Category: Uncategorized

Which is why we don’t “kidnap” people and “hold them hostage”, we prevent dangerous terrorists from harming freedom:

A failed American attempt to abduct two senior Iranian security officers on an official visit to northern Iraq was the starting pistol for a crisis that 10 weeks later led to Iranians seizing 15 British sailors and Marines.

Early on the morning of 11 January, helicopter-born US forces launched a surprise raid on a long-established Iranian liaison office in the city of Arbil in Iraqi Kurdistan. They captured five relatively junior Iranian officials whom the US accuses of being intelligence agents and still holds.

In reality the US attack had a far more ambitious objective, The Independent has learned. The aim of the raid, launched without informing the Kurdish authorities, was to seize two men at the very heart of the Iranian security establishment.

Better understanding of the seriousness of the US action in Arbil – and the angry Iranian response to it – should have led Downing Street and the Ministry of Defence to realise that Iran was likely to retaliate against American or British forces such as highly vulnerable Navy search parties in the Gulf. The two senior Iranian officers the US sought to capture were Mohammed Jafari, the powerful deputy head of the Iranian National Security Council, and General Minojahar Frouzanda, the chief of intelligence of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, according to Kurdish officials….

US officials in Washington subsequently claimed that the five Iranian officials they did seize, who have not been seen since, were “suspected of being closely tied to activities targeting Iraq and coalition forces”. This explanation never made much sense. No member of the US-led coalition has been killed in Arbil and there were no Sunni-Arab insurgents or Shia militiamen there.

This may go a long way towards explaining the Coalition of the Willing’s strangely muted response to the Iranian capture of their sailors. Downing Street likely realizes that the rest of the world isn’t likely to be overly sympathetic to the plight of the “hostages” once it’s realized that this is simply a tit-for-tat situation.

Pajamas Media makes the predicted conclusion:

OUR EDITORS’ TAKE: What does the ascendancy of Fred Thompson and Ron Paul mean? Is this an Internet (early adopter) harbinger of things to come? In the case of Thompson, we think this is indeed a possibility. The former Tennessee senator / prosecutor / movie and television star has… despite being undeclared … fared quite well on other polls. On the latest Fox News Poll he is ahead of the declared Romney and the undeclared Gingrich, ditto on the Gallup Poll.

Ron Paul is a different matter. The paleo-libertarian seems to be a purely Internet Phenomenon. He has yet to score significantly on any national poll, his best being a mere 3% on Zogby. Of course this could change. Pajamas Media would like to note, however, that the vast majority of his votes in our poll (1331 of 1725) were placed right here on the portal site, suggesting a determined effort by his supporters to “bomb” this poll

Of course, another 270 of those votes, or 15.7 percent of them, were placed right here on this arch-libertarian site. Was that an attempt to “bomb” this polling precinct? Or is it simply the strong preference for a man who is so foolish as to actually believe in individual freedom and the Constitution among readers of this site?

The truth is that those who follow politics on the Internet are a very, very small elite. Remember that from the national perspective, practically no one – around half of one percent of the population – even watches Bill O’Reilly on a given evening nor knows who Kos or Instapundit are. Among that elite, there are a disproportional number of libertarians. Thus, any Internet poll is going to favor libertarians just as any poll taken at a PETA meeting is going to favor vegetarians. There’s nothing shady about that, as Pajamas Media appears to imply, it’s merely a function of the environment.

My take on Thompson is that his appeal is primarily an indication of Republican malaise; he is the living, breathing None of the Above. And as I’ve written many times before, it doesn’t matter who the Republicans nominate, as the Lizard Queen’s ascension is ordained.

On a related matter, I note that the candidate nearly every other right-wing commentator pronounced unelectable – and whose 2008 victory I predicted in 2005 – seems to have gotten off to a good start:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign today announced it will report $36 million in total receipts for the first fundraising quarter, which ended March 31, 2007. The staggering number reflects the strength of support for Clinton from every walk of life and every part of America.

Record money, a favorable media, a failed Republican war and millions of Republican women voting for her because she’s a woman… she’s more likely to win in a landslide than lose.

