Dr. Frank's What's-it

This is a couple of

This is a couple of weeks old, but still worth a look. sp!ked's Mick Hume laments the lack of persuasive arguments on both sides of the war/anti-war divide and in the process comes up with this fine withering passage:

For those of us opposed to Bush’s war plans on anti-interventionist grounds there is no comfort in today’s peculiar anti-war mood. Its rather loathsome character was summed up for me by a letter we received at spiked-online.com, arguing that those killed in the Bali nightclub could not really be considered innocent victims, since they were rich Western tourists who had ‘decided to enjoy themselves at the expense of folks in a Third World country’. Those killed in New York on 11 September were, it added, even less innocent, since they had chosen to ‘work in the generic cause of global imperialism’ on Wall Street. Our sympathetic correspondent concluded, ‘The only truly innocent are babies and the mentally challenged — the rest of us share all kinds of guilt.’ It is a depressing sign of the times that many will now proclaim such infantile, moronic sentiments who do not have the excuse of belonging to either of those categories.