Author: VD

The supply of suicide bombers appears to be running low:

Two suicide attacks on pet markets in Baghdad today have left approximately 100 killed and twice as many wounded. Both attacks used women “with Down’s syndrome” according the the Daily Mail and less specifically, they were described as “mentally disabled” according to CNN. Both bombs appear to have been remote detonated. These women probably did not know they were carrying explosives at all, and it would probably be fair to include them among the victims….

Today’s attacks also tell us that al Qaeda in Iraq is getting very desperate in seeking the high-casualty attacks that they so value. They were forced to scrape the bottom of the proverbial barrel, and use not only women (which they’d prefer to subjugate), but mentally disabled women at that, suggesting that finding willing volunteers is becoming ever more difficult.

When you can’t easily find a few hundred volunteers among a potential pool of 1.2 billion people, I think it’s pretty safe to conclude that religion is not a very powerful motivating factor underlying suicide bombings. Meanwhile, that well-known religious group, the Tamil Tigers, continue their explosive campaign against the Sri Lankan government, sans suicide.

A suspected Tamil Tiger roadside bomb attack on a civilian bus has killed 27 people and wounded dozens more in central Sri Lanka. The attack came as a six-year ceasefire between the state and rebels formally expired.

Suicide bombing is merely a dramatic propaganda statement that anyone who has seen The Godfather II should understand. It’s designed to inspire the very kind of fear that permeates Sam Harris’s ludicrous first book. It’s also militarily negligible, except perhaps in the very limited case of high-level political assassinations. When, like every other military or political tactic, it ceases to become effective for the moment, it’s set aside in favor of other, more effective tactics. The idea that use of this tactic ever said anything significant about religion or religion’s place in the modern world, even a particular religion, was always a particularly stupid argument.

This will become become obvious to even the most skeptical Harris fan once the either the Iraqi and Afghani occupations end and bombings by Muslims slow to a single-digit, Jerusalem-focused trickle again, or Iran is occupied and a new wave of bombing horrors wrack both the Middle East and West.

Everything’s not quite as slick and sophisticated as we would have liked, but both Paid and Free ebook versions of The Irrational Atheist are now available from the TIA downloads page. You can also access the downloads page from the link underneath the picture of the book cover on the right sidebar.

The PDF is the cleanest version; the LIT and PDB versions are functional but will require some polishing over the next few days thanks to the copious footnotes. I appreciate the work done on those versions by Adam and SWW, who jumped in on short notice and made it possible for us to have them available now. If you’d like to create another version in whatever idiosyncratic format you happen to prefer, you can do so from the DOC file; please send it to me when it’s done and we’ll add it to the page. If you run into any technical issues with the downloads or whatever – you know there are bound to be some – let me know.

There is also a new TIA forum for reviews and TIA-related discussions. If anyone is interested in volunteering to moderate them, please let me know here. There’s bound to be a need for it. Thanks very much to Digital Cowboy, who managed to get this together on time despite having a few curveballs thrown at him over the last few weeks.

Dr. Helen casually consigns David Frum’s plan for a Republican comeback to the circular file:

John Hawkins has an interview up with David Frum, author of Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again. Frankly, after reading the interview, I couldn’t tell many of Frum’s supposedly conservative responses from that of a liberal Democrat–don’t worry about cutting taxes, give even more government handouts to low income groups, etc.

Frum’s comeback plan is merely the blueprint for permanent Republican minority. In their arrogance, George Bush and the neocons have destroyed the Republican party by betraying conservatives at every opportunity. The only thing that will keep Republicans from another multi-decade spell in the political wilderness is if Hillary Clinton approaches governance with the same laid-back reserve that she showed in pushing her socialized health plan on America. As it stands, they’re toast for at least eight years and quite possibly twelve.

The insane thing is that Frum’s approach couldn’t possibly work anyhow. You can’t beat Democrats by competing for the handout vote. They’re not just willing to trump you every single time, they’re delighted that you decided to play their game on their turf.

Joe Carter chronicles, in painstaking detail, why John McCain may not actually be the worst possible Republican nominee, all appearances to the contrary:

The main reason I can’t support Mitt Romney is because of John Kerry. I spent much of the 2004 election bashing Kerry for his political expediency. How then can I defend a candidate that is a bigger flip-flopper than Kerry?

Beelzebub takes a shot that I will readily admit to not expecting:

I’ll shoot the first volley. The Voxster makes a big case about the religious causalities of War. True/false? In the end it doesn’t matter, and in essence, by your comments you know it too. All we really need to prove is whether ONE war, or even one death can be ascribed to religion, and we’ve already condemned it.

True. I certainly do devote two entire chapters to it, mostly because one of the New Atheists primary arguments against religion is because they believe it to be a primary cause of war and military conflict. They make both implicit and explicit arguments for this. Both their implicit and explict arguments are incorrect, as I demonstrate in no little detail. Beelzebub says “Screw the “New Atheists” and claims my successful dissection of their war-related arguments is irrelevant because a single historical death ascribed to religion is enough to condemn religion. While I’m glad to note that he concurs with my assertion that I have effectively refuted Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, I have three questions for him.

