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David Frum hits the salient point:

It would be a strange reading of the Christian Bible, or any moral tradition, to conclude that in order to avoid hypocrisy we ought to embrace shamelessness. These are not easy issues, and perhaps I should have advanced my conclusions in that previous post more tentatively than I did. And of course, this whole train of thought may well be utterly wrong.

But let me finish with this thought. Suppose I am wrong and that Andrew [Sullivan] and his readers are right. Suppose hypocrisy is the worst of all possible misdeeds, and that it is a very, very grave offense for any of us ever to pretend in any way that we are better than we actually are.

Is this terrible sin of hypocrisy confined solely to the realm of sexuality? Or might it reach more widely and include more areas of the human experience?

Suppose for example that you were a writer who strenuously praised “doubt” as the fundament of intellectual integrity – while yourself speaking always in self-righteous certitudes?

Or suppose that you told your readers you valued empiricism above all things – while yourself eschewing research and fact-checking?

Or finally suppose that you condemned everyone who disagreed with you as dishonest – while yourself mischaracterizing or misrepresenting the words of others?

I haven’t been particularly interested in the Haggard affair anymore than I was with the cases of Michael Jackson or the guy who played the principal in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”. Tracking who likes to put what where just isn’t high on my list of priorities, although I wonder if those who are so very excited about the outing of an evangelical pastor will be quite as enthusiastic once the not-so-secret predilections of a certain Senator from New York are exposed to the public.

(If you ever want to see the true picture of horror, watch the faces of both Hannity and Colmes when Gennifer Flowers casually drops the L-bomb on their show. Too bad YouTube wasn’t around then.)

In any event, while hypocrisy is undeniably wrong, I respect the way the situation was handled by both Haggard and the organizations he formerly led. After some initial evasions, Haggard absolutely did the right thing by admitting his error, resigning from his position and asking for forgiveness from the members of his church. He sinned, he is repenting and he will be forgiven and welcomed back into the church… although hopefully with the caveat that he will not again be trusted with a position of spiritual authority.

(I do note, as a few gay men have commented, the only real surprise is that so few appeared to realize that Haggard might have some issues in that particular area. I wasn’t even close to being the only one to see those beady eyes combined with the huge smile and find myself thinking “wait, they thought he was straight?”)

But we are all hypocrites. I know I am, and a lifetime of experience suggests that you are too. We all nurture our hidden desires and hide our secret sins. The only individuals capable of always holding to their standards are those who don’t possess any at all. This is why a revelation of hypocrisy is meaningless with regards to the verity of the standard being hypocritically violated; if murder is immoral, then it is immoral regardless of whether the murderer genuinely believes he is committing a moral act by murdering or not.

It’s not often that I’m in accord with David Frum, but his logic is unassailable here.

From National Review:

As we examine the results of this election, it is imperative that we listen to the American people and learn the right lessons. Some will argue that we lost our majority because of scandals at home and challenges abroad. I say, we did not just lose our majority, we lost our way.

While the scandals of the 109th Congress harmed our cause, the greatest scandal in Washington, D.C. is runaway federal spending.

After 1994, we were a majority committed to balanced federal budgets, entitlement reform and advancing the principles of limited government. In recent years, our majority voted to expand the federal government’s role in education, entitlements and pursued spending policies that created record deficits and national debt.

This was not in the Contract with America and Republican voters said, “enough is enough.” Our opponents will say that the American people rejected our Republican vision. I say the American people didn’t quit on the Contract with America, we did. And in so doing, we severed the bonds of trust between our party and millions of our most ardent supporters. – Rep. Mike Pence

Now, if only the “conservative commentariat” that aided and abetted the neocons, faux conservatives and FDR-Republicans will admit to their complicity in this Republican debacle, perhaps the party would have a chance of turning things around in time for 2008. But that won’t happen. No one in that party is going to listen to me or any of the very small number of people who saw and publicly predicted this sort of result more than a year ago, instead they’ll continue to listen to the siren song of Powerline, National Review and the Radio Rushbots as they whisper sweet nothings about how Republicans must move left and turn to anti-conservatives such as Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney to rescue conservativism.

I’m not in the least bit bitter about being ignored since I believe the nation’s fate is sealed regardless of who is in power, I just wonder why people continue to give such credence to people who are so reliably and spectacularly wrong.

Yesterday the country delivered a well-deserved “fuck you” to the Republican Party, and while I don’t think that this bodes in the least bit well for the future of the nation, it does provide me with no small measure of cold amusement, even schadenfreude.

