podpolia

Anti-Semitism seems to be on the rise in much of the world. The mere fact that the Prime Minister of Israel must attack those who compare Israel to Nazi Germany is really saying something. The comparison of military and police strikes (that have killed 3,000) against Palestinian terrorists (who have killed 1,000 Jewish civilians) to the systematic destruction of 6,000,000 European Jews just because they were Jewish is ridiculous.
The recent letter by Russian politicians asking for a ban on Jewish groups illustrates how much of the world is affected by anti-Semitism. These elected officials seem to believe that Jews are behind anti-Semitism, which is patently stupid. We shall have to keep an eye on this situation around the world as it progresses. Jews from any nation are welcome in America (but if they happen to be conservative they’ll be branded as “neo-cons” and viciously attacked by liberals).

Power Line has an article about the review of a book I (supposedly) read for my 20th Century Political Ideologies class last semester. The review is quite good, as were our discussions in class on the topic of the book. By the time we were to read this book for class, it was the end of the semester and I had gotten so thoroughly sick of the downright stupid things said in some of the other books we had for the class (the reading of which would be followed by my fuming, ranting, raving, and laughing out loud, followed by throwing the book across the room and refusing to read anymore) that I didn’t even bother reading it, and instead focused on the content of the discussion we had in class.
For Ignatieff’s book, the biggest question (at least in Dr. Botteron’s mind) was “what rights can be legitimately suspended in times of emergency?” This question was tied directly to the point mentioned in the review about how we can only be certain that we won’t regret removing a right in hindsight only if we determine what we can safely eliminate (temporarily) beforehand. Our class discussion, therefore, centered around what rights we thought could be suspended, and why. Suprisingly (for me, anyway) most of my fellow students were quite willing to eliminate most of the rights besides the ones granted by the First Amendment. There were minor discussions about habeus corpus (and Lincoln’s suspension of it during the Civil War) and various other rights. My stance on the issue was that all of the rights but those granted by the Second Amendment (the right to keep and bear arms) could be temporarily abridged — and that those rights could be abridged (though very carefully), but only if others were left intact. My argument was that the rights could be legitimately abridged to preserve the lives of the citizens, but that the citizens MUST have a way to regain control of the political organization after the crisis was over. I feel that the nation has elected the government it has because it was willing to trust it with their own well-being. However, I also feel it is imperative that we must have the ability to change that government if it violates our trust and begins acting against our interests.
Dr. Botteron and I were both suprised that others in the class agreed with me on the topic (and not just Landry, the neo-fascist). That’s one nice thing about political philosophy classes — if you make sense and make a convincing argument, sometimes even people you wouldn’t suspect will agree with you.

It looks like one of the nation’s leading Democrats is trying to find ‘common ground’ with as many people as possible on abortion. This is rather a touchy topic for a Democrat to indicate willingness to compromise on, but it looks to me as if she’s trying to move towards the middle of the political spectrum while still opposing Bush on quite a lot of things. Is this the first step towards a more moderate Hillary — one that is undoubtedly interested in running for President in 2008? We shall see.

Power Line links to an excellent article by Victor Davis Hanson about the developments in Iraq, and the context they should be viewed in. It turns out that this quagmire has given us quite a few new options on how to deal with certain trouble spots around the world. I think some of his ideas are a bit extreme (though the idea of Condi Rice threatening to level Syria’s military strikes me as quite amusing), but on the whole it’s a quite thorough analysis. The whole ‘quagmire’ thing is overdone.
In fact, I’m rather concerned. We have about 4 inches of quagmire on the ground, and it’s flurrying again. If the wind gets up some more, we might have quagmire drifts!

I’m not sure just what this is supposed to tell us about Senator Boxer (other than that she’s a raving loon), but I’m sure Freud would have found it fascinating. Anyway, the article suprisingly put in the relevant parts of the transcript, although they neglected to mention that Senator Boxer had just finished an immensely long (it can only be described thus) diatribe about Rice and the war with Iraq and every single related thing she could think of. When you spend 5 or 10 minutes telling someone how they lied to the country and deceived everyone and more or less how they’re just basically evil, it seems that you can then claim to be the victim of an ‘attack’ when that person asks you to stick to the topic and not say that she’s the scum of the earth.
Fascinating.