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BB has a familiar complaint:

I wish that you would write it plain, easy to understand, laymans English. You may think that you are somehow getting points by showing off your ability to work with words. But what good is it if readers don’t understand what the hell you are saying? You have an interesting something about you, but it is just to difficult to be sure as to just what it is you are saying. This is annoying. Your words are as a puzzle, something that has to be figured out.

One needs to be an academic champion to keep up with the way you twist words around a pole. (Not to mean that you are twisting the truth or anything like that). Your wording is as a twisting mountain road, and all that icing on the cake is not necessary. Somehow, I do think that you are a cool person, and my overall opinion of you is that you are the good guy, chasing the evil demon by shoving the truth right in their face.

If you have something to say, why don’t you just say it in plain English? Please.

Today’s column, plain English version:

Islamo-fascism is a whack word. Neocons made it up so they could talk Americans into killing hodgies they don’t like without pissing off the hodgies who live here and the hodgies they like. The fascists weren’t hodgies and the hodgies aren’t fascists. See, some dago said so and he would know. You can’t front on that, even some Republicans who suck neocock won’t try.

Word.

DL takes a post-modern approach to ideological terminology:

While the term Islamo-fascism may not represent “pure” fascism in the way Mussolini envisioned it, the current bunch of zealots and thugs attacking the West and holding power in Iran do fit a loose description of the term. Firstly, the Islamic zealots are extremely nationalistic if one considers them Islamic nationals. The Shiites in Iran are very nationalistic in both religion and race. They and many of their Sunni brethren believe in a pan-Islamic world much like Hitler wanted “Lebensraum” for his “master race.” They have no qualms in killing anyone who does not agree with their ideology and believe they are doing Allah and mankind a service by exterminating Jews and Infidels. They also tend to elevate certain leaders to cult status and carry out orders with blind devotion — much like the fascists of Germany and Italy in the 1930’s and 40’s.

The point of my column is that it doesn’t represent fascism at all! To claim that it does is stretching concepts beyond any potential utility, or even meaning. It is as accurate to say that Bush is Hitler and we all know how reasonable that comparison is regarded on the right. To claim that one need merely consider Islam as being a nation in order to make the definition fit is like saying that one need merely consider “10” to be “2” in order to define 4 as being 2+10. Islam is not a nation, it is a religion, which is precisely what makes this conflict such a difficult challenge for its Western foes.

Furthermore, the religious dreams of the jihadists far exceed those nationalist aspirations of the National Socialists, who were perfectly willing to accomodate Great Britain, the United States, Japan and numerous other countries so long as they were willing to accept Germany’s domination of Europe. In any event, this is a meaningless point, as the National Socialists were not Fascists and the Fascists were not National Socialists. The historically illiterate may confuse the two, but it was only a quirk of chance and British diplomatic incompetence that the Italians were aligned with the Axis and not the Allies as they had been in World War I.

As for the blind devotion to their leaders, this has been largely true of every military expansionist force. It is not useful in defining either an enemy or an ideology.

Your article focuses on the “intellectual” meaning of fascism. The common meaning in the minds of most people is “Nazi-like.” I could expound on why modern “liberalism” has nothing to do with Liberal philosophies. Meanings change over time. The Muslim Brotherhood was allied with the Nazis in World War II and later assassinated Anwar Sadat for brokering a peace with Israel. They are a forerunner of the current bunch of Islamic extremists and have been called Islamo-fascists. In a more modern example of true fascism look at “Communist” China. There one sees a political dictatorship which exercises full control over its citizens in all affairs but does allow the semblance of private property rights and capitalism. Mussolini would be proud.

My column focus on the “actual” meaning of fascism. The fact that most people have an IQ of 100, watch television instead of reading books and couldn’t name a single fascist except Benito Mussolini if offered a million dollars to do so indicates that one would have to either be dishonest or a fool to accept the common understanding of this or nearly anything else. Meanings don’t change over time, they merely broaden, often thanks to the intellectual dishonesty of those with a direct interest in confusing people. This is why the neocons attempt to sell “islamo-fascism” and it is why I am openly rejecting their disingenuous intellectual revisionism.

