About a month ago, a woman having a mental health episode was shot dead by the police in the city of Fort Lee, New Jersey. About a week ago, schools in South Jersey were closed after shooting threats there. Before that, a shooting at a New Jersey football game caused a stir. Then a dirt bike theft and shooting incident in Dennis, New Jersey caused school cancellations. Two days ago, a burglary suspect was non-fatally shot by the police in Rumson, New Jersey. Around the same time, perhaps for comic relief, a New Jersey police officer shot himself in the leg during a drill at a shooting range in Passaic County. Back on August 9, a Jersey City activist was shot in the leg by the Israel Defense Forces in Beita, in the West Bank. To cap it off, almost exactly a month later, another American activist was shot dead by the same Israel Defense Forces in the same place. She was buried yesterday. Continue reading
Category Archives: Ukraine
Anarchy, Democracy, and Privacy
A trio of announcements on, yes, anarchy, democracy, and privacy:
(1) PoT’s Roderick Long has a review in Reason of Jesse Spafford’s new book, Social Anarchism and the Rejection of Moral Tyranny (Cambridge, 2023). Despite his reservations with some of Spafford’s arguments, Roderick says,
…this is an intelligently argued book that deserves careful reading and discussion—particularly among market libertarians, since it offers ingenious and powerful arguments, from premises many libertarians will find appealing, to conclusions that most libertarians will be eager to avoid. That’s the sort of challenge that libertarians need to take seriously.
Judging from the review, I’m inclined to think that Spafford’s discussion of the Lockean Proviso is worth further discussion. I’m hoping we can have some of that here, possibly with Spafford’s input. Continue reading
Blathering at the Abyss: Bret Stephens on Ukraine
It’s said that you should never judge a book by its cover, but there’s a lot to be learned about a piece of writing from how it begins.* The opening to a piece of writing often marks out what the author takes to be uncontroversial, and in so doing, reveals the assumptions that structure his thought.
This column by Bret Stephens (back in September) is intended as a cautious defense of the presidency of Joe Biden. It opens with this apparently uncontroversial claim—or set of claims–about the war in Ukraine.
We are inflicting a strategic humiliation on Russia by arming Ukraine without putting American forces at risk.
A single sentence can assert several propositions at once. The preceding one asserts at least three: Continue reading
Every Way You Look At It, We’ve Lost
Sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon
Going to the candidates’ debate
Laugh about it, shout about it, when you’ve got to choose–
Every way you look at it, you lose
–Simon and Garfunkel, “Mrs Robinson“
I didn’t watch the Republican debate last night. I don’t even remember what I did instead. I read about the debate this morning. I’m glad I missed it.
On foreign policy, the Republicans are divided over Ukraine, but united in their desire for war with Mexico, China, and migrants. That’s all I need to know to dismiss them from consideration. The Democrats have the mirror image view: united on war in Ukraine, divided and equivocal on the rest. That’s all I need to know to dismiss them. Continue reading
I Don’t Wanna Hold Your Hand
There’s been an outpouring of sympathy for the Ukrainian fencer Olha Kharlan for not shaking the hand of her Russian opponent, Anna Smirnova. Kharlan’s refusal was, of course, an impassioned protest against the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The underlying assumption here is that an athlete in an international competition is in some sense a representative of her government, including its very worst policies. On this assumption, every Russian athlete is a representative of Vladimir Putin and his invasion of Ukraine. Until January 2021, I suppose, every American athlete was a representative, whether chosen or not, of Donald Trump. Every American athlete right now represents our current immigration policies, up to and including that of pushing mothers and their children into the Rio Grande in defense of America’s southern border. Every Saudi athlete represents MBS’s evisceration of Jamal Khashoggi. Every Chinese athlete represents the repression of the Uyghurs. And so on. I guess athletes from Niger are, for lack of a government, exempt. Maybe Sudanese ones, too. Continue reading
The Most Dangerous Game
For a moment the general did not reply; he was smiling his curious red-lipped smile. Then he said slowly, “No. You are wrong, sir. The Cape buffalo is not the most dangerous big game.” He sipped his wine. “Here in my preserve on this island,” he said in the same slow tone, “I hunt more dangerous game.”
–Richard Connell, “The Most Dangerous Game“
Anyone who favors intervention in the war in Ukraine owes it to themselves to read about the emerging consensus on nuclear war over Ukraine. A year ago, anyone who brought the subject up was dismissed as a pacifist, a scare-monger, a defeatist, or a crank. Now, a little over a year later, the idea of nuclear war is being normalized in military circles in both the United States and in Russia. Sober, respectable, mainstream strategists are now beginning to speak and write as though nuclear war was just another one of those things that’s headed our way, and will just take a bit of getting used to. Continue reading
Unsafe at any Bandwidth
No one was particularly impressed a year ago when I predicted on Facebook that if we got involved in Ukraine, we could expect Russian hackers to attack American medical facilities, with worrisome consequences. Big deal, I was told. Ukraine must be defended, and if so, such costs must be discounted.
Continue readingThe Learned-Helpless Grandiosity of the Ukraine War
I hesitate to turn this blog into a running catalog of the absurdities of the Ukraine war, but at this rate, I probably could. From an article in The New York Times about Europe’s confused, ambivalent response to the Ukraine war:
“The consequences of Ukraine in the E.U. will be complicated, even explosive,” said Thomas Gomart, director of IFRI, the French Institute of International Relations. “But it will be politically impossible to reject it.”
The war hasn’t yet been won–there’s no end is in sight–but already the contours of the post-war world are an inevitability, indeed, out of the control of the people tasked with deciding it. They lack the power to resist Ukraine’s entry into the EU, but somehow have the power to defeat Russia by proxy. Continue reading
The Past Is a Foreign Country
Why, according to Bret Stephens, must we remain involved in the Ukraine war? Because if we don’t…
China would draw the lesson that, if there are limits to what America and our allies are prepared to do for Ukraine (which fights for itself and shares a land border with NATO), there will be much sharper limits to what we are prepared to do for Taiwan.
Apparently, we get no belligerency credits for having fought and defeated Imperial Japan, for dropping atom bombs on it, or for having militarily occupied it. We get no credit for having defended South Korea against a North Korean invasion, for having fought the Chinese themselves in North Korea, or for having stationed troops in the DMZ since 1953. And we get none for spending a decade-plus defending South Vietnam against the North at the cost to us of some 58,000 deaths. Continue reading
David French on Ukraine: A Demolition
It hasn’t yet been a year since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, or the beginning of the US-led proxy war against Russia, and already American support for the war is slipping. Last year’s promises about never-ending aid have quietly been toned down, as have last year’s predictions about Russian defeat and collapse. Predictably, the more stalwart supporters of the war have popped back up to accuse us, yes, of a “failure of will,” a brand of moral weakness to be contrasted with the Stoic hardiness required to sit in front of a computer and demand that the war continue. Continue reading
Policy of Truth 