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WND column

Better Late than Never

Being one of the many columnists who initially supported the invasion of Iraq under the mistaken impression that Saddam Hussein had violated a ceasefire agreement with the United States (although I did argue that it should not be undertaken in the absence of a declaration of war), I am in no position to criticize Mr. Farah or anyone else for taking a long time to come around to the understanding that the military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq must come to an immediate end.

Only a very few commentators, such as Antiwar.com’s Justin Raimondo and WorldNetDaily’s own Pat Buchanan and Ilana Mercer, can truly say that they were opposed from the start to the expensive, unconstitutional and ultimately useless abuses of the American military that have been inflicted upon it by Republican and Democratic commanders in chief over the last nine years. And even fewer opinion writers are man enough to admit in public that their previously expressed opinions were incorrect. Farah, to his credit, is not afraid to do so.

“For the life of me, I cannot begin to understand our objectives in either Iraq or Afghanistan any more. … I admit I was a supporter of both of these campaigns. I was obviously wrong.”
– Joseph Farah, Where are protests of Obama’s wars?, July 22, 2010.

At the Black Gate

Requiem for a Writer

Many years ago, when I was in junior high, I read a science fiction novel that had what I still consider to be one of the greatest endings in science fiction literature. It was compelling enough that I didn’t learn until years later that I had read the last book in the original trilogy and what ultimately turned out to be the third in a series of five. That book was Giant’s Star and it offered what then appeared to me to be a unique and highly original concept of human origins. The author was James P. Hogan and the books of the Giants series are very well worth reading today as they hold up surprisingly well considering the changes in technology that have taken place between now and 1977.

Read the rest at the Black Gate.

Weekly Poll: Afghanistan and Iraq

In light of Mr. Farah’s recent conversion to the anti-war cause, I’m wondering how many readers here support the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, how many oppose them, and how many, like Mr. Farah and me, have changed from supporting at least one of them to opposing them both at some point along the way. As for me, I never supported the Afghan war and began openly opposing the Iraqi war in 2004 when I learned that my support for it on the grounds of the broken ceasefire agreement was based on incorrect information; the agreement was between Iraq and the United Nations, not Iraq and the USA. Therefore I was forced to conclude that sans any declaration of war or casus belli, the Iraqi war and subsequent occupation was always wholly illegitimate as well as lacking in any national security interest.

Losing his party

The assumption of Obama as the automatic Democratic Party nominee in 2012 takes another hit:

If you haven’t read today’s Wall Street Journal column by Senator James Webb (D-VA), you owe it to yourself. The key line is this one, where Webb argues that our “present-day diversity programs work against that notion, having expanded so far beyond their original purpose that they now favor anyone who does not happen to be white.”

What makes it key is: Why now? Why write this column today? What brought this particular issue out at this particular moment?

These questions are important, because Webb’s column is a virtual declaration of war on President Obama — at a time when Obama’s head must be already spinning after two weeks of racial strife from the NAACP and Andrew Breitbart. And a “recovery summer” that’s anything but. So it’s not often I find myself agreeing with Pat Buchanan, and when I do — even only partly so, like today — I always wash afterwards. But when Buchanan says that the White House is in a “panic” because it “fears it is losing white America,” he’s absolutely right.

But what Obama really ought to fear is losing his own party — because Webb’s column is just the most recent sign.

I just thought it was worth pointing this out, given that it appeared precisely one day after I was accused of being a political moron for stating that Obama is going to lose control of his party and will pushed to the exits during the 2012 Democratic primary, presumably in favor of the Lizard Queen. Now, I could quite clearly be wrong, and after all, the safe bet is to assume the status quo. After all, my original prediction of Obama as a one-term president is looking pretty good right now and I could have simply rolled with that if I was at all concerned about credibility as a political analyst.

But I’m not a political analyst and I find it much more interesting to follow trains of thought as they happen to occur. Go read Nate Silver and listen to his many convoluted explanations of why the polls prove the Democrats will hold the House and Senate this fall if you want professional political analysis. (My opinion is that they’ll lose both.) The point is that when you look at where the economy appears to be headed in the next two years and combine that with the probable Democratic electoral debacle this fall as well as the growing panic among Democratic office-holders and Obama’s increasingly disastrous poll numbers, it adds up to what I see as an unusually volatile Democratic primary.

The original Internet tough guy

Spencer Ackerman on Michael Ledeen:

Let’s just throw Ledeen against a wall. Or, pace Dr. Alterman, throw him through a plate glass window. I’ll bet a little spot of violence would shut him right the fuck up, as with most bullies.

And to Lenny Ben-David:

Lenny Ben-David, you and I will meet someday, face to face. I hope it comes very soon. I promise you it will be an unforgettable experience.

In case you’re interested, here is that intimidating hard man, Spencer Ackerman.