I don’t disagree with DL’s statement about the PRC. Unfortunately, it is also far too descriptive of the modern United States.

If one tries to intellectualize catch-words and phrases used by politicians and the media, one soon either gives up in frustration or is regarded as a malcontent.

I think the latter has been sufficiently well established by this time. I find it amusing that as my column readership has steadily continued to increase, to a point where it is as much as 6X more than that of some better known commentators, I actually get less email, receive fewer book offers and am referred to less frequently by the mainstream conservative commentariat than ever before. C’est le système.

The animal jihad appears to be taking a strategic approach, picking off those humans who best know their wily ways:

[Crocodile Hunter Steve] Irwin, 44, died this morning after being fatally injured while filming a nature documentary off Queensland. The news has shocked the nation and prompted a rush of tributes from politicians and the public alike….

Mr Stainton said Irwin had gone “over the top of a stingray and a stingray’s barb went up and went into his chest and put a hole into his heart”. “He possibly died instantly when the barb hit him, and I don’t think that he … felt any pain.”

Sounds like an ambush to me. But considering how the Crocodile Hunter enjoyed amusing himself by messing around with dangerous animals, I think this unfortunate event falls into the “not exactly a big surprise” category. I’d always assumed that he’d get it from a sea snake after seeing him messing around with those incredibly venomous beasts in the water. At least I thought it was him, I suppose it could have been one of his imitators.

The problem is that Irwin never learned the lesson of the great Marlin Perkins, namely, you talk to the camera while one of your poorly paid and expendable employees goes in and wrestles the alligator. And now Mankind has lost one of its potential leaders in the Global Struggle Against Violent Animals.

Beware the squirrels.

PS – I have to note that this sounds too freakish and ironic to be true. I wouldn’t be shocked if it turned out to be some sort of publicity stunt.

PPS – The Mad Aussie says it’s true and that there’s a national day of mourning Down Under. Go figure.

Is reached by Bitch PhD:

The WaPo reports on an interesting study that suggests that test scores go up if test-takers aren’t first reminded that they’re not expected to do well. What’s really interesting is that the boys’ scores didn’t go up with positive reinforcement the way the girls’ did. The obvious conclusion is (duh) that boys, as Mr. B. once pointed out to some neanderthal co-workers, are given the message throughout childhood that they can do whatever they want, so they start off with a baseline self image of competence and ability that is frequently undermined for girls.

No duh. The reality is that boys and men tend to require negative reinforcement in order to reach peak performance. (Or if you prefer to be pedantic, negative encouragement.) Men feed off anger, which is why coaches scream at their football teams and why tennis players such as John McEnroe always tended to erupt at times when they were still in the match and had the opportunity to turn it around.

This is anecdotal, of course, but an important difference between male and female motivation was underlined for me during my collegiate track days. Wednesdays were Speed days for the sprinters, jumpers and hurdlers, which was a group of about 30 men and women at our lowly D1 school, and they were much dreaded because most of us always ended up vomiting before the end of the workout. We even used to color coordinate our lunches on occasion because we knew we’d be seeing them again in a few hours. Not eating wasn’t an option, as the dry heaves were much worse than merely losing lunch.

The Speed day from Hell was when we had to run 17 consecutive 200s under 28 seconds, each separated only by a 100-meter walk and a 100-meter jog. I started puking after number eight and it just got worse from there. Antwan, who was so proud of his iron stomach, finally lost it at fourteen. I swore I would never forgive the son of a bitch who coached us for lying and telling us that we were only going to do fifteen. We crossed the line, guys were collapsing with relief, and the bastard starts clapping his hands, saying: “one more… you got one more in you.” And he did it TWICE! Now, of course, it seems pretty funny.

That workout was a nightmare, but things were usually less brutal and it was always amusing to see how our SJH coach handled the sexes differently. The two groups ran separately but on the same 200-meter track, so as the women would flash by, he’d praise them and stroke their egos: “You’re looking strong, ladies, looking great! Keep it up, keep those arms pumping….” The women would bask in his praise, and, visibly energized by it, pick up their pace.

