Vox Popoli

I keep telling you that the atheist icons really aren’t that intelligent or well-educated, and while many have begun to accept that reality, some of their acolytes have proved harder to convince. Which is strange, since they tend to reveal their historical ignorance almost every time they open their mouths. In his column about his new book today, Pat Buchanan embarrasses the blundering blitherbuss Christopher Hitchens:

And why did Hitler invade Russia? This writer quotes Hitler 10 times as saying that only by knocking out Russia could he convince Britain it could not win and must end the war.

Hitchens mocks this view, invoking the Hitler-madman theory.

“Could we have a better definition of derangement and megalomania than the case of a dictator who overrules his own generals and invades Russia in wintertime …?”

Christopher, Hitler invaded Russia on June 22.

Hitler was no madman, he was simply evil. As for his decision to invade Russia, like both his predecessor and his successors, (Napoleon and the EU), he became overconfident due to his previous successes. Hitler had previously overruled a number of his more cautious generals in the past and been proven right to have done so. And as for Hitchens, it should come as little surprise that he confuses a literary bon mot about never invading Russia in the winter with actual knowledge of the historical Operation Barbarossa.

I realize some people may have laughed when I pointed out in The Irrational Atheist that gamers actually know more about this sort of thing than most journalists and academics, but it’s absolutely true. No ASLer or CMOB player could ever make such a boneheaded mistake.

UPDATE – It’s amusing, but when Spacebunny dropped the post in my office after I posted this, I opened up a large envelope which turned out to contain the premier issue of the new magazine from Strategy & Tactics, World at War: The Strategy and Tactics of World War II. The first game included? Barbarossa: East Front 1941-1945. One relevant point I’ve already noticed in my initial scan of the lead article – fantastic maps, by the way – is that German strategic intelligence informed Hitler and his generals that there were 200 combat divisions in the Soviet order of battle, of which only 50-75 were on the front facing Germany; in fact, the Soviets had 360 divisions at their disposal. Thus, neither Hitler nor his generals were aware that Zhukov and Stalin were waging a war of attrition for the first year of the war, especially since the capture of 390,000 troops and 4,500 tanks at Smolensk and Minsk led the German High Command to believe that they were successfully repeating their previous blitzkriegs of France and the Low Countries.

The group stage went pretty much as I expected. The only disappointment was that there wasn’t a decent third team in Germany’s group, as they would have almost surely flamed out if there had been a Sweden or a Czech Republic there. The only real surprise was Holland, as not even my Ajax friend expected them to beat both France and Italy. I figured them for a loss to Italy and maybe a tie with France. Speaking of the Azurri, they finished strong, as usual, and put Les Blues away without any trouble. But Spain looks tough, very tough, and I don’t think the oft-confused Italian defense is going to shut down Villa, Fabregas, and company. Turkey shouldn’t be in the quarters at all; they got lucky against both the Swiss and the Czechs. But, as the Greeks showed four years ago, a little timely luck can take you a long way in this tournament.

Here’s what I expect:

Portugal over Germany
Croatia over Turkey
Holland over Russia
Spain over Italy

The two I’m less confident about are Portugal and Croatia, since Portugal has a history of choking and Germany has a history of over-performing. But the Portuguese have played much better this tournament and while Cristiano Ronaldo is a complete cheeseball, he’s not a choker. Croatia is a more complete team than either the Swiss or the Czechs, but who knows if the Turkish luck has run out or not. I’d be surprised if Italy beat Spain and shocked if Russia beat an increasingly impressive Holland.

I don’t know if they read my column at Cato, but clearly I’m not the only one who saw Boumedienne as a political shot across the bows:

Brink Lindsey of Cato offers an interesting argument on Boumedienne in this Bloggingheads.TV. He says we should read Boumedienne not as a case expanding the civil liberties of armed alien enemies, but as a separation of powers case: a limit on untrammelled executive power. That point is legally wrong, I think, but psychologically acute…. because it is probably true that the court would have shown greater deference to the administration’s proposed military tribunals had it ever got around to initiating any. The court’s reasoning in Boumedienne may be lousy. But its instincts are perhaps understandable.

