Vox Popoli

At least Captain Ed correctly recognizes the GOP’s self-destructive impulse, as exhibited most recently by RedState’s ban of Ron Paul supporters:

I disagree with Leon’s assumption that these Paul supporters are all or mostly cryptoliberals. Plenty of libertarian-leaning Republicans exist in the party, along with the former Buchananites and isolationists of the GOP. Instead of cutting these people off, it might be better for Redstate to keep engaging them. After all, Paul will not be in the race all that much longer, and we need those voters to stay in the GOP when Paul disappears. There are worse impulses than libertarianism.

The GOP does need those voters, but they’re not going to get them. Not because its leadership has rejected the only candidate who can beat Hillary in 2008, but because it is rejecting the conservative principles upon which the party is supposedly based. Many conservatives and libertarians have learned their lesson from their betrayal by George W. Bush and will never again vote for a big-spending, Constitution-ignoring, globalist, big government candidate, much less one that is openly pro-abortion to boot; the fact that he might have an (R) after his name only makes the candidate that much more offensive to them.

None of this is a surprise, of course. Except for the unexpected Paul irruption, this entire campaign has been a charade on both sides of the aisle. As I predicted literally years ago, the whole point of nominating a Giuliani or a Romney is to permit the GOP to take a dive for Hillary. If you still believe there are two different political parties in the United States of America, you have been paying attention to the style of their pre-election promises rather than the substance of their post-election actions.

I have never been terribly impressed with RedState. They’re about as ideologically conservative as Hillary Clinton:

Effective immediately, new users may *not* shill for Ron Paul in any way shape, form or fashion. Not in comments, not in diaries, nada. If your account is less than 6 months old, you can talk about something else, you can participate in the other threads and be your zany libertarian self all you want, but you cannot pimp Ron Paul….

P.S. Comments to this post are closed. Complaints may be directed to the contact form.

No, life isn’t fair. All that glitters isn’t gold. And, as Daniel Larison notes, not everyone who claims to be conservative supports free discussion, liberty or the Constitution.

The presumption behind the ban that most Paul boosters are liberals is embarrassing to RedState. Sadly, it says a lot more about what passes for conservatism at RedState than it does about the Paul supporters. Rather than reaching some reasonable middle ground, punishing posters who abuse their privileges, their solution is a ban against new members saying anything about Paul. The symbolism of this move is terrible for RedState. It says to all those enthusiastic Paul backers that there is no point trying to talk to most Republicans, and after this I would be hard pressed to contradict such a view.

Lowkey asks about anonymous commenting:

I was wondering if you had a response to Dennis Prager’s most recent column, given that you do host a poltical discussion blog that remains relatively civil without any way of identifying most of the participants.

The key word there being “relatively”, of course. I think Prager is wildly and utterly wrong in every way, as there is no reasonable way to enforce identities – I quite enjoy net registrations since I regard them as mandatory exercises in creative fiction – and I dislike how registration tends to significantly stifle debate. So, I think his idea is impractical, pointless and ultimately self-defeating.

I don’t mind the occasional drive-by commenter, as it’s easy enough to nuke comments from those who get out of hand, while even the craziest people occasionally have something positive to add to the conversation. Many bloggers have asked me why this blog gets more comments than blogs with 10x the readership and the answer is an easy one: I don’t play thought police.

The rules here are simple. Keep the vulgarity within reasonable norms, be civil to Spacebunny, don’t cross-comment and don’t evade direct questions posed to you. You can accuse me of whatever you want, but you’d better be able to back it up with evidence.

Too many bloggers buy into the idea that they are somehow responsible for whatever their commenters happen to write. I don’t, as it makes no sense. The spectrum here is too broad for me to possibly agree with everything that’s written, much less be responsible for it. Yes, sometimes there is ugliness and vapidness and downright idiocy, but there is also the occasional insight, wisdom and brilliance. I don’t think you can have the latter without risking the former.