1. On what basis does a single death ascribed to anything condemn that thing?

2. Does Beelzebub condemn everything else to which a single historical death can be ascribed?

3. Is that to which more deaths can be ascribed to be more strongly condemned than that to which fewer deaths can be ascribed?

Kay Hymowitz laments the immaturity of the modern young man. Vox Day reads it, shrugs, and goes back to the Plaguelands:

But this history suggests an uncomfortable fact about the new SYM: He’s immature because he can be. We can argue endlessly about whether “masculinity” is natural or constructed – whether men are innately promiscuous, restless and slobby or socialized to be that way – but there’s no denying the lesson of today’s media marketplace: Give young men a choice between serious drama on the one hand, and Victoria’s Secret models, battling cyborgs, exploding toilets and the NFL on the other, and it’s the models, cyborgs, toilets and football by a mile.

For whatever reason, adolescence appears to be the young man’s default state, proving what anthropologists have discovered in cultures everywhere: It is marriage and children that turn boys into men. Now that the SYM can put off family into the hazily distant future, he can – and will – try to stay a child-man. Not only is no one asking that today’s twenty- or thirtysomething become a responsible husband and father – that is, grow up – but a freewheeling marketplace gives him everything he needs to settle down in pig’s heaven indefinitely.

There was no shortage of women who didn’t like it when men were responsible for everything. They wanted to vote, they wanted to work, they are demanding a turn to take the reins. Fine, says the modern young man, who has been subjected to 16 years of feminist propaganda that women are just as good – better, in fact – than men at pretty much everything. Not being given to whining and being largely practical, the young man is happy to leave the responsibility to the women who are demanding it. Who in their right mind would trade models, games and football for marriage to some controlling bitch who’s as likely to leave you as not?

I certainly wouldn’t. Yeah, I got married, but only because I got lucky and met a woman who looks like a VS model and is fine with the cyborgs and NFL as long as I keep it to what she considers a reasonable 12/7.

This is what matriarchy looks like. And until it collapses, as it most certainly will in a shorter period of time than anyone expects, we can expect to see more of this rational immaturity from men. If Ms Hymowitz thinks it’s bad now, she should just wait until the MMOs get superintelligent, Madden installs a live link to NFL trades and injury updates and the inanimate sex dolls become animated sex droids. You wanted to drive, women, now you’ve got the wheel. Good luck with that.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s an infestation of Skeletal Flayers in the Ruins of Andorhal that requires my attention.

Someone suggested following up the success of the first book surge with another one. I rejected that idea because a) been here done that, and b) you guys have already done more than enough to get the ball rolling. You exceeded not only my expectations, but even my objectives. I really appreciate your enthusiasm and support. What I think would be helpful now is posting your reviews on Amazon once the book’s page is open to them, presumably on Friday. So, if you’ve read the book and you’re up for it, then please let me know here.

This is particularly important because, as the shrieking monkeys have made abundantly clear, they’re not about to permiit not having read TIA get in the way of offering their uninformed opinions on it.

Rich Lowry marvels at the political astuteness of Kate O’Beirne:

Pundit Credit Where It’s Due

Someone who called the Rudy thing from the beginning—that he wasn’t a good fit for the GOP and wouldn’t win the nomination—was my colleague Kate O’Beirne.

She was hardly the only one, as every political observer with even half a functioning brain knew that he was a horrible, no-good, very-bad candidate. The only question was if the party elite could cram him down the Republican base’s throats long enough to let him take another pre-arranged dive for Hillary. As it turned out, he was so hapless that they couldn’t. Which is actually somewhat of a a comforting thought to take into the next eight years of rule by humorless lesbian blackskirts.

And you still wonder why I prefer to spend my time in Azeroth…. Meanwhile, the Englishman in New York goes medieval on the Manhattan conservatives:

You already have a genuinely conservative candidate on offer. He’s just not slick enough for you. What, he has positions you don’t agree with? More than the other guys? Actually, I have heard very little complaining about Paul’s positions. What I have mostly heard is (a) He’s funny looking, (b) He can’t win, and (c) He has a lot of icky supporters.

The answer to (a) is to put aside the New York Times “Style” section for five minutes and think. The answer to (b) is, that if conservatism is going to lose big in 2008 anyway (newsflash: it is), it should at least make a stand, to inspire future generations. The answer to (c) is, get in there and swell the ranks of non-icky Paul supporters — there are plenty of us — to drown out the nutsos.

I’m probably considered one of the nutsos, (in fact, now that I think about it, I KNOW I am), but hey, the more the merrier. And as it is written: Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity.

I very much like the addition of Nat Hentoff to the lineup:

What distinguishes us from all other nations is the range and depth of the First Amendment’s expressive individual liberties against government control of what we say and think…. Once our republic began, James Madison expected that no American would be punished for his “thoughts.” But “hate crimes” laws – vigorously and incredibly supported by the American Civil Liberties Union – are what Madison feared.

I seldom agree with Mr. Hentoff. But I have far more respect for him than for most of the nominally “right-wing” commentariat, because unlike them, he genuinely understands the concept of freedom of thought and the dangers of government control.

The Lewis book sounds like a restatement of the obvious, but then, the mindless Left could use just such a reminder right now, especially from one of its own.