The Dish

Here’s a disconcerting sign. According to this report, marriages designed to last only a short period of time are growing in popularity in Iraq. Stanley Kurtz will no doubt attribute this to gays. Others see it as religiously-sanctioned prostitution. Not so hard out there being a pimp, it seems.

A sane reader writes:

"I am all for rigorous scientific research on this subject.  Of course there is a lot of genetic diversity and different genetic adaptations (including cognitive) between populations.  But without becoming as reactionary as the Harvard Humanities department, I am very skeptical about subsets and broad generalizations based solely on race–because those groups are often too broad and arbitrary.  I don’t discount the Bell Curve’s statistical analysis, but I also don’t think it is a definitive answer of what is going on in human populations in regard to race–any more or less than I think Jared Diamond’s politically correct theory of geographical determinism is a definitive answer.  Instead I suspect there is a very complex relationship between a variety of factors (genetic, geographical, cultural ideas, even dumb luck) that control the rise and fall of civilizations and success of certain populations.  When looking at nature vs. nurture, culture is often the driving force of natural selection–and genetic changes can appear to happen almost spontaneously when such forces come to bear (which explains the rapid shift of skeletal structure in Europe and Asia after agriculture became widespread)."

That’s the trouble with reality: it’s all so fiendishly complicated. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t investigate every angle of the subject, free from political correctness and excessive social pressure.

Somewhere, George Orwell is weeping.

"A March 5 article about problems with MetroAccess service did not make it clear that Scott McDaniel, a MetroAccess rider, is an employee of Service Sources Inc., which operates the Woodmont Center in Arlington County. The article also misstated the nature of his disabilities. McDaniel is legally blind, and although he has other disabilities, he and his parents say he is not mentally disabled," – The Washington Post, yesterday. (Hat tip: Wonkette.)

As live-action? Here are the opening credits. Trippy.

If you’re in DC, there’s a lunch forum at Cato today for Bruce Bartlett, author of "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy." I’ll be commenting. It’s at noon.

"The Israeli bomb threatens nobody. An Iranian bomb does. India has transferred its nuclear technology to no one. Pakistan has. No one worries about India or Israel making the technology available to terrorists. Everyone worries about Iran doing that. These are distinctions with great differences. They are, as critics charge, double standards, but to apply a single standard to both friend and enemy, while it might be fair, would be singularly stupid," – Richard Cohen, making abundant sense, in the WaPo today.

These reports are among the most depressing to come out of Iraq. What if we have replaced one torturing regime with another? And what if our own example contributed? Money quote:

"Many cases of torture and ill treatment of detainees held in facilities controlled by the Iraqi authorities have been reported since the handover of power in June 2004," the [Amnesty International] report said. "Among other methods, victims have been subjected to electric shocks or have been beaten with plastic cable. The picture that is emerging is one in which the Iraqi authorities are systematically violating the rights of detainees in breach of guarantees contained both in Iraqi legislation and in international law and standards."

The full report is here.

Remember when the conventional elite wisdom was that racial difference was entirely a social construction and had no basis in genetics? Those days seem distant just a few years later. And the distance may be growing …

Is there a connection? The murderer of Theo van Gogh was a sexual failure in Holland. Mohammed Atta went to a strip club before 9/11. The sexual repression in much of the Arab-Muslim world means a lot of frustrated young men, eager for some kind of escape. Ian Buruma has a typically fecund essay on the topic here. Money quote:

"Sexual deprivation may be a factor in the current wave of suicidal violence, unleashed by the Palestinian cause as well as revolutionary Islamism. The tantalising prospect of having one’s pick of the loveliest virgins in paradise is deliberately dangled in front of young men trained for violent death. And even those who are not trained to kill and die often live in authoritarian societies in which sex before marriage is strictly forbidden, in which women outside the family home are not only supposed to be untouchable, but invisible. Access to MTV, the internet, DVDs and global advertising reinforces the notion that westerners live in a degenerate garden of sinful delights. This makes the lot of millions of young Arab men even harder to bear, and can provoke a mixture of rage and envy."

I cannot believe that a culture in which half of humanity is essentially in slavery to the other half, and in which all sexuality is treated as potentially damning, is a culture at peace with itself or the world.