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Why We Say Human Rights is the Reason

Michael Kinsley: “Bush has said clearly and often that Saddam's external threat does justify a war all by itself. So, human-rights abuses are neither necessary nor sufficient as a reason for war, in Bush's view, to the extent it can be parsed. Logically, they don't matter. That makes the talk about the torture of children merely decorative, not serious.”

Yeah. We on the mushy right (you know, the ones who talk like conservatives but only with a guilty conscience?) use human rights as a justification for going to war. Don't tell anyone, but it's only because we think it will convince those on the left that a war against Iraq is just.

Good Enough Reason for Me

The reason Mark Pilgrim is waiting to have sex (there's also reason to believe he means conceive rather than 'just' sex) until he gets married: “Because we don't want to worry for the rest of our lives whether our child have [sic] enough of an aptitude in math to count backwards from 9.”

Casus Belli

Josh Marshall: “The failure to disarm is probably a casus belli. But what we're looking for isn't a pretext for war, but a rationale for going to war now.”: I'm more inclined to say that there is casus belli, but it's not so much the timing I have problems with, but the way the war is going to be fought. (There doesn't seem to be much consideration on the side of the Americans of the detterance effect of Iraqi-sponsored terrorism.) I caught the tail end of the State of the Union address, but like TPM said, the problem is not that there are no weapons of mass destruction: it's that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that were once accounted for (by the UN) seem to have disappeared. “What happened to it all? The Iraqis say they don't have it. And they've provided no evidence that they destroyed it. Where is it?”

He Tried To Be Swayed

A Q&A between Ben Greenman and Louis Menaud. This is a great line: “[Orwell] tried to be swayed by women; he was just unlucky.”

Menaud's article, Honest, Decent, Wrong: The invention of George Orwell is also available online:

"Big Brother" and "doublethink" and "thought police" are frequently cited as contributions to the language. They are, but they belong to the same category as "liar" and "pervert" and "madman." They are conversation-stoppers. [...] The terms can be used to discredit virtually any position, which is one of the reasons that Orwell became everyone's favorite political thinker. People learned to make any deviation from their own platform seem the first step on the slippery slope to "1984."

Under-Extended?

Peter Goodspeed: “The Pentagon has 1.4 million men and women on active duty and is the largest employer in the United States, with more employees than ExxonMobil, Ford, General Motors and General Electric combined.”

It's a controversial stand to be sure, but I agree with Niall Ferguson: the United States is, if anything, for better or for worse, under-extended militarily.

Buddy Sex

The Buddy System: Sex in High School and College: What's Love Got to Do With It? by Laura Sessions Stepp [via MetaFilter]

Also, even as they seek the same sexual rush that guys historically have enjoyed, young women confess to dreaming about the romance of the old-fashioned pursuit: being wooed by leisurely strolls, candlelight dinners, small gifts and other gestures of courtship that were more common when their mothers were their age.

This is a theme that occurs in What Our Mothers Never Told Us by Danielle Crittenden (pp. 39-40):

What is striking about the modern film adaptations [of The Age of Innocence, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility] is their almost pornographic obsession with the vanished protocol of daily life [...] They are airbrushed, sentimental views of the past, to be sure, but it's the urge to airbrush that is the most arresting thing about them. [...] It's as if popular taste now wishes to recall the past only for its good points, and particularly that lost civility between men and women.

Update: I love MetaFilter. Especially this from Stan Chin: “I for one, welcome these sluts.” (It's so crude an outburst that I can't help but laugh.) Or the Tom Wolfe quote.

Update Jan. 20, 10:48 PM: good comments from orange swan, beth, and and Civil_Disobedient make (successive) comments that speak to me. I identify with what mdn says (except I'm not sure what he means at the end of his comments about physical strength).

rushmc is wrong when he says that “Stating that something "is wrong" is not saying what you think. Saying "I think X is wrong" is saying what you think.” Saying something is wrong is indeed saying what you think. It's just not a very good argument (neither is the second part) because you're not saying why you think it's wrong. IshmaelGraves deftly counters rushmc.

Update Jan. 21, 4:45 PM: beth says (and I can identify with this): “When the cultural expectation is for sex without attachment, anyone who wants an attachment with their sex is at a disadvantage.”

Update Jan. 23, 2:25 AM: I have to admit that echolalia67 states the opposition's position intelligently: “Aping a repugnant attitude that was traditionally held by some men is not feminism. Understanding what you really want and figuring out a way to get it in an ethical, honest way is, as far as I'm concerned, feminism.” She sees sex outside of a committed relationship as not necessarily unethical, but all-the-same not for her.

Real-Life Single Problems

Yet another fluff piece from Rebecca Eckler. I like how she ends it though: “With the return of the lights, though, real-life single problems are back.”

Oh, the article's about blind (literally) dating. (I actually read an article a while ago about this, so the trend isn't exactly 'newest'. If indeed it is a trend at all.)

Pakistan, North Korea and the United States

Seymour M. Hersh: “When it came time to confront North Korea, we had no plan, no contact—nothing to negotiate with. You have to be in constant diplomatic contact, so you can engage and be in the strongest position to solve the problem. But we let it all fall apart."”

Odds of That

Lisa Belkin: “The true meaning of the word is ''a surprising concurrence of events, perceived as meaningfully related, with no apparent causal connection.'' In other words, pure happenstance. Yet by merely noticing a coincidence, we elevate it to something that transcends its definition as pure chance. We are discomforted by the idea of a random universe.”

New Position on Casual Sex

The New Position on Casual Sex by Vanessa Grigoriadis

Another terrible article on casual sex.

Here I am having these tawdry affairs because I don't want to give men I might want to date the wrong idea by having sex with them, but I don't want to live without sex.

I gotta admit though, that's a pretty great quote.

Crittenden Quote #3

A longish paragraph from The Bad Book (as a friend calls it now) [see here and here], on p. 111:

Alas by withholding ourselves, or pieces of ourselves, instead of giving to our marriages wholeheartedly, we can't expect our husbands to do so, either. After all, it's not as if postponing marriage and going into it with our eyes more wide-open has made marriage any more stable than it was when men and women went into it practically blind. A young man I know told me that he'd "at last" moved in with his girlfriend of a few years. "We're more serious now," he said proudly. And I thought, No you're not. For marriage, as the married know, is about more than signing a lease, splitting bills, sharing chores, and professing a vague sort of long-term commitment; it's about more than being home in the evenings or spending weekends together or deciding what color to paint the walls; it's about more, even, than happiness and contentment and compatibility. It is about life and death, blood and sacrifice, about this generation and the next, and one's connection to eternity.

I'm just violating copyright because I'm too lazy to bookmark the notable quotes I come across and want quick access to them for future reference. Plus I borrowed the book from the library.

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