Prager’s opinion may lie in the fact that he’s fundamentally a radio performer, not a writer. I suspect that he likes to talk at people somewhat more than he likes to engage with them. A writer, on the other hand, always absorbs more input than he produces output. And even morons can serve a purpose. While I find some of my critics personally annoying, I still appreciate them, as even the most irritating moron can help me refine my thinking or at least demonstrate how I may have to clarify things in order for it to make sense to the average, clueless individual.

Christopher Hitchens gets his ass kicked again, this time by Dinesh D’Souza. In his typically absurd style, he manages to demonstrate what is either enormous historical ignorance or enormous dishonesty.

Hitchens: “There is nothing secular about fascism. Hitler praised the church in Mein Kampf.”

1. The latter sentence is irrelevant as Hitler was never a fascist of any sort. Both Mussolini and Hitler were very clear about the many ideological differences between secular Italian national imperialism and pagan Teutonic national socialism.

2. The first sentence is simply incorrect.

Per il problema finanziario:
Noi vogliamo:

b) II sequestro di tutti i beni delle congregazioni religiose e l’abolizione di tutte le mense Vescovili che costituiscono una enorme passività per la Nazione e un privilegio di pochi.

For the financial problem:
We demand:

b) The seizure of all the possessions of the religious congregations and the abolition of all the bishoprics, which constitute an enormous liability on the Nation and on the privileges of the poor.

Hitchens is nothing more than an intellectual joke and an increasingly specious one at that.

I always find colloquial expressions to be interesting because of what they reveal about a culture. Italian expressions can be particularly fascinating as they show a connection to both the primitive agricultural past as well as to intellectual aspects of the Renaissance.

It was very confusing the first time I heard someone say “boca lupo“, “mouth of the wolf”, in the context of a thesis presentation. Whose mouth? What wolf? Weren’t we talking about his thesis? But it simply means “good luck”, as in, “I hope you come out of this problematic situation all right”. I would have been even more confused the other night at practice did I not have a history habit, as one of our strikers was complaining vociferously about how a midfielder had passed the ball to the left just as he broke on goal to the right during scrimmage.

“Eppure si muove“, the midfielder replied sarcastically. “And yet, it moves”. That didn’t make any literal sense but it cracked me up all the same. The midfielder’s reply was a quote of what Galileo is supposed to have said after being forced to publicly recant his belief in the Copernican system.

This is getting ludicrous:

99 Masonville Marauders
71 Greenfield Grizzlies

90 Winston Reverends
71 Cranberry Bogs

66 Burns ICU
65 Mounds View Meerkats

64 Village Valkyries
48 East Mesa WhiteTrash

49 W.C. Silver Spooners
38 Black Mouth Curs

The Meerkats have scored 452 points, good for fourth in the league. Naturally, they’re FOUR games behind the 5-2 Valkyries, who have scored 31 fewer points, and three games behind the 4-3 Silver Spooners, who’ve scored 89 less.

I’m starting to feel like Mike Martz in St. Louis.

Christopher Hitchens offers a fittingly ridiculous defense of the ridiculous term “islamo-fascism”:

Does Bin Ladenism or Salafism or whatever we agree to call it have anything in common with fascism? I think yes. The most obvious points of comparison would be these: Both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind. (“Death to the intellect! Long live death!” as Gen. Francisco Franco’s sidekick Gonzalo Queipo de Llano so pithily phrased it.) Both are hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons), and both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories. Both are obsessed with real and imagined “humiliations” and thirsty for revenge. Both are chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia).

I could make a better case for calling atheism “atheo-fascism”. After all, atheist governments have historically been far more lethal than ANY fascist government – although the original Fascist government was, itself, atheistic – and atheists are equally “obsessed with real and imagined persecutions and thirsty for revenge”. And atheists are far more anti-Jewish than most theists today.

But it would be stupid, just as Hitchens’s defense of the term is abysmally stupid.

There is virtually NO similarity between the historical Fascist program and the Islamic Jihad. One is nationalistic, the other international in scope. One is utterly indifferent to questions of morality, the other is obsessed with it. One is heavily based on economics and politics, the other is almost entirely concerned with religion.