Now that I’ve received my spiffy new Encylopedia of Wars, a rather handsome three-volume set, it appears that my first estimate of 10.8 percent of wars being religious in nature was too high.

I haven’t gone through it in detail yet, but since the authors were helpful enough to list religious wars in the index, a quick comparison reveals that the true figure is more likely to be around seven percent. And this seven percent includes 14 iterations of the Byzantine-Muslim war as well as categorizing every Crusade as being religious in nature, even though most historians have concluded that a few of them, such as the Fourth, had nothing to do with religion in any way, shape or form.*

It’s interesting to note that despite the results of their own research, the authors of this seminal work nevertheless appear to blame pre-seventeenth century war on religion. On a closer reading, however, it may be more of a nod to the common prejudice of the historically ignorant than a reflection of their own conclusions. I think I shall have to ask them about this.

*The Fourth Crusade was the Venetian conquest of Constantinople, the Christian capital of the Byzantine Empire.

A lot of you emailed me this, but I think most of you are missing the more important point. It isn’t that women are prone to lie about rape. It’s that they are, from a legal perspective, children:

Darrell Roberson came home from a card game late one night to find his wife rolling around with another man in a pickup truck in the driveway. Caught in the act with her lover, Tracy Denise Roberson – thinking quickly, if not clearly – cried rape, authorities say. Her husband pulled a gun and killed the other man with a shot to the head.

I’m sort of curious what feminists will make of this, if anything, since on the one hand, they like to criticize all men as potential rapists, and on the other, they very much dislike the notion of men leaving women to their own defense. But the more important part of the story was in the last paragraph:

His wife also was charged with making a false report to a police officer – for allegedly saying she was raped – and could get up to six months behind bars on that offense. It was not immediately clear whether she had a lawyer. She had not been arrested as of Friday afternoon.

Of course not. Because, after all, she is a woman, and therefore a legal child, and therefore cannot be held responsible for her actions even when those actions have lead directly to someone’s death. I’d be surprised if she ever sees trial, in the unlikely event that she does, I’d expect her to get probation.

John Scalzi mentions the education of Tor editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden. Or, more precisely, the lack thereof:

Yes, there are people who have done well without college or even high school diplomas; allow me to point at my own fiction editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, an autodidact of the first order and one of the smartest people I know.

While I am second to no man in expressing serious doubt regarding the effectiveness and importance of a college education for most people, I rather suspect there may be a direct connection between the gentleman’s lack of an education and the way in which so many Tor books absolutely and utterly and completely suck from a literary perspective.

As Spacebunny once muttered in exasperation while determinedly slogging her way through yet another execrable hardcover: “who on Earth keeps giving these people book contracts?” Answer: a guy without a high school diploma. Thus is great American literature born….

Lest you wish to consider this some sort of sour grapes, I note that despite my membership in the SFWA, I have never submitted a single book proposal to Tor or any science fiction/fantasy publisher except Pocket Books.

Dr. Helen disagrees with part of my previous post, unnecessarily in my opinion:

Anger is not always stupid, petty and irrational; sometimes it is a legitimate response, a way to tell us that something is wrong or that we need to become more aware of what we are feeling and why. Women are not irrational creatures, but actually very rational at times and their angry behavior, even in a passive aggressive form, is not always about being emotionally manipulated.

What I was saying in an admittedly unclear manner is not that anger stems from being emotionally manipulated, but rather that being anger-prone renders one vulnerable to emotional manipulation.

If I cannot reason with you, if I cannot appeal to your rational thought processes, then you leave me no choice but to manipulate your emotions. Once I determine that a woman is one of the anger-prone, I make no attempt whatsoever to reason with her unless I intend to humiliate her in public, in front of those who are capable of rational thought.

Now, there are certainly men who are helplessly ruled by their anger, but there are fewer of them and they tend to be more obviously choleric. It’s a little easier to steer clear of them entirely if one is not inclined to put up with the bluster and nonsense.

We ask so many times how anger is felt by women or how women are affected by men’s anger or the anger of other women, but I would really like to know how angry women affect men. It’s always funny in our culture to see women lash out angrily at men, hit them, call them names and act in passive aggressive forms towards kids, husbands and male colleagues, and many men take the abuse, but at what cost?

