do not read while drinking Coke

I think I may have discovered the single funniest blog in the Blogverse.



on the threat posed by Iraq:

Chuck at Little Green Footballs writes: "Neither the protester holding this sign nor the Reuters copy editor who captioned the photo have any idea of the historical significance of its message, or what it says about the so-called 'anti-war movement.'� I couldn't have said it better myself. The threat posed by Saddam's Iraq is exactly that posed by Hitler's Germany in 1938.



Certainly, no country can be expected to stand up against the sheer force of Saddam's panzer divisions and luftwaffe when -- and that is a "when"-- he launches his blitzkrieg. I cannot believe that anyone who has any understanding of history could stand by silently as Saddam prepares to march his crack Baathist shock troops to reoccupy the Northern no-fly zones. Today it may be Mosul, but tomorrow it will be Warsaw. This formidable Iraqi war machine must be stopped now.

and on the true victims of rape:

The sad thing is that feminism has taken such a strong hold in this country that many people want to now blame rape on the men who commit it. Can you imagine that? How can a man resist assaulting a woman who's flaunting her body by wearing shorts, a tank top, or even a nun's habit? It's almost as bad as seeing a bulge in a man's jeans. We have no ability to restrain ourselves. The Lord made us that way.

and on how Seuss promotes sodomy:

Mr. Brown is gone for awhile living the bachelor life in the city. When he finally comes back. He's not alone. He's walking arm in arm with the mysterious Mr Black. Mrs. Brown is never mentioned again...So what happened? I think it's pretty obvious. Mr. Brown went off to the big city where he was recruited into homosexuality by the crafty Mr. Black. All this becomes clear when we learn that "Mr. Brown is upside down". His life's been changed. It's topsy turvy.

Don't miss the Presidential Action Figures or the Administration Holy Cards. This is satire on The Onion's level!

fun with Texas DPS

I want a new Texas Drivers' license number. The reason is, because I return/exchange a lot of stuff at Wal-Mart without a receipt, and I'm coming up against their six-month-limit policy. We get a lot of gifts for the baby and most are useless compared to diapers and what not. So it's clear - I just need a new TDL.



after all, Bush got one for similarly spurious reasons:

Now why would George Dubya require a Texas driver's license with an entirely new number? It was obtained on March 31, 1995, as was his wife's Laura Welch Bush's. His wife and daughters didn't need new numbers, nor did his famous parents -- former president and first lady, George H. and Barbara Pierce Bush -- who all would seem to be at as much risk security-wise. And by the way, doesn't Texas require renewal of a driver's license every four years on one's birthday? Did George Dubya have something in his past to hide to cause him to purge the old record and number? This seems especially confusing since his birthday is July 6, 1946, but he obtained his new number on March 31, 1995 as a renewal.



Due to this little anomaly, we thought perhaps we should check to see if this was a common practice for former governors of Texas, but no, they were not listed among the first four numbers previous to Dubya's. Now, in all fairness to Dubya we must ask why he would get a new number and not just assume it was to hide something in his past life. And why would he be given the nine-digit DL number 000000005? His wife's DL number is 005295107.

also, while we are at it, I think I deserve to have a new legal birthdate. Currently, mine falls on Valentine's Day and I therefore get cheated out of gifts - my wife need only get me a single present. This sucks. Also, I would like to move my daughter's birthday from April 10th to the same date as my wife's, April 17th. This will greatly reduce the amount of stress that I bear as I approach my old age.



Again, I find a precedent for this action in the state of Texas:

Which brings us to another subject on Dubya. During our search for the truth about Dubya's past, we came across something very interesting indeed! Another George W. Bush, white male, blue eyes, brown hair, but born on Oct. 17, 1964! What called our attention to this person, since there are so many Bushes living in Texas, this person's record was deleted on Dec. 24, 1998. Could there possibly be a connection between this person and Dubya that we as voters as yet are not aware of and why was his record deleted?

Since my daughter was born in Texas and I paid the extra $25 for teh fancy embossed Texas State Map version of the certificate, I think I'm as well qualified as this unknown guy George W. Bush whose record was deleted in 1998.



Texas DPS has recently shown that it is indeed willing to modify and destroy records even today, not just 5 years ago, so I think I've got a good case here.

bounded by the Qur'an and the Constitution

Tacitus points to this absurdity. I feel that the woman has no right to make this demand.



My religion demands that I neither pay nor receive interest. But if I pay my taxes late, then you better believe that I'll be paying interest. Being compelled to pay interest under threat of jail is a consequence of not paying taxes on time - therefore paying taxes on time is a religious duty.