Read Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Manifesto. There is not a SINGLE ONE of the seventeen policies that would apply to radical Islam. Not one! I highly doubt any radical Muslim wants the secular state to seize all the possessions of the Islamic clergy or to grant women’s suffrage; radical Islam is closer to the complete opposite of fascism than it is to being a form of it.

And given his past ideological identity and his recent and all too predictable call for the mass-murder of Muslims, it is amazing that the ex-Marxist and current atheist Hitchens should have the nerve to call anything “a cult of murderous violence”.

John Leo writes about dear darling Hamline:

Troy Scheffler, a graduate student at Hamline University in Minnesota, thinks that the Virginia Tech massacre might have been avoided if students had been allowed to carry concealed weapons. After e-mailing this opinion to the university president, he was suspended and ordered to undergo “mental health evaluation” before being allowed to return to school.

Punishment for expressing an opinion is not unusual on the modern campus.

Small Minnesota wannabe universities are among the worst for this sort of thing; when you’re number 202, you try a LOT harder. You haven’t met a true over-the-top left-wing would-be eurosophisticate until you’ve met a few of the sort that frequent Carlton, Hamline and Macalester.

They don’t speak anything but Midwestern English, have never been anywhere except a weekend trip to New York City, but the one thing they can achieve in their humble parochial environs is to out-angst the French Existentialists and out-PC the Ivy League.

And they do. One reason Pharyngula is so reliably deranged is that he suffers from the same disease, except that he’s at a community college in Morris, far from the bright lights and big city excitement of St. Paul.

Isaiah emails with an unusual perspective on the nature of American-Israeli relations:

considering the pro-arab nature of bush policy, it is risible to wade in the muck of the israel lobby argument. just when did this “palestine nation” ever exist? and yet the planned vivisection proceeds. based on persian rhetoric and actions, israel has every right to wipe tehran off of the map. best that this would happen without one cent of U.S. aid. not likely to happen while the jewish state remains a vassal of washington. careful, your shirts may be turning brown.

Is it really pro-Arab to invade and occupy an Arab country for four years? Regardless of whether “this palestine nation” ever existed or not, it exists now and has been recognized by the United States government, which is all that any American should require. Ethnic Jews living in the West are not in a reasonable position to argue against Palestinian nationhood on the grounds that ethnicity is the sole legitimate basis for nationality.

And what, precisely, are the actions that give Israel “every right” to wipe Iran off the map? Pursuing nuclear weapons technology? By that logic, Israel has every right to wipe Washington, London and Paris off the map as well. As for rhetoric, there is no shortage of damnable rhetoric on all sides; if verbal threats justify lethal action, I possess dozens of licenses to kill.

Finally, I note the idiocy of attempting to equate libertarianism with National Socialism. Libertarians don’t even wear uniforms; if we did, cobalt blue ties and hot pink miniskirts would be prominently involved.

Keep that in mind when you’re reading National Review and they’re pushing Giuliani, Thompson and now Huckabee:

RE: Paul’s Simplistic Understanding [Mark Hemingway]
I’m not voting for Ron Paul because it’s not expressly prescribed in the Constitution.

First Letter to Paul from a Federalist [Mark R. Levin]
As for Ron Paul, his understanding of the founding is simplistic and inaccurate. Yes, the Founders believed in individual liberty. But they believed in a whole lot more.

That’s It? [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
I could actually watch another hour this time. Without Ron Paul.

Come on Wendell [Kate O’Beirne]
Time is short – ignore Ron Paul.

You Spoke too Soon, Levin [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
Ron Paul is talking, so I’m tempted to turn to Desperate Housewives.

Kate and Kathryn Jean demonstrate once more the complete insanity of women’s suffrage. Subjects like fiat money, unconstitutional wars and utterly predictable foreign policy consequences are just too difficult and boring for their pretty little heads; these so-called professional political commentators are simply not interested in anything more sophisticated than brief sound bites about “the children” and “the future” and promises to keep them safe from the scary Islamo-bogeymen.

Hemingway is amusing, though. It’s a pity Levin didn’t see fit to expound upon what else the Founders believed, how those things ranked vis-a-vis individual liberty, and the various candidates’ positions upon them.