Many were extremely skeptical when I wrote last year that the Republican party had likely hit its peak of power that was likely to recede, although the apparent loss of both the House and Senate is taking place two years sooner than I thought it would. (I assumed one house would go to the Democrats this time around, followed by the other one in company with the Cherry Blossom Throne in 2008.) The results mean that Hillary Clinton is almost assured to be the next president of the United States, as even massive blunders by an overstepping Reid-Pelosi Congress will be blamed, not necessarily inaccurately, on President Bush by the Democratic media. How deep the Republican plunge will go or how long it will last, I do not know, but this election by no means marks the nadir.

The turn of the century was supposed to be the triumph of the conservatives. From the dark era of the Democrat-dominated ’60s and ’70s, conservatives began their protracted march toward electoral power, culminating finally in the long-awaited capture of all three branches of the federal government. The Reagan Revolution was finally to be realized in earnest!

But just as most Republican Supreme Court nominees have turned out to be treacherous supporters of big government – activist liberals in disguise – their legislative- and executive-branch colleagues likewise revealed themselves to be every bit as unfaithful to conservative principles of small government and individual freedom. As is all too often the case, conservative success carried within it the seeds of its own demise.

Real conservatives now understand they have been betrayed – badly – by this fraudulent man. Compassionate conservatism, as it turns out, is simply another name for Great Society liberalism, and not even the Texas swagger is original. Genuinely conservative Republicans are dismayed by the president’s unveiling of his core liberalism and rightly fear for the future of a party which has likely seen its high-water mark already.

The coming conservative collapse
September 19, 2005

The constant push to the left by “pragmatic conservatives” notwithstanding, the fact is that the Republicans cannot win consistently without strong conservative candidates. There is a reason that a neo-Wilsonian LBJ-clone like George W. Bush had to be clad in conservative’s clothing, after all, and even so, he didn’t come anywhere close to approaching the Reagan landslides. Although it appears counterintuitive to shallow observers, the “Democrat Light” approach is futile. Supposedly electable moderates like Giuliani and McCain are actually far less electable than a solid conservative governor with no national following.

The stupid thing about political pragmatism is that there is nothing pragmatic about it. It’s a losing electoral strategy, and even when it works, it prevents the party from achieving any of its goals. As I wrote in September 2003:

Pragmatism in politics is self-defeating in the long run. It is a euphemism for the slow sacrifice of one’s principles. The constant substitution of “electable” moderates for principled conservatives is what repeatedly kills the Republican Party and prevents it from ever realizing even a small part of its platform when it is in power.”

But enough of the “I told you so”. What about the future? What is to be done? Nothing, because the elders of the Republican party have not even begun to absorb the lessons of their defeat, nor will they consider doing so until they have been repeatedly driven home by a two-term Rodham reign. Nor should genuine conservatives shed any tears for the defeated neocons, compassionate conservatives and strong government Republicans, even if it takes another 40 years in the political wilderness for Republicans to reconsider Reaganism. Once more, I repeat myself:

It is time for conservatives to abandon their allegiance to the Republican Party, which in its tripartite power has revealed itself to be far from the party of freedom and small government it billed itself to be when it claimed the presidency in 1980. Yes, this means that the Democrats will win in 2008, which they are sure to do anyhow when the Elder Gods of the Inner Circle dig up the corpse of Bob Dole, rename him and offer him as a sacrifice to the Lizard Queen.
Hot-air Republicans
May 8, 2006

Pretty much the only thing interesting I’ve read about today’s elections:

The networks claim to have completely revamped their exit-poll methodology, which in 2004 had surveys in which the results, collected mostly by female graduate students, consistently favored Democrats.

I quite enjoyed the entire debacle in 2004 – and seeing my re-election call proved right, of course – but this aspect of the errant exit-polls was my favorite. Those pollers must have been working towards graduate degrees in Education or Womyn’s Studies. You know all of them were thinking that if they just snuck in an extra Democratic vote or two here and there, no one would ever notice.

Math is hard!

There’s just something tremendously funny about a politically correct cabal being forced to basically promise not to hire too many female graduate students in order to keep them from screwing everything up again. Hey, there’s a Survivor for you, female graduate students from Harvard, Yale and Princeton competing against illiterate, mentally retarded Third Worlders.

I’m not saying the Ivy Leaguers would necessarily lose, I just think it would be a lot closer than one might think.

