Category: War & Peace
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Not your typical Mormons
Via Reason’s Hit and Run blog, this has to be the most interesting link of the day: The Mormon Worker, which appears to be just what it sounds like – a Mormon version of Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker, “devoted to promoting Mormonism, Anarchism, and Pacifism”!
Maybe we can get Russell Arben Fox to comment on this?
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Freedom by cluster bomb
Michael Gerson scolds critics of “President Bush’s democracy agenda” (he doesn’t mean Bush’s commitment to transparency and accountability here at home, by the way) and manages to write an entire column without mentioning the means supported by proponents of the “democracy agenda,” namely maiming and killing large numbers of people in foreign countries.
See here for a less snarky response to this kind of thinking.
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Skeptical of the skeptical environmentalist
The Washington Post Sunday Outlook section ran a lengthy piece form “skeptical environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg (based on his new book), arguing that we need to avoid the “extremes” in the climate change debate – those who deny that human-caused climate change exists on one hand and those who see it as an extremely serious and potentially catastrophic problem on the other. Lomborg concedes that it’s happening, but says that policies aimed at drastically cutting carbon emissions are inferior, in terms of their cost-benefit ratios, to policies directly targeting the problems that global warming threatens to exacerbate. For instance, deaths from malaria could be more effectively reduced by providing mosquito nets than by reducing carbon emissions. And more polar bears could be saved by banning hunting than by halting the melting of the polar ice cap. In other words, rising global temperatures may be a problem, but it’s a less serious problems than many others we face, and those problems can be tackled more effectively at less cost.
Liberal blogger Ezra Klein takes issue with some of Lomborg’s numbers here, particularly his claim that global warming will actually save lives by reducing the number of deaths from cold. Bill McKibben reviews Lomborg’s book here. McKibben spends a good deal of his review taking apart Lomborg’s numbers, and in particular his claim (contradicted by a recent IPCC panel) that halting and reducing CO2 emissions can only be done at a prohibitive cost to the world’s economies.
McKibben also makes this telling point against Lomborg’s claim that scarce resources should be redirected from addressing climate change to allegedly more pressing problems:
Why has Lomborg decided to compare the efficacy of (largely theoretical) funding to stop global warming with his other priorities, like fighting malaria or ensuring clean water? If fighting malaria was his real goal, he could as easily have asked the question: Why don’t we divert to it some of the (large and nontheoretical) sums spent on, say, the military? The answer he gave when I asked this question at our dialogue was that he thought military spending was bad and that therefore it made more sense to compare global warming dollars with other “good” spending. But of course this makes less sense. If he thought that money spent for the military was doing damage, then he could kill two birds with one stone by diverting some of it to his other projects. Proposing that, though, would lose him much of the right-wing support that made his earlier book a best seller — he’d no longer be able to count on even The Wall Street Journal editorial page.
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The angry American
The Washington Post Style section had a short interview with Merle Haggard this morning, with Hag sounding off about the current state of the USA. (He also has a new bluegrass album out.)
The interviewer refers to Hag’s politics moving to “the left” from the days of “Okie from Muskogee” and “The Fightin’ Side of Me,” but I think there’s a fairly consistent strain of “America first” right-populism here. The kind of conservatism that doesn’t see why American boys (and girls) should be off dying in some faraway country to bring them “freedom” while freedom at home seems to be contracting. And that sees the workin’ man footing the bill and shedding the blood for these wars.
Reason magazine’s Jesse Walker wrote about the puzzling politics of country music last year.
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Is Ron Paul crazy?
Well, maybe. But he also manages to combine uncompromising rhetoric with political savvy, according to Jeremy Lott (via). This may help explain why Paul is doing better than anyone expected (his campaign reportedly now with more cash on hand than John McCain’s, for instance).
One of the interesting thing about Paul is that he’s able to attract a variety of people who would otherwise likely be at odds with one another: libertarians, American nationalists skeptical of free trade and the “New World Order,” Christian homeschoolers, anti-war conservatives, and at least a few people on the left. The Republican base, however, remains steadfastly opposed to Paul’s anti-war stance and he’s probably too much of a libertarian for the mainstream Christian right, but it now looks like he at least has a chance of having a significant impact on the race, rather than simply being a gadfly.
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The need for enemies
Conservative columnist Steve Chapman writes on the inflation of the Islamist threat and the way some people thrive on being part of a grand ideological crusade. Normal people, meanwhile, prefer to live in relative peace and freedom.
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The “preventive paradigm”
“In isolation, neither the goal of preventing future attacks nor the tactic of using coercive measures is novel or troubling. All law enforcement seeks to prevent crime, and coercion is a necessary element of state power. However, when the end of prevention and the means of coercion are combined in the Administration’s preventive paradigm, they produce a troubling form of anticipatory state violence–undertaken before wrongdoing has actually occurred and often without good evidence for believing that wrongdoing will ever occur.” – David Cole & Jules Lobel (link)
A Thinking Reed 