Just got back from seeing The Motorcycle Diaries with my friends Kamilla and Chad; overall, it’s quite an enjoyable film, although I think that knowing where Ernesto Guevera’s journey ends—or at least what that journey was eventually perverted into, depending on your perspective on communism—made it slightly hard for me to feel a great deal of sympathy for the lead. Still, it’s a good rental, and enjoyable for the “buddy film” aspect of the piece if nothing else.

Glenn Reynolds in the course of rightly criticizing the neo-Confederate movement makes this rather incongrous statement:

As a political force, neo-Confederate sentiment is pretty trivial at the moment, even compared to the decaying remnants of Marxism.

Apparently Glenn didn’t get the memo about these schmucks who apparently have a substantial chunk of the Mississippi legislature doing their bidding. At least the Marxists around here are in relatively harmless professions (or serving on the Jackson City Council, which amounts to basically the same thing).

Somehow, the departure of William Safire from the New York Times has led to the gratuitous misuse of language:

Participation varied by region, and the impressive national percentages should not obscure the fact that the country’s large Sunni Arab minority remained broadly disenfranchised – due to alienation or terror or both.

The word “disenfranchised” literally means deprived of voting rights. Southern blacks were disenfranchised under Jim Crow. Women were disenfranchised prior to the passage of the 19th Amendment.

By contrast, Sunni Arabs in Iraq were not disenfranchised; nobody stopped them from voting. Instead, they chose not to drag their sorry asses to the polls, for whatever reason.