Cowboys

My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys

Think Saddam Should Be Tried by International Tribunal?

Read This: Don't leave Saddam trial to the 'jet set'. It should change your mind.

This is Good

The Western Disease

There is something terribly wrong, something terribly amoral with the Western intelligentsia, most prominently in academia, the media, and politics. We don’t need Osama bin Laden’s preschool jabbering about “the weak horse” to be worried about the causes of this Western disease: thousands of the richest, most leisured people in the history of civilization have become self-absorbed, ungracious, and completely divorced from the natural world — the age-old horrific realities of dearth, plague, hunger, rapine, or conquest.

To sum up the Arab street: It appears to care not a whit that a native psychopath butchered hundreds of thousands of its own — only that his anti-American braggadocio was revealed to be a sham to millions and that Americans of all people had to free Iraqis from such a menace. Honor and shame — the stuff of tribal societies — matter more than the lives of innocents.

The so-called Arab street and its phony intellectuals sense that influential progressive Westerners will never censure Middle Eastern felonies if there is a chance to rage about Western misdemeanors. It is precisely this parasitic relationship between the foreign and domestic critics of the West that explains much of the strange confidence of those who planned September 11. It was the genius of bin Laden, after all, that he suspected after he had incinerated 3,000 Westerners an elite would be more likely to blame itself for the calamity — searching for “root causes” than marshalling its legions to defeat a tribe that embraced theocracy, autocracy, gender apartheid, polygamy, anti-Semitism, and religious intolerance.

Hatred of Israel is the most striking symptom of the Western disease

Indeed, the liberal Europeans should love Israel, whose social and cultural institutions — universities, the fine arts, concern for the “other” — so reflect its own. Gays are in the Israeli military, whose soldiers rarely salute, but usually address each other by their first names and accept a gender equity that any feminist would love. And while Arabs once may have been exterminated by Syrians, gassed in Yemen by Egypt, ethnically cleansed in Kuwait, lynched without trial in Palestine, burned alive in Saudi Arabia, inside Israel proper they vote and enjoy human rights not found elsewhere in the Arab Middle East.

There's alot more. Read it.

Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus?

I found this over at The Gleeful Extremist. An article at the Economist called Living with a superpower. It's an interesting comparison of the countries of the world and where they stand value-wise.