Better too much habeus than not enough. Especially since it’s long past time to be expecting any of the three branches of the federal government to pay any attention to the actual law.

Everybody wins. The Big Three get their championship, David Stern gets his theme for the next three NBA seasons, and the Black Mamba gets his motivation for his villanous and triumphant return next year. Once you understand the narrative, you can see how the NBA is supposed to play out. First the Celts win, then the Lakers, and then it’s best 2 of 3 as the Big Three are headed for retirement….

Now, why couldn’t the Timberwolves have traded for Pierce and Allen instead? Oh, that’s right, it wouldn’t have fit the script; I suppose the statute of limitations has run out on Minneapolis seeking revenge on Los Angeles for stealing the Lakers.

There was a small protest London today, with a number of not-terribly youthful youth handing out flyers to advertise an anti-Nazi rally against… the anti-EU British National Party. You have to be either pretty young or pretty stupid to not recognize that the organization that is most similar to the Nazis would probably be the anti-democratic, anti-free speech one led by Germans that has taken over nearly the entire continent of Europe.

In a sane world, no one who is still in college or is employed by a college would be permitted to have any say in anyone’s affairs but their own. There’s a reason the Constitution doesn’t permit anyone to run for office until they’re 35; let the under-30s drink and do all the drugs they want and none of them will give a damn about not voting anyhow.

Now they’re just begging for trouble:

Two male priests exchanged vows and rings in a ceremony that was conducted using one of the church’s most traditional wedding rites – a decision seen as blasphemous by conservatives.

Do you want science? Here’s a falsifiable hypothesis: a Christian society that turns from God will, over the course of 100 years, devolve into a violent, dictatorial and pagan society rather than the shiny, democratic secular science fiction society that so many atheists expect.

Whoop-de-damn-do. I wouldn’t have minded in the least if the blithering idiots at Wikipedia had collectively decided to nuke the entry for me there, but apparently they decided that I am notable enough or whatever. Oh, hurrah!

The result was keep. There is substantial support for the retention of this article by established users, while no users with > 50 edits support its deletion. Furthermore, the references provided in Theodore_Beale#Notes indicate sufficient coverage of Theodore Beale in third-party reliable sources to establish a presumption of his notability per the general notability guideline. John254 02:01, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

What I find bizarre is that every other writer who uses a pen name seems to be listed by that pen name, but since Wikipedia appears to be run by the same sort of near-illiterate left-wingers that one so often finds among my critics, in my case, the listing is done the opposite way round. It makes no difference, but I did count at least three factual errors on the current page; for example, I certainly didn’t do the Archangel comic books by myself, I can’t even draw. My Dad has never been a publisher of any kind, with WND or anywhere else. And on what planet is a blog called Martini Revolution considered a “reliable source”?

I also noticed that unlike every other writer’s page I’ve read there, from my new buddy Sam’s to my not-quite-as-new pal Derb’s, there is infinitely more space devoted to “controversies” than there is to any of my actual views on Christianity, omniderigence, libertarianism, Austrian economics, war, the probability of Japanese invasion in 1942, feminism, atheism, music, or game design. So, since I’m not permitted to write up such things myself, it would be nice if someone here who is sufficiently familiar with my perspective would consider taking the time to do so.

Apparently Andy McCarthy seriously believes that petitions are a deadly danger to American lives. Didn’t National Review once consider it to be a basic truth that American liberties were more important than American lives?

The combatants will be raining their habeas petitions on the district courts starting today (if they haven’t started already). To protect Americans lives, it’s vital for Congress and the administration to act now.

As I wrote in today’s column, the Supreme Court’s detainee decision is both wrong and necessary. The decision is wrong because it’s the invention of a nonexistent right. But the invention was necessary in order to counter the much more dangerous unconstitutional fictions concocted by Bush and the Democratic Congress. Nevertheless, this does not bode well for the Republic.

