“50 cents: *That* I can understand”

Years ago, there was a cartoon in MAD magazine in which some prosperous businessmand spent his time chewing out people for losing quarters while ignoring the fact that his company was losing billions of dollars. The punchline was that billions of dollars were an incomprehensible statistic to him but “50 cents: *that* I can understand”.

I sometime suspect something similar is at work in weird, irrational acts like banning burqinis. Of all the things in the world that we have to worry about, a few modest Muslim bathing beauties seems to me to be pretty far down on the priority list. But it’s so much easier to make life pointlessly difficult for a few women (who are much less likely to burn your country down) than to address some of the rather more obvious problems in the Islamic community that feminine modesty. Saying, “Well, it’s not like we’re beheading anybody” pretty much gives the game away: it’s a chicken-hearted little retaliation by people without the guts to address the main issue of Islamic violence.