Today In The Global War On Straw

Shorter A. Yasmine Rassam: “Anybody who thinks that women’s rights have taken a step backward as Iraq becomes an Islamic theocracy with limited coercive capacity must think Saddam was a liberal feminist, because of course things can only get worse if they start at an optimal point.”

I suspect that this particularly silly wrinkle in the “objectively-pro-Saddam” routine is going to become more common among people who care about women’s rights only when they can be used as a pretext to depend hare-brained imperialist schemes…

Elsewhere in the Wide World of Non-Sequiturs, in an “update” to his risible argument about how it’s crazy to think that invading countries to seize material goods is “imperialism” (I would add it as an update to that post except that it might imply that the two arguments have some logical relationship to each other), Glenn Reynolds says that “I do think that seizing Saudi and Iranian oil would be entirely morally justifiable on terms usually approved of by the left: They didn’t earn it, they inherited it (it’s like the Estate Tax writ large!…why isn’t war for oil not only morally permissible, but morally required, if the forcible redistibution of wealth in other ways (including “windfall profit” taxes — or Evo Morales’ seizure of natural gas wells in Bolivia) is OK?).” The assumptions here are that 1)the consequences of legislation constitutionally enacted and applied with due process are precisely equivalent to one state simply seizing goods from another sovereign country by force, and 2)the American “left” is generally in favor of confiscatory taxation and the large-scale nationalization of businesses. Given that all of these assumptions are plainly erroneous, there’s obviously nothing to discuss. (And I note again the instructive conflation of “windfall taxes” and “ending corporate tax breaks and subsidies” that has been so convenient to country-club Republican statists like Reynolds.) What this post does make clear is that Reynolds’ claim that Ward Churchill is the “face of the left” isn’t just rhetoric; he really seems to believe it. He’s perpetually shadowboxing with a tiny, uninfluential faction of the left, pretending that it holds some influence in this country. Evidently, discourse with someone with so little understanding of American politics is a complete waste of time.