Yes, it’s cold in the winter

All it takes to publish an op-ed sometimes is to transcribe an amusing conversation about the weather:

Bundle up!

“Got to be below freezing,” he said, buttonholing me right out of the blue. It turned out he was heading into the gym I’d just departed, which might explain his presumption of intimacy. Or maybe he was simply a loony. Anyway, he went on: “What do you think it is, uh?

“About two degrees,” I offered.

“Minus two, uh?” he asked, suspiciously.

“Plus two, maybe.”

“No, no, no!” His tone was both challenging and aggrieved. I had betrayed him in some way. “Must be below freezing.”

“Cold enough anyway,” I suggested, as a compromise.

“Freezing,” he insisted.

“That’s winter for you,” I persevered, consolingly. “It gets cold.”

He glared at me as though I were a dangerous dissident and walked away.

I’ve experienced similar conversations, if perhaps without so much suspicion, aggrievement, betrayal, and angry glowering.  Usually, though, I’m told something just as obvious, but apparently equally unsatisfying to my interlocutor, as the fact that it’s cold in the wintertime — that I’m from New England.

(image from flickr user Logan Antill under a Creative Commons license)

People who can count backwards are way smarter

Boing Boing highlights a list of the 500 worst-ever passwords.  Topping the list, which reads creepily like a semantically awkward porno, is, unsurprisingly, Dark Helmet’s favorite, 123456.  Somewhat amazingly, its opposite, 987654, is only the 410th stupidest password.  I guess that’s why Dark Helmet is the bumbling bad guy.

(h/t Professor Blattman)

(image from flickr user John(ny) D under a Creative Commons license)

Needless Nazi comparison of the day

Allow me to parrot the furiously circular logic of Jonah Goldberg: Liberals are fascists.  Israel-haters are fascists.  Liberals are Israel-haters.  Liberals are fascists.

To Goldberg, the fact that there are a plethora of crank extremists out there — and even more on the Googlesphere! — is proof positive that the masses of the Islamic world, and, gasp, the West, are all card-carrying members of a vast plot to adorn Zionists with swastikas.  It’d be harmless enough, I suppose, if Goldberg were simply treading water alone in the cesspool of this paranoia, but he actually engages the disgusting arguments of theis lunatic fringe:

First, let us note that if supposedly all-powerful Israel is dedicated to exterminating the Palestinian people, it is doing a very bad job. The Palestinian population has only grown since 1948. There are more Arab citizens living in Israel proper today than there were in all of Palestine the year Israel was founded.

By caricaturing the history of Israeli-Palestinian interaction — it’s not failed genocide, see, no big deal — Goldberg both skirts the actual issue of Israeli aggression and trivializes the concept of genocide itself.  The fact that there are more Palestinian refugees in Gaza and in “Israel proper” right now does not exactly reassure me that their human rights are being taken care of.

(image from flickr user arellis49 under a Creative Commons license)

Who’s to blame for the war in Gaza? Palestinian children, of course

Natan Sharansky demonstrates an exercise in sickening oversimplification.

Israel’s assault on Hamas is just the latest in a long chain of military clashes, the scripts of which are always the same. On one side, there is the Israeli army. Technologically and militarily superior, its soldiers are motivated by a powerful commitment to their country’s security. On the other, there are Palestinian terrorists whose aim is to kill as many innocent Israelis as possible by unleashing missiles and suicide bombers on civilian centers. Then, when Israel retaliates, they appeal to the world with gruesome images of Palestinian suffering as part of a global campaign to prevent Israel from defending itself.

Yep, and it’s not at all this kind of black-and-white moral depiction that accelerates this cycle that Sharansky supposedly deplores.  But it gets worse: not only is every Palestinian an insidious guerrilla exploiting the suffering of civilians, but Palestinian children are not as deserving of protection as other innocent civilians.

Inevitably, some of these protests come from Israelis. Last week, before the tanks had begun rolling into Gaza, the journalist Tom Segev put it bluntly in a column he wrote in Ha’aretz. “A child in Sderot is the same as a child in Gaza,” he wrote, “and anyone who harms either is evil.”

Mr. Segev is correct when he says that the suffering of children on either side is intolerable — this is why the pictures from Gaza make us shudder. But he is wrong to draw a moral equivalence between the two sides. In this, he lends a hand to the Palestinians’ most shameful military tactic: pimping the suffering of their civilians as a weapon of war.

And — yes, there’s more — the UN refugee agency charged with caring for the over one million refugees in Gaza is actually making their lives worse by not forcing them back to homes that they don’t have.

Why is it that the tempers raised by the Israel-Palestine issues give rise to the most shockingly inhumane moral pronouncements, on both sides?  The question tempts one to pledge, as Kevin Jon Heller has, simply not to write about the area at all.

(map from Wikimedia Commons)