First of all, neither the Qur'an nor the authentic hadith of the Prophet SAW demand that the face be fully covered. If this woman was part of some other religion that had scriptural requirements that supported full facial covering, then she might actually elicit some sympathy from me. However, her invocation of Islam here is disingenious on her part, since she demonstrates her intent to violate her own stated beliefs by choice.



Let's take her at her word. Suppose that her religion (whatever it may be) truly demands that she wear a full facial covering. The requirement by the State of Florida that her photo show her face is a requirement for the privelege to drive (neither the Constitution nor the Bill of Rights demand that driving is a right). Then by the constraints of the belief system she chooses to adopt, not driving becomes a religious duty^[1]



The bottom line is that this woman chooses to wear her full facial veil based on a personal interpretation of religion^[2] . She is attempting to leverage that personal interpretation to evade a civic requirement in order to lay claim a privelege. This puts he in the position of placing her desire to drive above her belief in her religious responsibilities.



She has to decide which is more important. If she was truly as committed to her personal interpretation as she claims from her high horse, then she should consider driving haram, just as I am personally forced to consider paying taxes late haram.



Note however that this issue is fundamentally different from the restrictions on Muslim schoolgirls in France from wearing the hijab. That is a true case of discriminating victimization by the State and interference with religion.



UPDATE: Al-Muhabajah makes some important relevant points and argues that even if this woman is wrong to demand a photo license with veil, the state is equally wrong to demand that her license be revoked outright.



UPDATE 2: Matthew distills the issue:

As I understood it, the state never denied that she has a right to wear a veil while driving. What they denied was that she has a right to wear a veil while getting her photo taken. If the state is really trying to prevent her from driving-while-veiled then I think she ought to win. If all they want is an unveiled photo and then want to let her wear what she wants, then I think the state should win.

^[1] The irony of this compared to the opposite situation regarding women drivers in Saudi Arabia is not lost on me. and is grist for the comments mill.

^[2] Which has essentially zero scriptural or doctrinal support. It's essentially a religious innovation (bida).

pragmatic prioritizing of responsibilities

actually, Bill and I agree completely:

Diana argues that Islam, as she understands it, is incompatible with American ideals, and where there is conflict, Islam must give way. I think Islam is more complex than her characterization of it. There are certainly aspects of the religion that trouble me, but I find that, like Christianity or Judaism, there is much good in it as well. Diana suggests that the "cognitive dissonance" cannot be rationally reconciled; I believe the dissonance is absolutely necessary, can be reconciled only through reason, and further, only through this cognitive dissonance will the Islamists, who refuse to admit a second, opposed idea into their minds, be routed.

this is what I actually meant when I said that there is no dissonance, that the only challenge is in assigning priorities. Take an example - the requirement that meat be halal. In practice I do not fully adhere to it, though I avoid pork completely I still eat beef and chicken at McDonald's, etc.



I make no excuses, it is my goal to someday be fully halal, but I've simply accepted for now that this is a goal that is prioritized lower than other more immediate ones (such as making sure that I speak our native language to my baby daughter as much as possible). Part of the reason that eating halal is scheduled lower on my priorities is simply because it's really hard. We live far away from our community in Houston, we often are exhausted after the long day and need to do dinner quick or cheap or bopth, etc. (these are not excuses). Speaking our language to our child is also hard, but it costs us nothing apart from a mental effort.



Dissonance arises when you have actual conflict - society tells you to do one thing, and that thing is in direct conflict with a religous requirement. To take a concrete example, if I am late on my taxes, I have to pay interest on that balance. My religion says that interest should not be paid or received. However, my religion also requires me to abide by the laws of my nation, and if I tried to fight against paying interest on my tax bill, I would suffer penalties far out of proportion. The bottom line is that I am compelled to pay interest on a late tax bill - so I simply do NOT pay taxes late. And if I ever am late, then I pay the interest.



The point here is that even this seemingly clear cut example of a conflict demonstrates the door to avoiding conflict. Don't pay taxes late. That becomes a religious responsibility, in a sens,e because the consequences put me in a position to violate my religious responsibilities.



This is always the case - there is always a way out, if you identify the source of the conflict and take preventive steps. And sometimes if there is no way out, then you are being compelled - which means that you at least didn't choose to violate the religious responsibility deliberately (premeditated).



In a free society like America, it's much less a problem. Even my community members in Britain face serious issues at times in being compelled to violate their religious responsibilities (which I won't be explaining in further detail, sorry). This forms one of the major foundations for my assertion that America remains the most Islamic country in the world - if you define an Islamic country as one that facilitates the believer's adherence to Islam.

