As always when I take a short break, a bunch of very insightful stuff has been posted across the blogosphere that’s well worth taking a look at.
Lawrence Simon has a post with a thought experiment that is both shocking, emotional, and frightening all at the same time. I don’t think I’ll ever quite look at the death toll from another suicide bombing in quite the same terms again, and I doubt that anyone else who reads this great piece will either.
Eric S. Raymond (of The Cathedral and the Bazaar fame) has a great series on
the myth of moderate Islam. (
The second part is up here.) A lot of his points are controversial to say the least, but he does a good job of showing how the concept of jihad often leads to the kind of terror we’re seeing now, as well as why the concept of Islam itself often helps breed fundamentalism.
Last but not least is another brilliant Victor Davis Hanson piece which deals with the need for realism in foreign policy. We have to be mindful of the world as it is rather than trying to see the world as we’d wish it to be – especially when dealing with terrorist states like Iraq and the Palestinian Authority. As always, Hanson makes a great suggestion to help reform the media leftists:
We should adopt a policy of trading places for a year. A few editors of the New York Times, some writers for The Nation, a bureau or two in the State Department, and a dozen or so Harvard faculty should try laying cement in Vegas, daily frequenting the local Taco Bell in South-Central L.A., or driving a smoking, 30-year-old Massey-Ferguson with a tank full of paraquat for 12 hours or so at a stretch. Such field research would do wonders for their worldview and their take on human nature. And I expect such a sabbatical at the tire shop in Des Moines or waitressing at Denny’s in Mobile would not turn them into Marxists as much as realists who could at last gain the full measure of someone like Arafat, Kim Il Sung, or an Iranian cutthroat mullah.
Your regularly scheduled blogging will now resume unabated…
