Vox Popoli

To my usual rule about quizzes and tags since a few people have emailed me similar questions of late:
1. One book that changed your life?

“Tragedy and Hope” by Carroll Quigley. It confirmed my suspicion that the lunatics were closer to the truth than the mainstream. Book Two of “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius would be a close second.

2. One book that you have read more than once?

“The Dark is Rising” by Susan Cooper.

3. One book you would want on a desert island?

“Remembrance of Things Past” by Marcel Proust. That way I might actually finish it.

4. One book that made you cry?

“Dragondrums” by Anne McCaffrey. I wanted a fire lizard very badly by the end of the book and looking outside the window at the blue, dragon-free sky and knowing that I’d never have one was simply more than I could bear. More recently, “Thank You, Jeeves” by P.G. Wodehouse but that was because I was laughing so hard.

5. One book that made you laugh?

“Thank You, Jeeves”, naturally. And the Perfect Aryan Male and Big Chilly once kicked me out of the room where they were watching a movie while I was reading and being too thoroughly amused by the Original Cyberpunk’s “Headcrash”.

6. One book you wish had been written?

The third volume of William Manchester’s biography of Winston Churchill. It would also have been nice to write “Rebel Moon Rising”, but that is most unlikely. The ending worked well for the game but was a disaster for the novel. Stupid, stupid! (Picture Chris Farley….)

7. One book you wish had never been written?

“The Communist Manifesto” by Karl Marx. Anything by Mercedes Lackey, Catherine Asaro or Laurell K. Hamilton. Ye cats, they’re bad!

8. One book you are reading currently?

Paul Johnson’s “Creators”. It’s as good as “Intellectuals” if rather less snarksome. It’s arguably better than Daniel Boorstein’s book on the same subject as well. I’m also reading Giordano Bruno Guerri’s “Fascisti”.

9. One book you have been meaning to read?

I haven’t been able to bring myself to start Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle yet. I have all three volumes in hardcover and on my Treo as well, but the sweetness of the anticipation is simply too enjoyable to give up yet. I’ve also never gotten around to reading Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” but I intend to later this autumn. I find Ye Olde English to be more than a little distracting but that’s no excuse.

There are few things so purely enjoyable as seeing the light come on.

Week One results:

71 – Mounds View Meerkats
62 – East Mesa White Trash

58 – Greenfield Grizzlies
45 – Mile High Club

64 – Newport Sea Dogs
43 – West Texas Vikings

41 – Burns Montgomerys
37 – Pale Horse Cowboys

53 – Santa Barbarians
37 – COS McRays

Yes, the White Buffalo and I kicked things off in inimitable style, as my Meerkats swarmed their way to the high score of the week while WB’s Grizzlies had no trouble devouring the Shrubbery.

However, and I quote: “WTF? 3 teams starting non players! Dude, why are we wasting our time? You need to publicly bitch slap the Cowboys, White Trash, and Vikings – or give their teams to someone else.

In fairness to the White Trash, Portis did play. But as for the Vikings and Cowboys, I recommend paying closer attention to the injury wires. There was a chance Housh might play, but Davis is on the IR and is out for the year. If you want to run with the big dogs, then get with the program!

Rich Lowry gets his federal kneepads:

There has been one constant in the five years since the terror attacks of 9/11 — there has been no follow-up attack in the United States. It is the most blessed non-event in recent American history. Of course, that could change in an awful instant. It is nonetheless the signal accomplishment in the war on terror. While the smoke was still clearing from downtown Manhattan, no one would have said that the fight against terror should be judged on whether the U.S. is popular abroad or able to spread democracy. The standard was avoiding another attack in the U.S., and by that standard, the war on terror is a tentative success.

There are rival explanations for this success….

I note that he leaves out my explanation for this “success”… every time there is a terror attack, whether it is planes mysteriously falling apart over Long Island, Muslims shooting Jews in Seattle or massive explosions at oil refineries, it is loudly announced that what looks rather like a terrorist attack was, in fact, a mirage, an accident, nothing to look at, carry on about your business. Furthermore, it is an insult to the passengers of the Shoe Bomber flight to credit the government for their actions in saving their own lives.

By Lowry’s own standard, then, the war on terror is already a failure. Considering the 96,000 Muslims imported in 2005 courtesy of that same government, one has to wonder how much longer it will be before the Three Monkeys will drop this line of argument just as they dropped the once-popular German Occupation analogy eighteen months ago.

