Tracking the Chaos

Taking a cue from Ditzy Genius, your humble blogger will today experiment with a new feature:

A Few Comments About Things In The News

1. JD2B (who doesn't seem to have permalinks, dammit! scroll way down to posts from 4/6) points to a shocking "think-piece" printed in the Wall Street Journal that argues that conservatives are not well-represented among law school professors. Comment: Yay! More seriously, the authors' point is that lots of people are left out of higher education, therefore affirmative action is silly. I wonder if they think conservatives have suffered discrimination and other forms of oppression for hundreds of years in the U.S. Probably, they do. I also wonder if they've stopped to consider what motivates conservatives to go to law school. Do conservative law students aspire to become professors? A few do, perhaps, but I'd guess the majority of conservative students aspire to big jobs in BigLaw where they can maximize discretionary income, which means very few end up in academia.


2. How the Rich Go to War from James Ridgeway. "A list of military men and women who have so far died in Iraq shows that most are middle or working class." I've been wondering if anyone was tracking this. Apparently so.


3. Get Ready for Patriot II: How much liberty will you trade for the holy grail of "security"? Isn't our freedom what makes us secure, rather than the other way around?


4. A Warmonger Explains War to a Peacenik: Brilliant. It's incredible how often the reasons for war changed, and how flimsy and fabricated the majority of the reasons turned out to be. Many will say that none of this matters now—we've been to war, it's virtually over, so how we got here is irrelevant. That's only true if we're eager for history to repeat itself. Perpetual war for perpetual peace? No thanks.


5. I Should Not Be Allowed to Say the Following Things: Tell that to John Kerry. And for you TMBG fans out there: "I should be allowed to glue my poster, I should be allowed to think!"


6. This is what war looks like: Army Chaplin offers Baptisms and Baths and soldier who shoots child says "I did what I had to do."


7. You knew the movie "Top Gun" was all about guys w/hardbodies playing with each other, but did you know it was a cautionary tale against homosexuality? I wish I could rattle off movie review blog posts this smart.

Posted 06:41 AM | Comments (2) | general politics