I didn’t vote, of course, as it just gives the bastards cover. They’re taking the nation to Hell with or without my help, so I decline to lend a hand.

He just wants to get laid:

It is difficult for a woman to understand what it is that a prostitute can offer these perfectly attractive men that a free sexual encounter — be it a one-night-stand or in a relationship — cannot. In an age when women are more sexually liberated and “strings-free” sex is a greater possibility than it ever was before, why are more and more young men choosing sex with a pro?

I don’t know what’s so hard to understand. While it may be upsetting to know that many eligible young men would rather part with $100 than be forced to deal with you even if you provide them with sex, just wait until those scorned and bitter geeks perfect their robot-girls… as Dilbert suggested, the human race may not survive that one.

More importantly, the growing attractiveness of prostitution as a substitute for casual sex is one of the many natural consquences of a drift towards post-Christian culture. It’s more evident in Amsterdam and London than in the USA, but the trend is clear throughout the West. As with so many other things, once traditional Christian morality with its fixed basis in Scripture is cast out the window, it is replaced with a whole host of other, more fluid sensibilities.

And there’s absolutely no reason for any godless individual to take issue with prostitution. On what basis would they object to anyone choosing to engage in such simple and relatively pleasant manual labor. Indeed, despite their strong basis for moral opposition, it is absurd for Christians to seek to outlaw prostitution anymore than they work to ban gossip, gluttony and taking the Lord’s name in vain.

Anti-theists often like to point out that the Golden Rule is known to many other cultures. This is true. But it is also true that there are a whole host of things that the Christian West has traditionally considered social ills which are widely accepted in most non-Christian cultures, including prostitution, infanticide, polygamy and totalitarianism with a brutality seldom historically known in the West. It is a mistake to conclude that throwing out any tradition can be done without realizing unintended consequences, and regardless of one’s personal faith or total lack of it, the first fruits of post-Christianity cannot be regarded with a great deal of optimism.

Now that I’m wrapping up “The Wrath of Angels”, I’m considering what to do next. Which of these sounds more interesting?

1. Media Whores: Courtesans and Charlatans of the American Commentariat

2. The Irrational Atheists: Richard Dawkins and the Clowns at Reason’s Court

3. A fantasy novel entitled “Dragonnaire” set in the same world as some of the short stories in “The Altar of Hate”.

4. The Chronicles of King David: David the Hero

Based on admittedly limited information, I could probably find a publisher for the second and third. The first and fourth would probably have to be self-published.

YK considers Richard Dawkins’ proper position at Reason’s court:

Excellent visual, but wouldn’t a better title for him be jester in that context? Admittedly, that wouldn’t evoke quite the same familiar picture as clown, and perhaps that’s why you chose it instead of the possibly more appropriate “jester.” No matter, you certainly painted the picture well and that’s really what counts.

I was thinking much the same thing upon reading the column after the fact on WND today, but then, one has a certain responsibility to sustain the metaphor. Since I began this three-part series with Sam Harris, the fundamental concept of clownship was inescapable given his unique combination of ignorance and incompetence.

Dawkins is much more interesting, and in fact, I tend to prefer his approach to evolutionary biology to that of his bete noire, Gould’s, and not only because it leaves him susceptible to logical attacks on the practical, moral and societal fronts. I don’t know if it came through today or not, but I am fairly sympathetic to Dawkins’ general perspective, my vast differences with him on the existence of the supernatural and its implications for humanity notwithstanding. He’s not only sound on post-modernism, he’s rather good on cultural relativism and feminism too.

I had been thinking of Dawkins as the jongleur prior to seriously delving into his work, and “jester” certainly does him more credit than “clown”, but upon further reflection, he’s actually a bard. Some of his lovely songs are true, some of them are false, but an understanding of which fall into one category or the other will seldom be clear to the general audience.

And if I may make a point in support of today’s column, Big Chilly said that he felt the “initiative” deconstruction was perhaps a bit unfair, given the possibility that the term was being used in a more sophisticated manner by the Marines. Unfortunately, this cannot be the case, as an older and better example makes it very clear that the military concept of initiative has always encompassed the potential desirability of disobedience to orders from superior officers.

The Prussian/German roots of Third Generation war go back earlier, to the Scharnhorst reforms that followed Prussia’s defeat by Napoleon. One of those reforms changed what was required of a Prussian officer; instead of being responsible for obeying orders, he became responsible for getting the result the situation required regardless of orders (in 19th century war games, it was common for junior Prussian officers to be given problems that could only be solved by disobeying orders).
– The Four Generations of Modern War, William S. Lind

So, it is clear that Dawkins is not only basing that particular argument on a false premise, but possesses a conception of military philosophy that is more than one hundred years out of date.