Papapete clings to neoconnery:

The… statement is rather disingenuous. After all, the countries where Sharia is the law of the land are among the most oppresive in the world, and the jihadists are working violently toward imposition of Sharia on the whole world. It is therefore reasonable to assume that if the jihadists are successful the governments they form will meet the second definition of “fascist”. It’s thus not a stretch to use that definition to describe them now. The only argument is whether the term is useful or not.

Except for the last statement, Papapete’s logic is spurious and the fact that it requires the same mental and semantic gymnastics used by academics to argue for the whiteness of black and so forth should have given him pause.

The secondary definition of fascist is “control”, not “a desire for control”. Since the jihadists are violently opposed to those currently in control where Sharia is the law of the land, that definition of fascist could only be applied to “friendly” governments like Saudi Arabia, not the enemy jihadists. As I mentioned two weeks ago, the U.S. government fits the first definition of Fascist more precisely than do the jihadists, the same is true as well of this secondary definition.

Moreover, the term is utterly useless, as this vastly expanded definition of fascist applies equally well to Genghis Khan, Shalmaneser I, King Philip IV of France, Moctezuma II and Abraham Lincoln. It serves no purpose except to offer intellectual cover for those who support the goals of the jihad but not its methods.

So, to use the term “Islamo-fascist” is to publicly reveal oneself to be either a historical ignoramus, a mendacious propagandist or a mental sloven.

Which one applies to you?

Bane likes how Lileks states it, but they both fail to understand the irrelevance of their martial enthusiasm:

Look: there’s always a place for the bitchers, the carpers, the griefers, the snipers, the angry marginal sorts flinging poo from the cages of their own beliefs. But it’s not the pessimists who will save the West. It’ll be those who believe the West is worth saving, and not because it is the least horrible option whose defense must be prefaced with endless apologies, but because it really is the best hope we have. Would you rather be a libertarian in China? A Christian in Sudan? A Zoroastran in Iran? A lesbian in Saudi Arabia?

But – but we supported the Shah, and –

Yes. Interesting how supporters of the Shah didn’t storm our embassies or wage a 30 year Death-to-America campaign after we cut the Shah loose. Reset the hands. We can argue about all manner of strategies now, but there’s one division that counts more than any other, and it’s fundamental and pervasive. Pessimism or optimism. One’s very satisfying. The other’s hard. I’d say we don’t have any choice, but we do, and that choice may undo us yet.

First, citations of past misdeeds and incompetencies are not always an indictment of essential American evil, but can be relevant in terms of pointing out one reason why so few allies are willing to sign onto the Grand Crusade for Democracy. I don’t know Lilek’s position on immigration, but if he is a conventional Republican hawk, then he is Optimistic on converting the entire Muslim world through the neocons’ internally contradictory Kill-and-Seduce strategy and Pessimistic on Encouraging Emigration.

This is stupid, of course, since the latter is eminently possible whereas the former is likely to wind up with the same sort of Unintended Consequences that our installation of the Shah did. The evilness of installing the Shah is far less important than the unintended consequences of doing so. Already one of the justifications for invading Iran is the assumption of the result of American actions in Iraq.

The most important point that must be understood is that the West cannot be defended externally while it is simultaneously weakened (demographically) and colonized by non-Westerners. That’s not pessimism, that’s a provable assertion backed by millenia of historical examples. Mindless invocations of national will never win wars or stop migrations, such declarations have been made by winners and losers alike and they are particularly unconvincing when that will is clearly nonexistent.

Foolish optimists with demonstrably counterproductive strategies focused on irrelevancies won’t save the West either. And Bane, I believe you could say it better, but it wouldn’t make any difference because you’d still be avoiding the central issue.

Zuzu of Feminstasi angrily swings and somehow manages to entirely miss the point:

Let’s think about this for a moment — this guy is actually arguing that women having sexual liberty and being able to control when they have children and how many is an abuse of freedom. And the same goes for support of gay marriage and no-fault divorce.

What’s particulaly funny is that one of her readers actually thinks her meandering response “is a fantastic analyis of Dinesh’s batshit logic”. But what is that logic?

1. An abuse of freedom is possible. To deny that it is possible to abuse freedom would be a logical and effective response, but Zuzu does not make it.

2. It is an abuse of freedom to threaten a free society’s ability to survive. This is also arguable, again, the argument is not made. I’d consider making it, after all, I’m in favor of personal nukes. Most people who claim to believe in freedom aren’t.