Then we’d pass him and his encouraging tones would switch immediately to a harsh, barking roar. “Is that all you’ve got, you worthless motherfuckers? If you don’t get a fucking move on, the girls are going to lap you ladies. Get those asses in gear!” There would be a few muttered curses in the pack, but our blood would be up and we’d pick up the pace. Coach would switch back and forth like that with every lap, as if he was schizophrenic.

Now, he was always experimenting with new ideas and techniques, so when we weren’t running, stretching or lifting weights we’d be doing anything from watching video to getting hypnotized, but one of his biggest failures was when he tried to mess with his schizo motivational method. First he tried screaming at the girls, they immediately got upset and slowed noticeably down. When he jacked up the volume and the intensity, one girl quit practice on the spot and two or three more were openly crying during the post-speed stretching. He had to meet with several of them later that week and assure them that it had just been an experiment, he didn’t plan to repeat it and he wouldn’t yell at them anymore.

The failure of positive encouragement with the men was just as obvious, if rather less dramatic. When one day, he unexpectedly began telling us how great we were doing, we immediately relaxed and began to take it easy. That experiment didn’t last quite as long, after about ten minutes of complimenting us and watching us get progressively slower, he was so furious that he soon reached new heights of linguistic inspiration and we were back to flying around the track again.

The differences between men and women are not primarily due to socialization, and no amount of feminist theorizing is going to change that.

The Physics Geek makes a recommendation:

Over at Balloon Juice, liberal Tim F. opened a discussion thread. The topic? Which current political party resembles the Nazi party. Lots of entertaining non sequiturs. Add in the multitude of logical fallacies and you’ve got a surefire recipe for humor. Heck, I’ve been laughing my way through the thread for 10 minutes.

Just thought that you might be interested in the discussion, especially since you’ve provided some of the more cogent arguments as to why the current Democrat party is philosophically aligned with the old Nazi party.

It’s hard to decide whether the two-digit IQs on display there make one want to laugh or begin building an underground bunker in despair. One would presume that the most reasonable way to begin discussing the chosen issue would be to examine the ideologies of the current political parties and then to compare them with the ideology of the historical Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei.

Now, some might argue that a party’s place on the left-right spectrum should be determined by what it actually does when in power instead of its driving ideology. That’s not an unreasonable position, but if utilized, it must be applied equally to all parties, not merely the defunct ones, which means that one must today describe the Republican party as the party of legal abortion, gun control, enthusiastic foreign interventionism and bigger, more intrusive government than the post-WWII Democratics ever sought.

Not that the mental midgets over at Balloon Juice managed even this, instead they almost immediately leaped the tracks with an irrelevant discussion about the Civil Rights Act and end in a deeply embarrassing display of historical ignorance with a heated debate over whether “liberals defended and excused Stalin” or not. Apparently these quasi-illiterates believe the following left-liberals to be entirely imaginary: Betty Friedan, Walter Duranty, Eric Hobsbawm, Alfred Sherman, Robert Conquest, Christopher Hill, Raphael Samuel, E.P. Thompson, Jack Foner, Walter Reuther, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Jean-Paul Sartre, Sir Bernard Pares, Harold Laski, D. N. Pritt, Theodore Dreiser, Romain Rollandor, Neal Ascherson, John Cornford, Denis Healy, Philip Toynbee and Upton Sinclair, to say nothing of many, many others guilty of the same intellectual abomination.

One doesn’t have to be stupid to be a liberal in the modern American sense of the term, although it surely helps. One does, however, have to be almost completely ignorant of history.

An Apology to Our Readers

After an investigation, The New Republic has determined that the comments in our Talkback section defending Lee Siegel’s articles and blog under the username “sprezzatura” were produced with Siegel’s participation. We deeply regret misleading our readers. Lee Siegel’s blog will no longer be published by TNR, and he has been suspended from writing for the magazine.

Franklin Foer
Editor, The New Republic

I don’t care if it’s nominally left or right, seeing the mainstream media revealed for the fraudsters and whores they are at heart never ceases to be entertaining.