RZ questions my logic:

BTW Vox I know your opinion about copyright, but the best bet is give people half of the book for free and then make them buy it. I would go buy War in Heaven right now if you hadn’t given it to me.

I honestly don’t think that is the best bet. After all, RZ has been able to buy “The War in Heaven” for the last six years, but has not done so. Is the story really so compelling that one would simply have to go buy the book after getting in halfway? And wouldn’t one be less willing to start reading an ebook that one knows is incomplete?

I like to own books. I purchase books that I like, regardless of whether I’ve read them already or not. For example, I’m planning to pick up a four-volume set of J. Gregory Keyes excellent “Age of Unreason” precisely because I’ve read and enjoyed the ebooks. I prefer to buy books that I’ve already read, in fact, because I can avoid polluting my library and wasting my money on stuff that I don’t like. My economic vote is more informed, one might say. (And that I’m a copyright “criminal”, but I’ve freely admitted to that already.)

I have seen no evidence that freely available ebooks hurt book sales and a fair amount of evidence to the contrary. The ebooks that are found most easily on the pirate archives are the best-selling books, whereas midlist stuff like my own is much tougher to find and obscure niche stuff is wholly unavailable. (Anyone ever seen any Oman texts?) The number of those people willing to pay for a book is a small subset of those willing to read it, and since both groups are equally capable of producing the word of mouth required to produce new book buyers hitherto unfamiliar with the author, my strong suspicion is that at this particular intersection of time and the development of the literary market, free ebook releases are a net positive. How strong a positive is yet to be determined, of course.

In tangential news, I finished the last formatting and spell-checking for “The Wrath of Angels” today, (which was more exciting than it should be given a machine with a broken keyboard), and I should be receiving the final high-res cover image from Rowena this week. I’m hoping to send everything off to the printers before November 15th, and the books should ship out three weeks after that but since this is my first experience with this sort of publishing, I’m just going to go with the flow and see what happens.

And yes, I will be releasing the ebook in .pdb and .pdf formats as well. In fact, they’re already done.

From the Star Tribune:

Q Here are quotes about faith from two thoughtful Twin Cities clergy members. What is your response to each?

The Rev. Greg Boyd, pastor of Woodland Hills Church in Maplewood: “I thirst for water, and water exists. I hunger for food, and food exists. I hunger and thirst for God, so I concluded that God must exist.”

Dawkins: The fact that you hunger and thirst for something does not make it exist. A young man ravaged by lust might hunger for a woman he believes loves him back, but she just doesn’t, and he can’t make it so by longing for it. It’s silly to assume that wanting something means it exists.

Dawkins repeatedly demonstrates a weak grasp of analogy and logic, and he does so again here. There is a tremendous amount of empirical evidence that it is common for young men to, in fact, make it so by their hungry longing, indeed, that is the societal norm in romantic male-female relations.

Furthermore, his response is an evasion. Needs and desires are seldom, if ever, fixated on nonexistent things. The only logically correct way to attack Boyd’s argument is to a) deny that he hungers and thirsts for God, or, b) provide examples of genuine human longing for the nonexistent. The counterexample he provides is flawed because the woman’s love most likely exists, it merely isn’t directed in the young man’s direction.

Personally, I don’t think much of Boyd’s argument here myself, but that’s beside the point. I’m the last to question Greg’s belief in God; why he happens to believe is of no interest to me, I’m simply glad and grateful that he does.

Vanity Fair talks to the neocons:

[Richard] Perle goes so far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would not have advocated an invasion of Iraq: “I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, ‘Should we go into Iraq?,’ I think now I probably would have said, ‘No, let’s consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.’….

Having spoken with Perle, I wonder: What do the rest of the pro-war neoconservatives think? If the much caricatured “Prince of Darkness” is now plagued with doubt, how do his comrades-in-arms feel? I am particularly interested in finding out because I interviewed many neocons before the invasion and, like many people, found much to admire in their vision of spreading democracy in the Middle East.

I expect to encounter disappointment. What I find instead is despair, and fury at the incompetence of the Bush administration the neoconservatives once saw as their brightest hope.

Well, it’s nice to see them stabbing Bush in the back, anyhow. The problem with their story is that it isn’t presidential incompetence that ruined anything, it’s that the democracy project was a hopelessly bad idea in the first place.