The NPC Theory

I've plugged my friend Eric aka Phlegmatic's blog The 4th Humour before for its lurid and fantastically detailed dream diary. In general, his blog has a very high SNR of creative content and what I like to think of as "geek" philosophy - which is no less robust and rigorous as Matthew Yglesias' more traditional brand.



Now, however, Eric has finally decided to commit his "NPC Theory" to writing - which essentially states that most of the people you meet are "non-player characters" (NPC's) - programmed automatons with a finite set of responses to stimuli from the context of your perspective. This is subtler than the brute-force "free will is illusion" concept because the same person may be an NPC to you but a PC to me.



I like making the analogy to the Blogsphere - how many blogs are essentially recycled content from the A-list linkers? and how many are massive tomes iof fresh and original content? Looking at my own blogroll, I realise that I've heavily filtered it to emphasise those bloggers who are PCs from my perspective.



Anyway - do check out Eric's blog, the two entries on NPC Theory thus far are the Introduction and the Modified Turing Test for Character. I'm waiting for more!

WMD-22

Given that WMDs are still a desert mirage, the debate continues as to rationale for the war. Or at least, it continues among principled proponents of the war on Iraq like Thomas Nephew, and principled opponents of the war like myself. In his latest post, he disagrees with Gary Farber's mea culpa and remains cautiously optimistic that we will indeed find WMDs yet. In the course of this, he also asks the pointed question:

And if Saddam didn't have WMD, why the song and dance with Blix? Why not just welcome UNMOVIC, say "knock yourselves out, help yourselves to the fridge," and have frequent photo ops with earnest good people from around the globe?

I can think of lots of good reasons why you wouldn't want a foreign spra-national body poking around your military sites, regardless of whether you have a WMD program to hide or not.



Just imagine. Tomorrow UN Inspectors demand to inspect the Nes Tziona facility in Israel, on suspicion of WMG program development. What reaction do you think the Israelis would have? Anything less than outrage and obstruction would be a dereliction of duty by Sharon. The problem is the a-priori assumption that such a weapons capability exists, and thus the creation of a catch-22. Thomas explictly writes in his argument "with regrets, for war":

SCR 687 called for the unconditional destruction of all weapons of mass destruction (WMD), including chemical and biological weapons, and all ballistic missiles, and the unconditional cessation of attempts to acquire nuclear weapons... War, when it does come, will already be justified by common sense readings of a number of Security Council resolutions including SCR 687 and SCR 1441, and the aggregate impact of these and a number of intervening resolutions. It will not be pre-emptive, it will be punitive. It will finish a war interrupted in 1991, whose terms of cease-fire have been repeatedly violated by Iraq.

Note that this has always been a catch-22. If you don't have WMD, you still are guaranteed to fail according to these criteria. Apply them to the hypothetical scenario directed at Israel above. Let's say we have a similar SCR calling for Israel to renounce and unconditionally destroy all existing stocks of WMG. And unconditionally cease attempts to develop WMG. Apart from inflaming bloggers to furiously cry blood libel, is there any way that Israel could actually meet these conditions? The hypothetical Arab President of the United States in this bizarro world might well argue (from the perspective of his own self-interest) that Israel's history of aggression in the region (see: Suez Canal, attack on Iraqi nuclear reactor, etc.) as well as the "aggregate impact" of the previous UN resolutions calling on Israel to withdraw from occupied territory, etc - all amount to "finishing a war interupted in 1967". The most chilling aspect of this hypothetical is applying the words "it will not be pre-emptive, it will be punitive."



I for one am NOT comfortable with establishing this level of required compliance. Obviously the Israel analogy is incomplete, but the point is that precedent can and will cut both ways - and invoking all these rationalizations sets the bar far too low for my taste.



If tomorrow we indeed find that one of those creaky mobile labs really was once used for some WMD work. Will this really be a vindication? The threat as implied in the WMD argument for war was that of an immediate, weaponized arsenal, aimed at Israel and ready for export, as Iraq loomed on the verge of regional conquest. Today it looks a lot different. Isnt it time to admit that SCR 1441 was grossly misstated? And what do you make of the distance that the white house now is putting between itself and the whole WMD-as-casus-belli argument?



For me the bottom line comes down to two things - the fact that all reports of Sadam's WMD capabilities had always been filtered through the white house or 10 Downing. And the fact that Tuwaitha was looted. These demonstrate irrefutably to my mind that the rationale for war was wrong from the outset, and that having gone to war, we are demonstrably worse off.



