort of the inheritance tax writ large. Isn’t it?

MARK STEYN is reflecting on cultural sensitivity. Personally, I hope we all learn to be as sensitive as he is.

FUNNY: Last summer it was the anti-war people who wanted a debate on Iraq. Now it’s the Bush Administration that wants it, and is determined to get it.

THE INDYMEDIA KIDS are obviously provocateurs working for Ashcroft. Who else would respond to a reference on the Wall Street Journal’s website bringing in a lot of new eyeballs by posting this?

As far as defacing patriotic bumper stickers go, I’m all for it. Patriotism is a disease of the ignorant, kind of like believing in UFOs and palm reading. The American flag is also comparable to the Nazi flag and many people around the planet would agree with this comparison.

All empires fall. Let’s take down the American one.

Oh, right: idiots. So which is it?

The link is here and this is currently the very last comment. Beware that trolls unhappy with IndyMedia have posted the goatse.cx photo in various places.

SCIENTIST-BLOGGER DEREK LOWE has a series on chemical warfare. Start with this post and scroll up.

SCOTT OTT has discovered proof that Nicholas Kristof’s column on Cuba, much-reviled in the Blogosphere, is actually right!

ANDREW HOFER’S SUBTERRANEAN CONTACTS have produced this Al Qaeda internal memo, which suggests that their management techniques are more modern than generally realized.

ANOTHER DANGEROUS CABAL is exposed. Brrr.

THE FBI PLANS TO CHARGE five men arrested in Buffalo as part of a suspected Al Qaeda cell. But here’s the key part of the report:

Dr. Khalid Qazi, president of the American Muslim Council of Western New York, said he was told the investigation started when the local Muslim community reported suspicious activities to the FBI.

Yep. That’s how you catch these guys. And it’s why (as I’ve said since Day One) it’s important to treat the American Muslim population in general as allies, not suspects.

UPDATE: I just noticed that Bill Peschel is blogging again and posted similar thoughts last night.