Just a quick Turkish update — the leader of the Justice and Development Party, Recep Tyyip Erodgan, says he’s opposed to a US strike on Iraq unless approved by the UN. Thanks to Carneggy for the heads up.
Category: Politics
The Justice and Development Party has won the Turkish elections, kicking out the ruling coalition in a landslide. This seems likely to be more a reflection of discontent with the Turkish economy and a corrupt government than it is a return to Islamic fundamentalism, although the Justice and Development Party was formed from the remains of an Islamic fundamentalist party.
However, they ran on a pro-Western platform and have disavowed their Islamic roots. This isn’t the Taliban, and the victory does not represent a repudiation of Turkish assistance in the US war on Iraq. I expect some will claim it does, but this one isn’t Bush’s fault. It may not even be a crisis.
Either way, this does not change the status of the Kurds. The US still needs to arm Kurds in Iraq to fight a war there; Turkey still hates the idea, because it would encourage Kurd separatists in Turkey. Messy.
Also note that the Turkish army is perfectly willing to engage in a coup should the government become overly Islamic. They did it in 1997, and several times previously. It’s not really that democratic a country.
Apparently, this sex toy thing is quite the issue for Alabama. The state has appealed the decision which permitted sex toys to be sold therein. You know, if sex toys were legal in Alabama, the legislators would have something to distract them from ineffectual prudishness.
So, was the Wellstone memorial too political?
In my tradition, one of the things you do at wakes is vow to carry on the work of the deceased. It’s OK to be really emotional about that; emotion is part of what a wake is for. Emotion represents respect for the dead. It shows you cared about him, or about her. I would expect that, at a politician’s wake, his close friends would want to make strong statements; that they would exhort the attendees to “keep his legacy alive.”
On the other hand, if some random Senator from Iowa showed up and started making campaign speeches, that might be kind of tacky. You don’t really want strangers at your memorial. (I may be too hard on Tom Harkin, here. Perhaps he was a close friend of Wellstone.)
The New York Times says that “the crowd put away any pretense of the nonpolitical.” Maybe so, but if there’s one thing that’s obvious about Wellstone it’s that politics were his passion. He cared about doing good. How could those eulogizing him not talk about something he cared so much about? To ignore politics would be to ignore an important aspect of his life.
That makes it hard to tell those who were sincere from those who were abusing the event. I suspect there were some of each. As always, we live in a flawed world full of flawed people.
One more quickie… people have observed that the University of Arizona campus was a weapons-free zone, and that this didn’t prevent the recent shootings. This is about as significant as pointing out that the UIowa student shootings didn’t take place in a weapons-free zone. If you don’t know how many people decided not to go on a rampage due to the policies in either case, you don’t know anything.
I’m anti-gun control as a matter of policy. I’m just tired of stupid people who obsessively twist every tragedy in the world to suit their political agenda.
Unnoticed in the furor over other issues: Bush is pushing for a ban on computer generated child pornography. In April, the Supreme Court struck down such a ban. I’m no fan of child pornography or its consumers, but free speech is free speech.
I found the claim that one in four children between the ages of 10 to 17 is exposed to pornography every year to be really funny, by the by. Newsflash: teenagers find porn on purpose. Always have, always will. It’s not an Internet thing, Mr. President.
The sniper seems to have been caught, which is great news. Not so great news: he recently changed his last name to Muhammad, and reportedly converted to Islam some years ago. Inevitably, some people are rushing to point out how dangerous those Muslims are.
I thought about it. In the last ten years, if we look at domestic terrorism, the score is American Christians 2 and American Muslims 1. Kaczynski and McVeigh beat Muhammad. Clearly — very clearly — Christians are bad news and very dangerous.
You heard it here first. Muslims make better Americans.
The danger is that we’ll ignore the real cognate, which is terrorism and membership in Al Qaeda. The latter happens to have a prerequisite. You need to be Muslim. That doesn’t speak to the terroristic tendencies of Muslims; it speaks to the prejudices of Osama bin Laden. He was in a position to leverage his hatred, but that says nothing about the likelihood that the Muslim on the street will be a terrorist.
It is dangerous (I’m tempted to say treasonous, but that would be wrong) to sweep all this under the generic rug of “Islamic terrorism.” There’s no such thing as Islamic terrorism, just as there’s no such thing as a black quarterback or a woman rock star. There are quarterbacks who happen to be black, there are rock stars who happen to be female, and there are terrorists who happen to be Islamic. None of those adjectives have a material effect on the nature of what they do.
Eugene Volokh has some interesting discussion about the limits of free speech. The Supreme Court commented this morning on the question of free speech as it applies to explanations of how to commit a crime. In short, they refused to hear an appeal of a decision in which a lower court essentially claimed such explanations were protected. However, the Supreme Court also explicitly stated that they were not agreeing with the lower court in that decision.
This is probably illegal, but here’s the transcript of the Supreme Court arguments in Eldred vs. Ashcroft. (I say illegal because I’m pretty sure Lexis/Nexis has some sort of copyright on the collection of transcripts. Consider it civil disobedience.)