The NYT Book Review asked various writers to recommend books for the candidates. (Link via PowerLine.)
By and large, I didn’t think the suggestions were very deep. Can we do better?
Political Philosophy
Enslaving the Responsible
Over at Reason, the Libertarian Party of California is quoted as saying:
There’s no reason why consenting adults should not be allowed to marry so long as their arrangement doesn’t interfere with any other individual’s ability to live their life in any way they want to.
Aye, there’s the rub. With the contemporary culture of the invasive nanny state, we do not let people suffer the consequences of their own mistakes.
Timing Invasions
One Time’s site, Romesh Ratnesar argues we should consider invading Burma in order to head off a humanitarian disaster that could claim upwards of a million lives.
It’s not a bad idea except it is at least 6 months too late.
Just in Time for the Beijing Olympics
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has an online exhibition about the 1936 Nazi Olympics:
In August 1936, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi dictatorship scored a huge propaganda success as host of the Summer Olympics in Berlin. The Games were a brief, two-week interlude in Germany’s escalating campaign against its Jewish population and the country’s march toward war. This site explores the issues surrounding the 1936 Olympic Games—the Nazis’ use of propaganda, the intense boycott debate, the history of the torch run, the historic performance of Jesse Owens, and more.
Change a few names and nouns and the above description fits the 2008 Olympics rather closely, no? Congratulations to the USHMM on its fine sense of timing. Let’s hope that the Chinese government benefits less from the 2008 games than Hitler did from the ones in 1936.