Here.

[I didn't cross-post that here because the person referred to in the post has already threated a lawsuit against one blogger and to report another to the FBI. For what I don't know. Rusty's trying to relax and doesn't need that aggravation. Plus, I'm no angel when it comes to insensitivity, but, more often than not, mine is directed at people who want to kill me and those that support them. And if I ever say anything that you think is way over the line like that, I would expect to be beaten over the head as bad as she is getting it. For an excellent roundup of the background of the kerfuffle, Beth has it.]

Posted by: Vinnie at 05:18 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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Bill from INDC has a great post on strategy in winning the war against terror. He's right. Yes, you heard me, he's 100% right. It doesn't mean that my earlier post on Islam as the root ideology which we are fighting is wrong, but only that as a matter of strategy, it is irrelevant.

Muslims are not children. They are adults. As such, they understand that, as I stated in my previous post:

Alliances are relationsips based on mutual interests.

To think of an ally as a friend is to misunderstand the basis of a relationship. Indeed, much political theory has been devoted to arguing that nations cannot have friends, only allies. This is the core of most modern international relations theory, as I understand it, which is rooted in one branch or another of realism.

Neocons, in my view, are just another branch of realism which see the long term interests of the United States being tied to the state of freedom in other countries. So the term "ally" should be a term familiar to them.

Posted by: Rusty at 04:28 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
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I disagree with Sigmund, Carl, and Alfred. Denying the Holocaust is lunacy, but it should not be a crime. If one were to put people in jail for denying the 'truth', our jails would be full of Elvis spotters. Just because the truth that they deny is so disgusting and evil, does not give government the right to outlaw the telling of lies.

Besides, what government do you trust enough to decide the difference between 'opinion' and 'truth'?

Update: More from Wretchard:

But laws establishing "official truth" create categories of the Unmentionable into which subjects like the Jihad, feminism, abortion and Global Warming -- all the assertions, half-truths and humbug of the world -- will presently seek refuge.

Posted by: Rusty at 11:58 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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No, I'm not a conservative and neither is Glenn Reynolds. I'm a neo-libertarian. It's kind of like being a conservative, only we dig the notion of legal pimps and hoes. And it's kind of like being a libertarian, only we really dig our military. Is that clear?

UPDATE: Neither is Stephen Green. And a response for the poli sci geeks who secretly dwell among us.

UPDATE II: More political science geekiness, but true. more...

Posted by: Rusty at 08:14 AM | Comments (14) | Add Comment
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I actually disagree with Danny on this one. Intentionally offending people is often (but not always) legitimate discourse. Especially during times of war. I would suggest readers recall all of those wonderful Bugs Bunny cartoons vilifying the Japs and Germans during WWII. For some odd reason we hold the conflicting idea that these intentionally offensive cartoons were somehow wrong, yet killing those who were lampooned was ok.

And speaking of Bugs Bunny: What do you think the wascally wabbit said in order to get his fatwa, depicted below? more...

Posted by: Rusty at 08:34 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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UPDATE: Rusty responds. Scroll down for my responses.
UPDATE 2: Demosophist responds to a few things, in that Italian font.
UPDATE 3: Rusty back at ya!

I started out tapping out a comment to Rusty's post on this topic, but it grew to the point that I decided to publish it as a separate essayette. Rusty graciously establishes the empirical parameters of this thesis, but I don't think they necessarily address the issue:

If one were really interested in seeing whether or not there is a relationship between Islam and liberalism, I would suggest the following. In fact, I dare any one to run the following analysis.

Hypothesis: there is a strong correlation between the percent of a nation's population that is Muslim and the extent to which that country's population is free in the liberal sense of the word.

Null Hypothesis: there is no relationship between the percent of a nation's population that is Muslim and the extent to which that country's population is free in the liberal sense of the word.

Plot a simple OLS regression model with the two variables. The first variable would simply be % Muslim. The second variable would be the Freedom House numbers. Since the Freedom House Numbers are coded negatively the following results should be found.....

If we are agreed that the above is a moderately fair way of empircally testing the relationship between Islam and tyranny, then the gauntlet has been thrown. I personally do not have the time to run the numbers, but perhaps some enterprising blogger with moderate experience using SPSS would like to give it a go?

The problem with this method is that, while it's a reasonable way of testing the relationship between Islam and political freedom, that's not the research question that's being considered. more...