He looks like Rambo, the Punisher, and Ivan Drago all rolled into one awesome, genetically-engineered fighting beast, doesn’t he? Spencer – seriously dude, you do know your name is Spencer, right? – if you would genuinely like to engage in a little spot of violence with a right-winger, I would like to cordially invite you to step into the octagon for two minutes of full-contact violence with me. I’d offer more, but frankly, I doubt you’ll make it that long. No bullying, no talking, no posturing on the Internet, just straight-up MMA action until one party taps out or is rendered unconscious.

Speaking as a former full-contact martial artist who has been knocked out, had ribs, thumbs, ankle, nose, toes, and feet broken, and been knocked down by a punch or a kick at least 200 times, I really find these pugnacious little media pipsqueaks who have never taken nor thrown a punch in their lives to be tremendously tiresome.

Sports Guy Game

Despite being a natural negger, Bill Simmons demonstrates that he’s not only a Delta, but he doesn’t actually understand the concept of Game:

Q: As a female, I usually have a hard time admitting that I read your articles. I have a harder time admitting that I think you’re hilarious. I feel like I should despise you on principle, because let’s be honest, you’re a pig. But I do like you. More than I care to admit. I find myself referencing you in everyday conversation. If I can use you to back up what I’m saying, I think it has more weight. And when guys find out I like you, they love it (thanks for that). So my question is, how do you do it? How have you managed to make a self-respecting woman eagerly await you next column, even though I’ve come to expect you to have at least one disrespectful comment in there?
— Amanda, Richmond

SG: Typical e-mail from a female reader: expresses her disgust, insults me, changes her mind three times and ultimately admits that she can’t live without me. I don’t blame Amanda because she’s been weaned on 20 years of chick flicks, and the one rule of chick flicks is this: “Find the one guy who either drives you crazy or you can’t have, then fall madly in love with him even though you know it’s completely wrong.”

Incorrect. Amanda doesn’t read the Sports Guy because of the chick flicks, the chick flicks are a hamster rationalization of the natural female tendency to be drawn to men who don’t put them on pedestals. Throw in the DHV aspect of fame – the woman wouldn’t find the column so irresistible if it wasn’t by a columnist who has rightly become famous by virtue of taking his talents to ESPN – and it’s quite natural that she would like it despite finding it despicable on principle.

I used to be puzzled when women would send me emails complaining about my columns… accompanied by their pictures. WTF? Now, in light of Game theory, it makes considerably more sense. Of course, it doesn’t happen as often now that my feminist critics of yore are all deathly afraid of provoking public responses to their criticism. It’s been rather interesting to see how the amount of public criticism has fallen dramatically while the daily blog readership has continued to steadily grow.

Better late than never

Joseph Farah flips on the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq:

For the life of me, I cannot begin to understand our objectives in either Iraq or Afghanistan any more.

Because I appreciate the sacrifice our men and women are making over there, it is with a heavy heart that I make this proclamation. But enough is enough. We have spent over $1 trillion on these two wars and spilled far too much American blood. We are obviously unwilling as a country to do what is necessary to kill the bad guys in either place, so what is the point? Isn’t it time to declare victory and get out? What is the point? Can someone, anyone, tell me?

I admit I was a supporter of both of these campaigns. I was obviously wrong.

Being one who flipped on the Iraqi War in 2004, I’m hardly in any position to condemn latecomers. I made the mistake of supporting the war under the misconception that the ceasefire Hussein had violated was an agreement between Iraq and the USA, (it was actually an agreement between Iraq and the UN and therefore had absolutely nothing to do with the USA or its national security), but I was always against any potential military occupation. Pat Buchanan, to his credit, was one of the very few who had it right from the start. As for Afghanistan, we never had any business fighting the Taliban in the first place, much less attempting to occupy the country.

Anyhow, it’s good to see relatively mainstream Republicans beginning to join the libertarians in opposing the ongoing occupations. What a pity that the anti-war Democrats have again decided that they like war after all so long as a Democrat is the Commander-in-Chief. But given the history of 20th century American military conflict, it is a mystery that anyone believes Democrats are anti-war.

WWI – Wilson (D)
WWII – Roosevelt (D)
Korea – Truman (D)
Vietnam – Johnson (D)

That is not the track record of an antiwar party. Which, of course, is why I predicted that Obama would not end the wars, but rather, expand them.

Don’t f— with 4chan

This is absolutely hilarious:

We all went to bed that night, and then at 1:15 AM, my doorbell rang. Our dog started barking and we heard bam, bam, bam … someone was banging on our door. It was the Marion County Sheriff’s Department. An officer said an anonymous tip had come in that our daughter was hurting herself. He wouldn’t tell us who called the tip in, but he made me wake my daughter up to make sure she was OK. The officer was really rude and my daughter kept denying that she made any videos. She kept saying, “I didn’t do any of this!” He was here for about 15 minutes.

