“The post-Olympics news cycle was a dizzying display of handwringing over the supposed victimhood of empowered, badass American female athletes. If we were to believe much of our media and feminist commentators, these women had been disrespected by President Trump, who cracked a joke, and by the men of Team USA hockey, who laughed. It led to an online geyser of anger and indignation on the women’s behalf. During their match against South Korea in Australia last week, the Iranian women’s soccer team took part in a quiet protest by not singing along to their national anthem — less than 48 hours after the US began striking Tehran. Off the phony controversy, we heard the refrain that women athletes are treated like gum on the bottom of a shoe.” (03/10/26)
“Analysts from Washington think tanks and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have appeared dozens of times in the New York Times, Washington Post, CBS, and Bloomberg as subject matter experts on the Iran War — and counting. While they are usually presented as neutral policy experts, their funding structures and advocacy histories are rarely disclosed. As the United States moves deeper into conflict, the public conversation is increasingly shaped by experts whose institutions are funded by donors with clear interests. The question is not whether these institutions produce substantive research. Many do. The question is whether readers are given sufficient context to understand the financial and political ecosystems in which that research is produced.” (03/10/26)
“A genuinely liberal education is about freedom, and not in some utilitarian or sophomoric sense of freedom as a rejection of form or boundaries. The indispensability of a liberal education is the freedom from being tied to the zeitgeist of one’s age or situation to love what is true, good, and beautiful, and to be initiated into the world while cultivating a love for it. Such a vision of education advances an inward concern as opposed to the more technical processes typically promoted in teacher education.” (03/10/16)
“Every administration in my lifetime has promised to reduce American involvement overseas and in the Middle East in particular. And every single one of them has instead expanded and deepened our involvement in the region. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, so I think that fact demands a structural explanation.” (03/10/26)
“We’re no longer in the domain of the Pax Americana, where the West’s gains at the end of World War II, and then at the end of the Cold War, are vigorously defended (even if the defense of the North Atlantic sometimes extended all the way to Afghanistan) with the premise that many of those gains are as much about principles — universal human rights, the rule of law — as territory. We’re also no longer in the kind of sovereignty that the Russians sometimes facetiously proposed — and that Trump not so long ago seemed interested in — where national autonomy is paramount regardless of sticky annoyances like human rights; or where, in an alternative version of the same theory, powers have exclusive control over their regional sphere of influence.” (03/10/26)
“Since Donald Trump kicked off a March weekend by attempting to bomb a country of 90 million people back to the Stone Age, there is a question nobody in the White House has been able to answer: Why go to war with Iran? The shifting set of justifications has been pretty comical to watch, whipsawing from liberating the Iranian people to self-defense from Iranian attacks to preventing nuclear capability after a breakdown in negotiations (which was apparently not true) to payback for the 1979 revolution to the complicated tale that Iran would hit U.S. targets anyway once Israel struck first, so we might as well preempt that and get the volley of munitions started early. But in a press conference on Monday, Trump quietly hit on another rationale, one that may have more truth behind it than the others.” (03/11/26)
Source: The American Conservative
by Ted Galen Carpenter
“French leaders and the French people should be very cautious about embracing extended deterrence obligations. Primary deterrence — threatening nuclear retaliation for an attack on one’s own country — has a high level of credibility, so long as the country has the necessary weaponry to mount a serious counterstrike. Indeed, the main point of the Cold War era’s de facto doctrine of mutual assured destruction was based on that logic. The credibility of courting similar devastation in response to an aggressor’s attack on another country — even a close ally of the defender — has always had much lower credibility.” (03/10/26)
“As humans, we’ve always found ourselves haunted by our past mistakes, both as a personal matter of guilt, shame, or embarrassment and as a communal matter of reputation (up to and including potential ostracism). On the latter front, I’m old enough — and I’m not THAT old — to remember a time when anyone but the most public of public figures could … move to another county and start over, among new neighbors who neither knew of, nor had any reason to suspect, their prior violations of social norms. Clean slates, and if they nailed the ‘sin no more’ part of ‘go and sin no more,’ new and better lives. … That kind of thing can’t really happen today … and for the last 20 years or so we’ve been watching what happens instead.” (03/10/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Laurence M Vance
“A bill (SB26-097) was introduced in the second regular session of the Colorado General Assembly last month to decriminalize adult commercial sexual activity. … This is a bill that libertarians can unequivocally support. But not because libertarians think that prostitution is wholesome, good, and harmless, or because they don’t think that prostitution is immoral, shameful, and potentially dangerous. Libertarians simply believe that what consenting adults do on their own property, or on the property of others with permission, is none of the government’s business, none of the church’s business, and none of any individual’s business as long as their actions don’t infringe upon the personal or property rights of others. This is still true even if what consenting adults do is immoral, and even if the majority of Americans don’t approve of what they are doing.” (03/10/26)
