Iain Murray says that he won’t miss this year. It was pretty amazing in the vastness of its suckitude.
7 thoughts on “Good Riddance To 2008”
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Iain Murray says that he won’t miss this year. It was pretty amazing in the vastness of its suckitude.
Comments are closed.
Rand, I’ve noticed lately that some of your links open in the same browser window, and others open a new window. I grew accustomed to your page launching new windows for external links, and have been caught off-guard a few times now when I close a window with an external link and realise that I’ve lost TTM.
Has nothing to do with this post, but thought I would mention it anyway, as this is one of the posts that doesn’t open a new window.
Yes, one of the features of WordPress is that it allows me to insert a link with a single click. One of the bugs is that I have to add the target manually. In the olden days, I was clicking in the entire thing with a Firefox tool (that perhaps I should go back to), so now I often forget to add the target parameter to the link tag.
Don’t say “Good riddance to 2008” until you know what 2009 brings. You probably said “Good riddance to 2007” and look what we got.
There was one bright spot – victory in Iraq. And the Nobel Peace Prize winner wasn’t a thug, appeasenik, or envirofascist.
(I stopped caring about the prize when I looked at the roster of laureates and discovered that few actually achieved peace-advancing results.)
Well, pursuing “peace” as your pure overriding goal, Alan, makes as much sense as pursuing “self esteem” as your pure overriding goal — that is, not much.
What people in the “self esteem” movement forgot is that self esteem is a happy side effect of accomplishment, effort, self-discipline, and surpassing the non-compromised standards of achievement around you. Pursuing self-esteem as a goal in itself, e.g. by lowering or abandoning standards of achievement, is self-defeating.
In the same sense, peace is a side effect of justice, vigilance, strength, determination, clear judgment and a willingness to act. Very often, you achieve peace by fighting a nasty war — or being clearly willing to do so. Pursuing peace as a goal in itself, e.g. by forswearing any kind of violence of judgment, is equally self-defeating.
Ironically, Nobel himself had the right idea about peace. He imagined inventing a destructive force so violent that it would truly make war a last option, than which almost any kind of reasonableness was preferable. He was wrong that nitroglycerin was that force, but it turns out thermonuclear weaponry was. Thanks to The Bomb, we have had no serious First World wars in almost 70 years. That’s a record unmatched in previous history.
For another example, consider Pakistan and India. Before the both got The Bomb, they fought three costly wars over the Kashmir. Since they both got The Bomb, zero. Neither government can afford to go to war unless it’s a truly existential threat. Mere lust over territory is no longer enough.
Rand, it sucks that I can’t get a preview of comments any more. Bah.
I must say that 2008 was personally a good year for me. Did some nice improvements to the house, got my kids a car, one got their first job, survived a bad hurricane without the help of FEMA or filing any claim, and had a nice Christmas.
As a taxpayer and voter, it sucked. I don’t expect 2009 to be better in that regard.