thoughts in and out of season
Is it torture time? Afghan detainees’ deaths ruled homicides. According to their death certificates, two enemy combatants who died in U.S. custody at Bagram air base in Afghanistan died from blunt-force homicide. In general, the U.S. admits to a policy of using “stress and duress” during interrogation, including deprivation of sleep, various disorienting tactics, … More ...
Amnesty International made its name working for “prisoners of conscience,” defined as “people imprisoned solely because of their political or religious beliefs, gender, or their racial or ethnic origin, who have neither used nor advocated violence.” Like most bureaucratic and public policy organizations they’ve suffered mission creep, and most recently have hired a full-time lobbyist… More ...
Italian political posters are much more stylishly designed than in America, and when you combine the high style with the habitual cynicism about government it’s hard to believe any of it should be taken seriously. So when I was in Venice recently I was inclined to view the rainbow-colored peace banners fluttering from windows as … More ...
Why is this a good idea? Here’s an overview of the Somali Bantu we’re taking in because they qualify as “a persecuted class of people who deserve to be resettled in America”:
… More ...“The Bantus have had little formal education, low literacy and English levels, large families, almost no U.S. support system, and an almost total
The issues are getting too weird for comment: the Libertarian Party is conducting a “Guns for Tots” program in Harlem to protest proposed legislation banning all toy guns, while the Village Voice notes that war toys being sold in Easter baskets often feature soldiers with light-colored hair.
It is a requirement of human freedom and dignity that Catholic doctrine be understood as true, unchanging and publicly knowable. To the extent doctrine is settled and knowable, to be a Catholic is not to subject oneself to the rule of priests but to live intelligently in the world. Doctrine then plays a part (speaking … More ...
There will always be an England, or maybe some other country with the same name: Spectator and its Tory MP editor may face charges over Taki race rant. In a short opinion piece the columnist Taki used the expressions “black thugs” and “multiply like flies” in connection with West Indians. The Guardian, heir … More ...
The Totally Managed Universal Order has its problems. Perfect uniform central control of everything takes an infinite amount of time and effort, and is never carried out even tolerably well by those on the scene. Here is a field report from the new England, where a drunk on a train or child who bumps his … More ...
What’s the point of this treaty? Global Treaty Seeks to Wean World Off Smoking. Under the treaty, countries commit themselves to laws to curb tobacco use by ending advertising, requiring health warnings on cigarette packets, barring the use of “deceptive” terms on labels and the like. Neither the treaty, the article, nor the ineffable … More ...
Philosophical pragmatism is mostly the habit of changing the subject if a line of thought makes one uncomfortable. It’s the collapse of the coherence theory of truth into a comfort theory of truth. Such a view can have the appearance of great reasonableness, of not wanting to take things too far. A consequence of the … More ...