[LINK] Some Friday links

[rfmcdonald]

• eerie at 'Aqoul questions Ayaan Hirsi Ali's judgement and finds it sorely lacking. While I still have a certain appreciation for her, I also have to agree that quite a few of her arguments--especially her most recent arguments--are dangerously stupid.


• Amused Cynicism's Phil Hunt explores how Melanie Phillips was able to take a half-cracked article by Daniel Pipes on Islamic finance and inflate it into one sign of the West's collaboration with its Muslim conquerors.


• Richard at Castrovalva makes the defensible argument that of all writers, J.G. Ballard has best captured the zeitgeist.


• City of Brass' Aziz Poonawalla observes at length the pointless controversy over the Untied States' production of a stamp commemorating Eid.


• John Quiggin points out at Crooked Timber that the multinational invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is justifiable in ways in which Iraq's isn't.


• Edward Lucas memorializes assassinated Russian journalist Anna Politovskaya.


• Hunting Monsters has two posts (1, 2) on the Armenian genocide and a link to a provocative Ben Kiernan article at Open Democracy on the global history of genocide.


• Marginalia's Peteris Cedrins has an essay on the intimate connection between environmentalism and nationalism in Latvia.


• Positive Liberty's Jason Kuznicki wonders whether modern-day American conservatives have been excessively influenced by the tactics of campus left-wing radicals from previous decades. In this thesis' favour, there is the famed Trotskyite-to-neoconservative trajectory.


• In his latest blog entry, the erudite John Reilly argues (among other things) that public pension plans have proven themselves somewhat more realistic than private pension funds, that the uptick in Polish birth rates can be traced to an echo of a baby boom and easier finance, and that Russia's Orthodox Christian revival is "excessively dependent on government patronage."