Thursday, February 12, 2004 :::
Give Lily Malcolm a visit for her birthday.
I have a few comments for Kate, too, but maybe not now. Well, here's the short version:
1. I don't think "chink" is automatically an Asian racial epithet. I would be more likely to associate the word with a "chink" in one's armor. Much like "cracker", it can be meant as an epithet, but it doesn't have to be. I don't think that particular analogy is entirely false.
2. I agree that a lot of people seem to make bad arguments when good ones are available. Here in Massachusetts over the last few days, I've been hearing entirely unpersuasive ads by both sides in the gay-marriage debate. The anti-gay-marriage people want me to oppose gay marriage because it's new, and scary, and we should consider whether there might not be a good reason against it. This has a certain appeal to my Burkean side, but at some point, I feel they should actually offer a reason against it, rather than just suggesting that there might be one. Then the pro-gay-marriage people come on saying that "discrimination" is automatically bad, ignoring the fact that all laws, at some point, discriminate between those who follow them and those who don't. Is there a rational basis behind this particular discrimination? Nobody seems to want to say.
On his radio show tonight, Howie Carr was saying that, sure, homosexual lovers want to marry each other, but that he (Howie) would like to counterfeit money, and he's not allowed to do that. Even my landlord couldn't come up with a less apt analogy, and false analogies are his specialty.
Back in the debate over whether to go into Iraq, I was quite frustrated that the reasonable arguments against going in never seemed to get made. There were reasonable arguments, but we didn't hear them -- instead, we tended to hear "no blood for oil". There was a legitimate case to be made that we were best off letting the situation continue to simmer, as we've done with Cuba for the last half-century -- that it would be cheaper, easier, and no more dangerous. But instead we got the tin-foil hats.
3. The French government has never had religious tolerance. Further, it has never taken any position based on reason or principle, rather than the most visceral populism mixed with corrupt cronyist politics.
4. Neither has Bill O'Reilly.
I am way too tired to be blogging right now.
::: posted by Steven at 2:31 AM
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