When attacked, be a man and defend yourself, truth, reason and logic do not depend on numbers.

To paraphrase Prodigy, being outnumbered is not synonymous with being outgunned.

I wasn’t sure what to title this post, although “Women Sportswriters are Stupid and Irritating Wenches” or “Sports Editors are Complete and Utter Morons” would have been equally applicable:

According to figures from the Fantasy Sports Trade Association, there are currently between 15 million and 18 million fantasy sports players in the U.S. The average player is male, married, in a high-income bracket and more likely to do research for their teams online during business hours while at work. The number of players has grown seven to 10 percent a year for the past three years.

Great, first there was Viagra giving men a false sense of hope that they were something that they’re not. Now there’s fantasy football. I’ve had friends fly 2,500 miles across the country on the red-eye just to attend a fantasy draft. I just want to scream at the top of my lungs, “Stop it, you fools! It’s not real. It’s a fantasy, for goodness’ sake.”

….I guess fans will do anything to be a part of the game, and creating fake teams and fake organizations is no exception. Still, this fantasy fever seems so pointless. There is, and always will be, only one Jerry Jones. One NFL. Everyone else with their faux leagues and faux squads is just a poseur.

She’s right. Fantasy football is pointless. It’s certainly not important and productive, like watching “Desperate Housewives”, reading romance novels, looking at paparazzi pictures and gossiping on the telephone about what X said about Y to Z. Instead of spending 90 minutes on the VPFL draft yesterday – Nate’s team looks pretty good, by the way – apparently I should have spent that time doing something more pointful, like investing twenties towards the college funds of young, attractive dance majors short on clothing.

Contrary to the skeptical suppositions of many, I don’t hate women, but by the writhing tentacles of Cthulhu I will freely confess to all and sundry my deep and abiding hatred for female sportswriters. I loathe them. I despise their constant and reliable cluelessness about their only freaking subject, but most of all, I reserve my greatest contempt for their need to nag and lecture “high-income bracket” men who are far more successful than they are about the appropriate use of their free time.

Why do sports editors constantly attempt to inflict female writers on sports fans? It’s ridiculous. They’re inevitably terrible, would rather write about themselves or women’s issues than sports and reveal that they don’t know a damn thing about sports or sports fans in nearly every single column. Florida State’s Cowgirl, Jenn Steger, whose only talents appear to be a pair of implants, a pretty posterior and a cowboy hat, is nevertheless a twenty times better read than any female sportswriter who has ever written for ESPN or CNN/SI, simply because she actually likes sports and men who like sports.

There’s a place for articles like these… in women’s magazines. There are appropriate places to bitch about men and their inscrutable interests, a major sports site is not one of them. I mean, if I were an editor at Soap Opera Weekly or Digest or whatever, (which I sincerely pray will never, ever happen), I would not be so utterly devoid of sense as to publish a column written by a man who thinks that All My Children is roughly one-tenth as entertaining as the Teletubbies with the sound cranked up to eleven.

Anyhow, it doesn’t really matter. This witless wonder will disappear as quickly as all the other women vanished from ESPN’s Page 2, I just wish the editors would stop thinking that Title IX – which, along with the WNBA, provides the subject matter for 73.5 percent of all columns written by female sportswriters – applies to them as well as the nation’s universities.

Hmmmm… wait a minute, perhaps the sophistication of her point may finally worked its way into my sports-addled consciousness. Fantasy sports are not real! They’re fake! Well, forget fantasy football, then. Thank goodness we still have the reality of Madden’s 2007 to fall back on….

PS – I wonder what, precisely, is the false sense of hope created by Viagra? Either Pfizer is pulling off an annual $1.7 billion con job or this woman is such a WNBA fan that she can’t understand what use one could possibly find for an erection.

From the Washington Post:

…it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame’s CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming — falsely, as it turned out — that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush’s closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It’s unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.

From time to time, readers have asked me why I have never, not even once, posted about the Plame affair. This Washington Post summary explains why. I never regarded it as anything but a mild breeze in a tea pot, a partisan pissing match between the mindless cheerleaders of two political parties I hold in near-equal contempt. (It’s hard to decide which is worse, the evil idiocy of the Democrats or the self-deceiving moronics of the Republicans.)

