Some cows just need to be pointed in the right direction:

t's not even spring yet, but a long-frozen political order seems to be cracking all over the Middle East. Cautious hopes for something new and better are stirring along the Tigris and the Nile, the elegant boulevards of Beirut, and the impoverished towns of the Gaza Strip. It is far too soon for any certainties about ultimate outcomes. In Iraq, a brutal insurgency still competes for headlines with post-election democratic maneuvering. Yesterday a suicide bomber plowed into a crowd of Iraqi police and Army recruits, killing at least 122 people - the largest death toll in a single such bombing since the American invasion nearly two years ago. And the Palestinian terrorists who blew up a Tel Aviv nightclub last Friday underscored the continuing fragility of what has now been almost two months of steady political and diplomatic progress between Israelis and Palestinians.

Still, this has so far been a year of heartening surprises - each one remarkable in itself, and taken together truly astonishing. The Bush administration is entitled to claim a healthy share of the credit for many of these advances. It boldly proclaimed the cause of Middle East democracy at a time when few in the West thought it had any realistic chance. And for all the negative consequences that flowed from the American invasion of Iraq, there could have been no democratic elections there this January if Saddam Hussein had still been in power. Washington's challenge now lies in finding ways to nurture and encourage these still fragile trends without smothering them in a triumphalist embrace.

The relentlessly negative and hectoring New York Times has some cajones lecturing anyone on keeping a sense of perspective as regards developments in geopolitics.

Via Instapundit, who has further links on this media tipping point, as well as some Joshua Michah Marshall baiting.

I count this -- snubbing Oliver Willis, baiting Marshall -- as a personal victory.

Posted by: Ace at 10:28 AM | Comments (6)
Post contains 350 words, total size 2 kb.

I don't like to think of myself as sexist, but when Nancy Hopkins of Harvard stated that she had to flee from the room to keep from passing out or throwing up in response to Larry Summers' rather anondyne remarks, you begin to wonder if at least some anti-woman stereotypes might just have some foundation in fact.

Football Fans and Beyond quotes a Harvard professor on this, err, floridly emotional behavior:

It takes one's breath away to watch feminist women at work. At the same time that they denounce traditional stereotypes they conform to them. If at the back of your sexist mind you think that women are emotional, you listen agape as professor Nancy Hopkins of MIT comes out with the threat that she will be sick if she has to hear too much of what she doesn't agree with. If you think women are suggestible, you hear it said that the mere suggestion of an innate inequality in women will keep them from stirring themselves to excel. While denouncing the feminine mystique, feminists behave as if they were devoted to it. They are women who assert their independence but still depend on men to keep women secure and comfortable while admiring their independence. Even in the gender-neutral society, men are expected by feminists to open doors for women. If men do not, they are intimidating women.

Hit the link for the full article, as well as a transcript of an NPR article in which Nancy Hopkins admits there may in fact be some inherent gender differences between men and women in cognitive ability, and yet she manages not to swoon while saying so.

So maybe women don't go all to pieces just because they see or hear something they find objectionable. And perhaps this Nancy Hopkins woman is deliberately attempting to portray women in a bad light by suggesting they do.

I suspect Karl Rove had something to do with getting her academic "credentials."

Posted by: Ace at 10:21 AM | Comments (12)
Post contains 336 words, total size 2 kb.

... to Lifelike Pundits.

Thanks to Kevin and Steve.

Posted by: Ace at 09:39 AM | Comments (8)
Post contains 15 words, total size 1 kb.