The next morning, my husband and I were sitting in our home when the doorbell rang again. Another sheriff’s department officer was banging on the door. This time, they had another anonymous tip from someone in California claiming my daughter had female prostitutes coming in and out of our home from ads posted on Craigslist.

The punchline? All sorts of idiots on both sides of the political spectrum think that the problem here is Internet trolls and the solution is even MORE police activity. Of course, the only reason that anyone can be harassed this way is because of the police state in which the police do everything from sending investigative officers to armed SWAT teams to people’s houses without warrants on the sole basis of anonymous tips.

What’s happening here does reflect a sick society, but 4chan is not the sickness. It is merely a symptom of the myriad of ways in which the mere existence of the police state creates harassment of the individual.

Rape, ex post facto

If it is rape for an Arab to pass for a Israeli, I imagine that Jews who are mistaken for Italians or Caucasians will have to be prosecuted as well. To say nothing of all those women who falsely claim to be single when they actually have boyfriends or husbands.

A Palestinian man has been convicted of rape after having consensual sex with a woman who had believed him to be a fellow Jew. Sabbar Kashur, 30, was sentenced to 18 months in prison on Monday after the court ruled that he was guilty of rape by deception. According to the complaint filed by the woman with the Jerusalem district court, the two met in downtown Jerusalem in September 2008 where Kashur, an Arab from East Jerusalem, introduced himself as a Jewish bachelor seeking a serious relationship. The two then had consensual sex in a nearby building before Kashur left.

When she later found out that he was not Jewish but an Arab, she filed a criminal complaint for rape and indecent assault.The two then had consensual sex in a nearby building before Kashur left.

This ex post facto claim of rape is both logically and legally absurd, of course, but it does tend to suggest that Israel is as brutally ethnocentric as the European anti-Zionists claim contra the claims of its defenders. Given the apparent precedent set by this conviction, one is inclined to wonder if the American Jews who so eagerly descended upon the South during the Sixties on behalf of black rights will now take their guilt-ridden activism to Israel on behalf of the Arabs.

However, to be fair to the Israeli legal system, it should be kept in mind that this was the result of a plea-bargain, not a trial, so no precedent was, in fact, set. While the ethno-religious aspect of the case is what has attracted the media’s attention, I don’t think that the focus of the deception was actually on his married state is any less potentially problematic.

The end of trend

Nicholas Kristof is correct to say that men should not be written off, but for the wrong reasons:

With women making far-reaching gains, there’s a larger question. Are women simply better-suited than men to today’s jobs? The Atlantic raised this issue provocatively in this month’s issue with a cover story by Hanna Rosin bluntly entitled, “The End of Men.”

“What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men?” Ms. Rosin asked. She adds: “The postindustrial economy is indifferent to men’s size and strength. The attributes that are most valuable today — social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus — are, at a minimum, not predominately male. In fact, the opposite may be true.”

It’s a fair question, and others also have been wondering aloud if a new age of femininity is dawning. After all, Ms. Rosin notes that Americans who use high-tech biology to try to pick a baby’s sex seek a girl more often than a boy. And women now make up 51 percent of professional and managerial positions in America, up from 26 percent in 1980.

This demonstrates the problem with the linear thinker. Those who see the transformation of the workforce and academia into female-majority populations are assuming that the present post-industrial system is sustainable. But it isn’t. It’s true that women will continue to collect more and more worthless degrees than men and fill more and more needless paper-shifting jobs than men right up until the point at which a debt-laden society can no longer afford to pay for people to learn nothing and do nothing.

A private sector job which exists solely to comply with government-dictated paperwork is every bit as government-manufactured and unproductive as a public sector job. And that is precisely the type of job which is going to disappear entirely once the debt edifice collapses and the extent of the dollar-denominated imaginary economy is revealed. Just as stripping out the debt-funded component of GDP reveals that there has been no actual economic growth for decades, stripping out the paperwork jobs will demonstrate that the real labor force is still roughly 2/3rd male, just as it was in 1950.

Note for the historically illiterate. Women have ALWAYS worked. One-third of the labor force has ALWAYS been female. A more accurate description of “women in the workplace” is “middle-class mothers in the workplace”. The idea of the American stay-at-home mother was always a fundamentally middle-class one, and now, thanks to the increase in the labor supply combined with increasing taxes, most middle-class couples require two incomes in order to stay middle-class.

And the idea that the few Americans (300 million) who use sex selection technology to choose girls are going to counterbalance the millions of Chinese and Indians (2.3 billion) who use it to select boys is obviously absurd.

The non-linear thinker is forced to contemplate very different questions. Rather than occupy himself with asking if men are at an end or will be employable in a world of government-dictated make-work, he is forced to ask when the inevitable employment and academic collapse will take place in America and when the war between China and India, never officially ended, will resume. In other words, is it the end of men or the end of a societal trend?