The Poor Man hits the nail on the head:

Admittedly, you have to be a howling retard with all the intellectual curiousity God gave a Sea Monkey to think this way, but let me introduce you to your fellow human beings.

Brad DeLong has such an excellent post on the topic of war, excellence, and heroism:

Let me put it this way: who would you rather have standing beside you when spear meets shield–Achilles, Hector, or Odysseus? With Hector, the man of honor, you will wage war when you should–but you may well lose. With Achilles, the man of skill, you will win–but you will wage war all the time, whether or not you should.

With Odysseus, the man of strategy, you will wage war only when you can win–but will you always be happy with your victories?

I think I would take my place beside Odysseus. But who should I take my place beside? It is an interesting question…

The question for my readers is this:

Who would you rather have standing beside you when the horde of chitinous bugs comes swarming up out of a cave? Lt. Rasczak, Dizzy Flores, or Carl Jenkins?

(Update: Carl Jenkins. You know — Doogie Howser.)

Hi again. You may have noticed a slight change in the looks of the site — I’ve moved from running this site with a heavily-kludged version of blosxom to a stock installation of wordpress.

It’s not a big change, but it was overdue, since I usually can’t go six months without completely replacing whatever I’m using to build this site. So nearly a year — that’s unprecedented.

Matt Yglesias has something important to say about the difference between Republican and Democrat foreign policy.

When the GOP sees a regime that’s hostile to the United States and that it is within America’s capacity to topple militarily, they say: “Go for it.” A hostile state always might become an al-Qaeda sponsor, and Republicans think the possibility of state sponsorship of al-Qaeda is very, very, very bad, so it’s worth going way out of our way to make sure it doesn’t happen. Fundamentally, Republicans are eager to overthrow regimes not because they’re democracy-promoting idealists (though some are democracy-promoting idealists, that’s just not the dominant strain of thought) but because they’re very worried about state sponsorship.

The Democratic foreign policy establishment sees this very differently. Democrats worry about failed states. Democrats think al-Qaeda grows — and grows powerful — where institutions of governance break down. Iraq wasn’t governed pleasantly, but it was governed. Hence, Democrats are loathe to destroy a regime unless they’re prepared to put it back together. This makes Democrats more hesitant to overthrow regimes, not because they’re stability-worshipping realists (though, again, some probably are) but because their collective nightmare is more failed states. Democrats take nation-building seriously — too seriously to want to do it more often than is really necessary.

From the weekly standard:

Is there in the end a fatal contradiction between Israel’s Jewish character and its democratic form of government? Only if you accept the idea–rooted in Rousseau, promulgated for more than a century by Marxists, and embraced by left-leaning intellectuals throughout the Western world–that the aim of democracy is to reflect in its institutional forms peoples’ highest hopes, overcome individual alienation, and make all its citizens whole in heart and soul. But there is a more reasonable understanding of liberal democracy, one more in keeping with its first principles and classical formulations and less bound up with utopian hopes and Communist nightmares.

In this understanding, majorities are given wide latitude to legislate, circumscribed principally by energetic protection of the individual rights that belong to all citizens. In this understanding, states do not have an obligation to affirm equally the grandest aspirations of all citizens, but they do have an obligation to ensure that all are equal before the law and that none falls below minimum or basic requirements for education, health, and material well-being. And in this understanding, there is no reason in principle why a Jewish state–one which is open to Jews throughout the world, and gives expression in its public culture to Jewish history, Jewish hopes, and Jewish ideals–cannot protect the political rights and civil liberties, including religious freedom, of all its citizens, provide them with equal opportunities, and require that they take their fair share of responsibility for maintaining the state. And there is every reason, grounded in both democratic and Jewish imperatives, why Israel ought to do precisely that.

Substitute “heterosexual” or “blonde” or “right-handed” for “Jewish” in the above paragraph, and you’ll understand why things like this make me so sad.