I don’t know why this should surprise anyone. I understand that before finally settling on “Much Ado About Nothing, William Shakespeare seriously toyed with titling the play “The Independent Prosecutor”.

JE asks how a man can head a household as a stay-at-home father:

I am an avid reader of your columns and your blog, as I appreciate the refreshing perspective of a “Christian Libertarian”, a political view that I personally hold. However, reading your current column brought a question I hope you could answer…you see, I’m a stay-at-home father.

My wife and I have been married for four years, and we have a two and a half year old son. We both graduated with engineering degrees, but after I quit my post-college job as an engineer with the transportation department due to financial issues, we were faced with being unemployed with a child. After six months of parental basement living, my wife found a job that pays triple my old salary, as well as offering free PPO health benefits, etc. Needless to say, she accepted.

We now live very comfortably, and my wife works a 40-50 hour week. She’s home nightly for dinner, is a wonderful mother, and our relationship has never been stronger. That being said, I’ve found cold to non-existent reception in the local (and national) Christian community because of my decision to stay home. My wife and I both feel that a parent should stay home as opposed to dumping another kid in the public daycare system of our country. Our son is considerably advanced intellectually among his peers, which to us proves a tangible benefit for one of us having stayed home.

My point is, do you feel that my decision makes me “not a man”? Most mainstream Christian leaders won’t even address the issue, whether in person or via e-mail (where it would be extremely easy to offend w/o issue…unlike a personal discussion). What are your views on this?

My view is that one should never mistake the functional for the ideal, nor the sub-optimal for the unacceptable. While I don’t think your situation is ideal, it is certainly much better than the previous alternative, furthermore, the fact that you’re playing the short end of the probability game doesn’t mean that you will necessarily lose. In fact, knowing that and adjusting accordingly as problems arise will significantly increase the chance that your marriage will survive and prosper despite its non-traditional structure.

Specifically, it is better for a wife to stay home with the children than for the husband to do so. But it is much better for the father to stay home with them than for no one to.

The idea that it is the production of income that defines the head of a household is a mistaken one based on feminist ideology. This is typically illogical, every other ideology from Marxism to the far right considers those forced to work for wages as being the labor class and more prone to exploitation than oppression. Indeed, given that in a traditional household, men produce most household income and women control most household spending, one is forced to remember that basic logic is as hard for feminists as math is for Barbie.

Indeed, the likelihood is high that in most of those critical Christian households, the wife is the leader, not the income-producing husband. Still, there are real dangers to your currently happy situation, as your wife is less likely to feel able to have more children under the current circumstances, she may begin to resent having to support you when her friends are supported by their husbands and she may begin to find herself attracted to men who are less likely to be dependent upon her. But these are only possibilities, the key is being sensitive to any changes in her acceptance of the situation and reacting accordingly. If I were in JE’s position, I would continue to actively look for employment and encourage my wife to switch to a more traditional model once I found a job comparable to hers… assuming that’s possible. At the very least, attempt to have some employment options lined up in the event that she becomes dissatisfied with the present arrangement. What looks great to her when she’s living in the in-laws’ basement may not be quite as satisfactory two or three years down the road when she’s missed yet another afternoon birthday party or whatever.

Never forget that women are not static creatures. They are extremely dynamic, and while this tends to make them interesting, also means that you cannot assume that because everything is fine today, it will be equally fine tomorrow.

Do I think the situation makes you “not a man”? No, of course not. A man has a multiple responsibilities and failing to shoulder one does not make one a complete failure as a man. But failure does make you somewhat less of one in many people’s eyes including your own, and you will likely not be completely comfortable unless you either rectify the situation or find a way of adequately compensating for it.

No one lives in an ideal manner. We do the best we can under the circumstances in which we find ourselves. To be blunt, the particulars of LE’s situation concern me less than the passive-aggressive whining in his follow-up email, which complained about my failure to prioritize his email. That sort of thing will cause a woman to lose respect for a man a lot faster than mere unemployment.