3. A free society requires sustainable procreation in order to survive. This was debatable thirty years ago, but considering how the recent experiments in mass immigration are going, few but the most willfully PC would argue the point.

4. Women having insufficient children is therefore a threat to a free society.

5. “women having sexual liberty and being able to control when they have children and how many” is the primary cause of their having insufficient children. “gay marriage and no-fault divorce” are also contributing factors. I’m dubious about the negative effect of gay marriage myself, I think monogamy is a greater birth rate negative, but otherwise the statistics are conclusive.

6. Ergo, women having sexual liberty, etc, is an abuse of freedom.

Feel free to correct me if you believe I have summarized D’Souza’s logic incorrectly. If the summary is accurate, then see if you can attack it better than its hapless critics; I have already suggested two reasonable ways, there are others. Needless to say, Zuzu lights on precisely none of them.

One of the cartoonist’s blog readers rightly impales him:

Every time you’ve voiced an opinion on this blog and had it shredded by people who understand the issue at hand, you’ve backpedaled into “I didn’t really mean anything I said. I was just testing you. I was just conducting an experiment. Revel in my brilliance.”

Your standard scheme is: opine, face disagreement, insult people, backpedal. It’s lazy, and it’s cowardly. You’re obviously very impressed with yourself. You clearly want people to agree with you, and call you brilliant. You write books to “educate” people with your sage observations.

But as soon as you are in a feedback-capable forum, you cave. The internet is not a healthy forum for those craving approval. Post on any topic, and you will instantly get 50 people smarter than you rebutting your post. This is pretty much a worst-case environment for you.

I enjoy both Dilbert and Mr. Adams’ blog, but this reader has all but vivisected his typical behavior on the blog. Adams is the quintessential Gamma Male, a supremely skilled sniper who is afraid to directly confront so much as a Girl Scout in open debate. Everything is always couched in a manner to allow him to attack others without being attacked himself.

While one must make allowances for Mr. Adams, whose gift for entertaining the employed masses is largely based on his weasely, passive-aggressive nature, one need not do so for the average Internet weasel. It is my disdain for such creatures and their typical “gotcha” method of criticism that first led me to infuse my columns with the weasel-traps that are occasionally confused by the superficial for an Adamsian attempt to have things both ways.

For example, during a foolish attempt to have an straightforward discussion with some fellow SFWA writers who had taken offense at a side-comment about why women don’t write hard science fiction, I referred to what a spectacularly ugly woman Kim Stanley Robinson was. (Robinson is a man who won the Nebula in 1993 for Red Mars.) As I expected from the infantile SF writers who infest that particular site, this was immediately leaped upon to prove how stupid I was, thus absolving them from having to respond to any of the logical points I had made.

Of course, once I pointed out that I am perfectly aware that Kim Robinson is, in fact, Mr. Robinson, the embarrassed “gotcha critics” first attempted to claim that I was only trying to cover for my own blunder, then, when that didn’t fly, one or two tried to assert that setting such traps is somehow childish. But that assertion is to miss the point entirely, because the purpose of such things is to separate the serious critics who are worth engaging from those who are only interested in manufacturing a spurious excuse to quickly declare themselves the winner and run away. For example, if a critic declares that a treatise on Muslim immigration in Europe is completely worthless because the author makes one reference to Swaziland instead of Switzerland and uses that as an excuse to avoid facing the main thrust of the piece, he is merely a drive-by commenter and is unworthy of notice.

I have learned over the course of this blog that engaging such intellectual tadpoles is a complete waste of time; one sure way to get yourself ignored here is to unsuccessfully argue a point and instead of conceding it, go silent or try to change the subject. Another, of course, is to carelessly stick your foot in an obvious weasel trap.

Casey is almost as bored with the subject as John Galt:

You think you might get some new material some time soon Vox? I know the Forbes article has given you weeks of something so say…but maybe we can move on from woman hating for awhile…just for a change?

I find it tremendously amusing that when I respond to yet another feminist-related article, I occasionally get accused of being obsessed with the subject. Now, considering that I have posted on everything from Advanced Squad Leader to Zoolander, I merely wonder why no one ever asks this question of feminists, who have a strong tendency to be One-Note Janes. Furthermore, it is a response on my part, ergo….

I mean, seriously, have you ever seen a single feminist blog that offers WNBA picks, let alone NFL picks? By the way, (he segued), I’m not doing NFL picks this year. I’m too good to make it interesting, not good enough to be worthy of note. Adding the VPFL is enough of an NFL commitment, in my opinion.