Eric Alterman explains the unlamented demise of the daily newspaper:

The American newspaper (and the nightly newscast) is designed to appeal to a broad audience, with conflicting values and opinions, by virtue of its commitment to the goal of objectivity. Many newspapers, in their eagerness to demonstrate a sense of balance and impartiality, do not allow reporters to voice their opinions publicly, march in demonstrations, volunteer in political campaigns, wear political buttons, or attach bumper stickers to their cars.

In private conversation, reporters and editors concede that objectivity is an ideal, an unreachable horizon, but journalists belong to a remarkably thin-skinned fraternity, and few of them will publicly admit to betraying in print even a trace of bias. They discount the notion that their beliefs could interfere with their ability to report a story with perfect balance. As the venerable “dean” of the Washington press corps, David Broder, of the Post, puts it, “There just isn’t enough ideology in the average reporter to fill a thimble.”

Meanwhile, public trust in newspapers has been slipping at least as quickly as the bottom line.

The problem with newspapers is that they’ve been selling a fraudulent product for decades. Alterman is right, editors and journalists are totally convinced that they’re objective, even as they piss off at least a third of their potential readership with their obvious and overt political bias. It’s no secret why blogs and sites like WND have exploded in popularity; they don’t attempt to hide their basic perspective and you usually know what you’re getting with them. Visit VP and you know you’re going to get radical libertarianism, economic contrarianism, anti-equalitarianism and artistic cruelty directed at atheists, feminists, science fetishists, and Lakers fans. If you like that, you’ll read it, if you don’t you usually won’t.

The same is true for newspapers, but they are in denial about what they are: the propaganda arm for state and federal government, left-wing economics and skiffy social evolution. The market for that is limited. In summary, you can fool a lot of the people a lot of the time, but eventually it’s going to catch up to you and a business built around the fundamental concept of intentionally insulting your intelligence isn’t likely to survive as soon as an alternative presents itself.

Technology isn’t killing the newspapers. It’s merely providing alternatives to them that millions of people are gladly choosing.

Napoleons always have two lives, but the Lisbon Treaty campaign is looking a lot more like the one hundred days than the pre-Elba glories:

There is a determination in Brussels to carry on as if nothing has happened. In total defiance of the wishes of the Irish people, Germany and France have jointly called for the ratification process around Europe to continue. Britain is in on the act, too. Gordon Brown phoned Nicolas Sarkozy on Friday to promise that Britain would still ratify the treaty.

The Dutch prime minister has also called for ratification to proceed. Maybe I’m missing something, but didn’t two-thirds of his own people vote against the treaty? The president of the commission, Jose Barroso, said in reaction to the No vote: “The treaty is not dead. The treaty is alive, and we will try to work to find a solution.” With that kind of reaction, you begin to wonder why Ireland was allowed a vote at all….

The No vote is not the end of the story — it’s the start of a new battle. It looks like the Eurocrats are learning the wrong lesson. They think the No vote shows that in future the public must be cut out of the process entirely.

Tyrants have a strong tendency to make the same mistake. Because they are initially successful in bamboozling and running roughshod over the idiot masses, they begin to believe that they can do it indefinitely. Past success also causes them to overestimate their power, so when the idiots finally wake up to what’s going on and begin to dig in their heels, the tyrants errantly assume that they just need to push a little harder. Instead, their actions will provoke a much stronger reaction; if a second Lisbon Treaty vote is forced on Ireland, the No vote will probably hit 70 percent.

It’s more likely that other countries will be forced to hold referendums on Lisbon than it is that the treaty will somehow survive. Vaclev Havel isn’t going to permit the fraud of pretending that it isn’t dead and his moral authority will set an example for other, less principled European leaders. The EU tiger is quite literally a paper one; when it begins to fall apart it will fall apart very rapidly indeed. Whereas it wasn’t that long ago that even the euroskeptics were convinced that a united Europe was generally a good thing, now many europhiles are beginning to wonder just how anti-democratic rule by an unaccountable foreign elite is supposed to be preferable to their liberal democratic national governments.