Category: The Dish

I hope Hitch’s reported descent into "bomb-them-into-submission" mode is not a growing theme on the anti-Islamist front. But atheism combined with anti-Islamism can erase some important distinctions. The Reason Hirsi Ali interview is disconcerting in that context:

Reason: Don’t you mean defeating radical Islam?

Hirsi Ali: No. Islam, period. Once it’s defeated, it can mutate into something peaceful. It’s very difficult to even talk about peace now. They’re not interested in peace.

Reason: We have to crush the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims under our boot? In concrete terms, what does that mean, "defeat Islam"?

Hirsi Ali: I think that we are at war with Islam. And there’s no middle ground in wars. Islam can be defeated in many ways. For starters, you stop the spread of the ideology itself; at present, there are native Westerners converting to Islam, and they’re the most fanatical sometimes. There is infiltration of Islam in the schools and universities of the West. You stop that. You stop the symbol burning and the effigy burning, and you look them in the eye and flex your muscles and you say, "This is a warning. We won’t accept this anymore." There comes a moment when you crush your enemy.

Is she just an Amis-style liberal? Or a purveyor of misinformation? More discussion here. I hope the forces against Islamism don’t begin to degenerate into Steynian fear and loathing. I should add that I favor rescuing Islam, not crushing it. But then I’m not an atheist; I’m a secularist believer. Maybe that makes a difference in the end.

"PUR water wasn’t content with removing impurities from your water so they decided that they would put some back in…and then charge you for it!"

We look straight past happiness.

Braving a nightmare to get educated.

The answer is yes. One blogger predicts:

"Considerable social backlash. Even in Massachusetts."

Jim Fallows notes some resemblances between how their respective Nobel Prizes were received.

Or the power of the Colbert suffix:

It’s Colbert’s non-virtuous sense of the -y suffix—and his new meaning of “truthy” as not truthy at all—that’s inspired some recently coined words, demonstrating what the Stanford University linguist Arnold Zwicky has called the Colbert suffix. The most notable case is probably "fame-iness," a type of devalued, insubstantial fame epitomized by Paris Hilton and discussed by Meghan Daum in the Los Angeles Times. Zwicky has also found examples of "referenciness" (a quality possessed by writing that appears to contain solid references, but upon closer examination, those sources are actually bogus or beside the point) and “faithy-ness” (an insincere pretense to religious faith, endemic to politicians). Elsewhere, I’ve spotted “democraciness,” “innocentiness,” “integritiness,” “intelligentiness,” “outraginess,” “victoriness,” and “youthiness,” all of which have the Colbert flavor.

The Times Literary Supplement just had a story on the "The Thinginess of History."

Giuliani will have a hard time keeping all the Republicans on board if he wins the nomination. Even the GOPUSA poll suggests a resilient minority – around 15 to 20 percent – willing to jump ship if that happens. In a tight election, that’s a big deal.

"Lets also remember Obama is trying to run against our Eleanor Roosevelt" – from Marc.

Mickey claims:

If the White House had just ignored McCaughey’s piece, it would probably have gone away. The damage was almost entirely self-inflicted.

He’s right, I think. More evidence of Clinton’s self-defeating paranoia. He’s also right about this:

I specifically remember that the Clintonite rebuttal, like Ambitious Whippersnapper Ezra Klein’s recent blog post, made a big deal of the following provision in the law:

"Nothing in this Act shall be construed as prohibiting the following: (1) An individual from purchasing any health care services."

But of course laws have sweeping introductory provisions like this all the time, only to undermine them in the fine print. Maybe the Clinton legislation didn’t undermine this particular sweeping provision–but the Clinton spinners were fools to think anyone would be convinced by the sweeping provision itself. Or, rather, they were treating the press like fools, and the press doesn’t appreciate that. …