UPDATE: The above was also posted to Thomas's coments ection. He replied therein:

I'd say that a key difference between Israel and Saddam's Iraq is that Israel is a democracy and Iraq wasn't. I give much less of a damn about a totalitarian dictatorship's sovereignty than I do about a parliamentary democracy's sovereignty. [BTW, I also don't think that {Sinai,Osirak} are remotely comparable to {Kuwait}; you admit the analogy is incomplete, so I let it go at that.]



I don't think my rationale "guaranteed Saddam would fail." If he'd really gone the "knock yourself out" route, you wouldn't have had inspectors noting the resistance they did (here's a 2d account), we'd have found those labs right away, and SCR 1441 would not have been breached.



I haven't made up my mind about the bioweapons labs; I'd like to know more about them. In general, yes, if they were used for WMD work after 1991, Saddam violated the terms of his probation. As you know, I consider bio and chemical weapons part and parcel of the WMD equation. Anthrax alone can cause mass death in small quantities (1 kg -> 60000+ dead in a metro area, even if the DHS et al gets their public health act together) ; in theory, such labs could produce mass quantities.



SCR 1441 was a last chance to come clean. Saddam didn't.



But we agree on many things. I'd prefer the WMD evidence to be stronger. I hold the Bush administration accountable for their claims. And I'm as appalled as you are about the Tuwaitha looting.

I completely agree! I'm not trying to draw equivalence between Iraq and Israel. But what Thomas or I feel about the relative merits of Iraq's or Israel's claims to sovereignity is ultimately irrelevant. The main point here is that the invasion was justified on the grounds of a SCR's authority - and one that did involve a catch-22 no matter how much cooperation the Saddamites gave us, because of the a-priori assumption that there were WMDs to find. There is no credible way that anyone can argue that had Saddam totally given free reign to the inspectors, and had they still found nothing, that there would still not have been cries of "deception!" "obstruction!" etc because not finding WMDs is a violation of SCR 1441. Regardless of whether the WMDs were not found via outright obstruction or simple non-existence. I don't like that precedent because it can and will be abused.



And the second main point I'm trying to make with my thought experiment is simply that SCR 1441 essentially argues that "cooperation with inspectors" is a valid rationale for invasion and regime change. Not presence of WMD per se, but as you pointed out, obstructing the search for WMD in and of itself. The WMDs were less important than the process of looking for them as an end goal. This is why I see it as a catch-22.



Of course there are major flaws in any analogy between Israel and Iraq on any grounds. Of course there are differences. But I am not making the analogy in order to defend or accuse Israel or Iraq - the analogy exists solely to demonstrate that the precedents set by the SCR 1441 affair are dangerous ones that are blind to those differences.

24601

Inspired by Tacitus's open thread asking "what are you?" (or "what aren't you?") and why, I actually wrote down for possibly teh first time my general guiding principles. Readers of the blog might identify these themes running through my posts.



I'm not a Republican because I'm a closet communist. And I'm not a Democrat because I'm a closet fascist. At leats, that's how I look to the hard-core ideolouges who comprise the cores of these groups, and it's that rancor and filtered worldview that drives me away from any explicit party affiliation. Ultimately I'm less interested in party labels and more interested in philosophical ones.



For example, I'm definitely neowilsonian. I'm also socially conservative in practice, but socially liberal regarding socety and law. I'm extremely fiscally conservative. I'm a conciliator with dominator leanings. I think the best foreign policy is one that encourages strong allies of common interest, guided by the twin moral precepts of "if you want peace, work for justice" and "teach a man to fish".



I have strong libertarian impulses regarding personal liberty and states' rights but these are tempered by my progresive belief that diversity is a source of strength, which must be nurtured by the state. I see a basic conflict between capitalism and meritocracy, even though I strongly believe in both - which is why I see affirmative action as a powerful mediator.



I strongly favor scientific freedom, ie reverse engineering, stem cell research, etc. - I believe that technology and research must be unbounded by moral imperatives. Ultimately there is no technology that cannot be used to serve mankind, and that justifies the risk that it will be abused.



I'm against using religion or ethnicity as the sole fount of identity. I think identity needs separable orthogonal components, of which religion and ethnicity form separate axes. Another axis shoudl be national identity, yet another local (and for me, local identity is synonymous with State identity. I don't go much more fine-grained than that). I reject the idea that politics should enter into identity at all.



I am Valjean and Javert, in counterpoint. Also, see the Whitman quote in the "Praise for UNMEDIA" sidebar.