Thomas Friedman writes about the Israel-Palestine conflict: “The third way, unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon and Gaza, has been discredited by Hezbollah’s attack from Lebanon and the Hamas rocket attacks from Gaza.” This is, factually speaking, true. Unilateralism was very popular in Israel and among pro-Israel activists in the diaspora and then rapidly became unpopular when Hamas and Hezbollah continued to fire rockets across the unilaterally established borders.

What I’ve always wondered about this was why this process happened in public opinion? I had thought that the point of unilateralism was that Israelis reached the conclusion (rightly or wrongly) that there was nothing they could agree to that would stop the occasional terrorist attack so that Israel might as well unilaterally withdraw to borders that were practically and morally easier to defend. Agree with that or not, it seems logical enough and it’s not a proposition whose logic is undermined by the fact that some rocket attacks happened.

It seems, though, that what made unilateralism popular was that a large number of people thought that if the Palestinians were unilaterally given substantially less than they’d rejected at Camp David that they would spontaneously — decide to take that new, less favorable non-negotiated offer with such a degree of unanimity that no cross-border rocket attacks owuld ever happen. And, well, of course that theory got discredit — it was always really dumb.

Sure, Mitt Romney is crazy wrong about Iraq, but that’s normal for a Republican. I’m more interested in his weird use of the term “null set.” While researching that topic, I learned something interesting. It turns out that the thing I was taught to call either “null set” or “empty set” is now supposed to be the empty set exclusively.

The purpose of this is to avoid confusion with a different concept, also called

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A sage correspondent notes that the WSJ‘s coverage of letters in support of Scooter Libby includes this:

Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the New Republic, described himself as “the kind of liberal whom many neoconservatives like to despise.” In an interview, he said Mr. Libby had been a friend ever since he handled a legal problem for the editor in the 1980s. “He was amazingly kind and diligent” then, Mr. Wieseltier said. He added that he didn’t realize the letter had been made public.

Because of neoconservatives’ well-known dislike of the sort of extremely hawkish liberals whose primary political interest is foreign policy and pro-Israel activism and who write letters urging leniency for neoconservative criminals?

Megan Stack’s recounting of her life in Saudi Arabia is a reminder that for all the ink that’s been wasted on bringing liberalism to the Muslim world by bombing Muslim country or yelling really loudly at Iran, there are much more obvious things that could be done:

The rules are different here. The same U.S. government that heightened public outrage against the Taliban by decrying the mistreatment of Afghan women prizes the oil-slicked Saudi friendship and even offers wan praise for Saudi elections in which women are banned from voting. All U.S. fast-food franchises operating here, not just Starbucks, make women stand in separate lines. U.S.-owned hotels don’t let women check in without a letter from a company vouching for her ability to pay; women checking into hotels alone have long been regarded as prostitutes.

People could organize a boycott in the US and Europe against Western fast food franchises that enforce this kind of gender apartheid abroad. The Saudi market’s not that big, in the scheme of things, it would be relatively easy to put companies in a position where it’s not financially worth it for them to keep operating Saudi franchises under those conditions. Maybe the Saudi regime would let them operate differently. Maybe they’d agree to pay the price of isolation and activists would need to move on to the next economic sector. It does, however, seem to me that the Saudi elite prizes maintaining some degree of integration with the cultural and commercial mainstream and wouldn’t want to see Western brands all withdraw from their country.