Posted by: Demosophist at 03:02 PM | Comments (15) | Add Comment
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The following is a letter I wrote to Dean Esmay last night. He gave me a challenge in this post, as his first response to my essay Marx, Communism, Totalitarianism; Muhammed, Islam, Terrorism, and I wanted to respond. I wanted to post a more coherent answer, but it will have to do in a pinch. I do have other work. Let me preface it with a funny quote Dean sent me in reply: "I apologize for the length of this letter, but I lacked the time to make it shorter." Also, the disclaimer that it's not exactly spellchecked. Sorry. more...

Posted by: Rusty at 12:02 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Dean Esmay has a pretty good post about whether or not Islam compatible with democracy or not. Go read it.

Also, after you have read it you should probably read my essay Marx, Communism, Totalitarianism; Muhammed, Islam, Terrorism, in which I argue that Islam is a socio-political ideology every bit as much as it is a religion. It is much like Marxism in that the core ideology itself leads is incompatible with Western liberalism.

Now, let's return to Dean's post. Unfortunately, the data he provides is a classic example of what statisticians call selection bias. That is, you use data which supports your hypothesis and then exclude data which nullifies it.

Another problem is that the data do show that Muslim nations are becoming more free. A good sign, no doubt. But becoming more free does not make one free. One might argue that China is becoming more free, or that the Soviet Union in the late 1980s was becoming less authoritarian, yet there is no doubt in my mind that Communism is somehow intertwined with the fact that freedom was so scarce. Becoming more or less of anything is kind of irrelevant to the discussion.

Further, Indonesia has been a terrible ally in the war on terror. See this, this, this, this, and this. They have not cracked down on radical Muslims any more than has suited their own national interests. It is in no way a liberal democracy. Freedom House is simply wrong in this respect. I would point out that it is a crime for a Christian to give a Bible to a Muslin in Indonesia. And much of the Indonesian culture itself is not tolerant in any liberal sense of the word. And is a country truly a liberal democracy if a pictureless version of Playboy is banned?

Last, he gives the example of Senegal and Mali as the only nations on earth that have a Muslim majority and which are listed by Freedom House as liberal democracies (excluding Indonesia). Given that Freedom House gets it dead wrong on Indonesia, I suspect that there may be problems with their coding of Senegal and Mali as well. But I could be wrong. I don't know enough about these countries to speak on whether or not Freedom House correctly codes them.

However, statistically speaking two examples do not a falsification make. There are always exceptions to rules. My original point was that the Left loved to use Yugoslavia as an exemple of a 'free' Communist country. Even if we were to grant them that Yugoslavia was 'free' during the Cold War, to claim that there was not a causal relationship between Communism and totalitarianism based on a single outlier is an example of poor analysis (or poor operationalizing skills).

If one were really interested in seeing whether or not there is a relationship between Islam and liberalism, I would suggest the following. In fact, I dare any one to run the following analysis.

Hypothesis: there is a strong correlation between the percent of a nation's population that is Muslim and the extent to which that country's population is free in the liberal sense of the word.

Null Hypothesis: there is no relationship between the percent of a nation's population that is Muslim and the extent to which that country's population is free in the liberal sense of the word.

Plot a simple OLS regression model with the two variables. The first variable would simply be % Muslim. The second variable would be the Freedom House numbers. Since the Freedom House Numbers are coded negatively the following results should be found.

If Dean is right, and there is no relationship between Islam and freedom, then obviously the plots should be completely randomly distributed.

If I am right, and there is a relationship between Islam and freedom, then a positively sloping line should emerge. That is to say, as the percentage of Muslims in a country goes up, the Freedom House numbers should also go up.

The third alternative, of course, is that there is a positive correlation between Islam and liberal democracy, in which case one would find a negatively sloping line.

If we are agreed that the above is a moderately fair way of empircally testing the relationship between Islam and tyranny, then the gauntlet has been thrown. I personally do not have the time to run the numbers, but perhaps some enterprising blogger with moderate experience using SPSS would like to give it a go? more...

Posted by: Rusty at 11:00 AM | Comments (14) | Add Comment
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Inspired by Rusty, who was, uh, inspired by other people.

Then again, I may have been inspired by this.

Posted by: Vinnie at 07:02 PM | Comments (17) | Add Comment
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Posted by: Howie at 07:01 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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