OK, I have to call this policy choice stupid

By -
It looks to me, based on what I know, that the members of ISIS are generally very bad people. Could the US successfully intervene to defeat the group's aims? I find it doubtful, but if in fact we could, I am not reflexively opposed to the idea of doing so.

But this idea of picking out particular "moderate" rebel groups and funding them just strikes me as ridiculous. But it is typical of our current politics: it expresses the felt need to "do something" about anything unsatisfactory in the world, while doing it without any real commitment or any real likelihood of success. It is based on the same sort of sentiment that regards NFL players wearing pink shoes for a month as an important step forward in curing breast cancer.


Comments

  1. Samson Corwell5:52 AM

    …if in fact we could, I am not reflexively opposed to the idea of doing so.

    I have a feeling the libertarians who read this are going to start thinking you've become a neo-conservative. Not that I think this makes you even close to one, though; I hate neo-conservatism with a passion, but I have no problem with multilateralism.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more