As is probably quite clear to most of my readers, I am openly contemptuous of those who are ruled by their emotions, particularly anger. This is often mistaken for misogyny, but that is a blatantly sexist assumption. Having seen far too many men virtually emasculated by their fear of women’s anger, my instinctive reaction is to confront it, either by attempting to gently defuse it or simply crushing it with an avalanche of icy contempt.

What’s interesting is the way in which many women who use the threat of their anger to bully men can sense this unwillingness to cower before them and openly fear it. It’s both amusing and a little disturbing to see how such women will not even dare to meet my eyes once they detect it.

The best way to defang a passive-aggressive individual is to bring the subtext out into the open. This is most easily done by asking a direct question: “do you really think it’s appropriate to talk to your husband like that in front of all of us?” Most women would rather die than have their bad behavior exposed like that, which is kind of strange because they have no problem exhibiting it in the first place.

Another approach is to take the negative reinforcement line, for example, an individual who habitually speaks in an inappropriately disrespectful tone will usually knock it off if you inevitably respond with calmly polite vulgarities.

“Yes, of COURSE I’ll do EXACTLY what you require of me, your Highness. (said in a voice dripping with sarcasm)

“Yes, I very much expect you will follow your fucking orders in the precise fucking manner I have given them to you.” (spoken in a polite, inoffensive tone.)

“You can’t talk to me like that!”

“I can, and I will, so long as you speak to me like that. It’s up to you.”

In such cases, you cannot meet fire with fire and passive-aggression with passive-aggression, as it only exacerbates the situation. Conflict is an excellent issue-resolver.

Instapundit (180.5k daily visits, 4,623 links)
Votes in Pajamas Media poll: 739

Vox Popoli (2.7k visits, 258 links)
Votes in Pajamas Media poll: 333

It signifies nothing, I was merely surprised that the difference wasn’t an order of magnitude or more. Although I suppose that wouldn’t have been possible considering that the Ron Paul votes here currently make up about 15 percent of his total and he’s running a strong second on the Republican side.

The most likely conclusion is that most of my readers do not regularly frequent Pajamas Media sites, whereas Insty’s readers do. This would make sense, given that he’s involved with them and I am not.

I’m looking for a comprehensive list. So far, I’ve got the following off the top of my head:

1. Putting Galileo on trial.
2. Banning fetal stem-cell research.
3. Suing to teach ID in public school.
4. Suing to not teach evolution / teach evolution as theory instead of fact in public school.

Anyone got anything else?

Dr. Helen notes a study on anger:

Do you think it’s mainly men who are the supposed angrier sex so the insults must be coming from them? Think again. Research from a British study of 22000 people over 50 years shows that women are the angrier sex. Heather Joshi, the study co-author, states, “Our study show that women report being angry far more often than men do.”

I rather like Dr. Helen, in part because she’s able to consider something like this from a dispassionate point of view instead of immediately going off on an illogical and ironic rant about how women aren’t angry, it’s men who are angry and if women are angry it’s only because men pissed them off by being such oppressive, patriarchal jerks.

There’s nothing actually newsworthy about this study, except for the fact that it violates the Unicornitopia view that women are sugar, spice and everything nice and angry white males are the cause of all evil. The truth is that most women are walking around half-cocked at all times, always a single comment away from erupting in anger.

Why? I don’t know. I don’t pretend to know. But I do know that it is a major handicap in attempting to achieve anything or work with anyone. I also know that men who live in fear of setting off the permanently half-cocked tend to cripple themselves both emotionally and intellectually.

Anger isn’t often righteous, it’s usually stupid, petty and irrational. If one feels angry all the time, or bordering on being angry all the time, then one is teetering on the edge of constant irrationality. If that’s not enough to give you pause about giving into anger at every opportunity or even glorying in it, well, there’s not much point in attempting to speak reason to you, is there, since you’re nothing but an irrational creature capable of nothing but being emotionally manipulated.

And living in fear of such a one is rather like being a well-trained dog. Face the fear, let the anger come and then note how little effect it has on you once the shouting is done. And once the angry realize how little effect their anger has on you, they’ll either cut it out or their passive hatred for you will go active. Either way, you’ll be much better off.