Feb 04

All she needs is a lab coat and a fright wig

They laughed at me when that bitch Monica rug-burned
her knees in the Oval Office. They laughed at my universal health
care plan. They laughed when I told them of my conversations with
Eleanor Roosevelt’s ghost — they said I was mad.

Mad, am I? I’ll show them mad…soon, I’ll unleash my
mainstream-media minions and deploy my orbital mind-control lasers on
anyone they don’t successfully brainwash for me. Everyone will learn
to rue the day they ever laughed at me. I’ll seize the very White
House itself
and dictate my terms to a trembling world!
Bwahahahahaha!

Feb 01

How low can they go?

Here’s another one for the file marked “Bush’s opponents are so
deranged that they are good reasons to support him”. At The Corner,
via InstaPundit, Tim Graham has this
report:

Driving in, I had to sample some “progressive talk” on the SOTU [State of the
Union address]. At the Stephanie Miller Show, they were laughing about (and
playing an audio montage of) how many times Bush used the “F-Bomb” last night.
That’s their strange description of the word “freedom.” They also mocked the
mentions of “liberty.”

This is a symptom of how degraded the soi-disant “progressive” wing of
American political culture has become. I don’t like George Bush much, but
as long as his opponents behave like this they make him look like the least
nasty choice.

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe “respectable” liberals and the Democratic
leadership will actually come out against treating the words “freedom” and
“liberty” as obscenities or jokes.

I’m waiting…

(…the sound of crickets chirping…)

Jan 27

Oh, Canada! Oh, delicious!

Stephen Harper, the newly-elected Conservative prime minister of Canada,
is huffing and puffing about Canada asserting its sovereignity over the arctic
waters of the Nortwest Passage. “The United States defends its sovereignty;
the Canadian government will defend our sovereignty,” said Harper at the
end of a news conference, promising to deploy naval icebreakers into the
disputed waters.

The resulting brouhaha is hilarious on so many different levels
it’s hard to know where to start.

Continue reading

Jan 27

Glenn Reynolds puts it perfectly

Glenn Reynolds writes:

You know, to me Wal-Mart is a lot like George W. Bush. It’s not that I’m that big a fan in the abstract, really, it’s just that the viciousness and stupidity revealed in its enemies tends to make me view it more favorably than I otherwise would.

Thank you, Glenn, for expressing my feelings about both George Bush and Wal-Mart perfectly.

Dec 09

No War For Magnetite!

I contemplete this
news story
:

Earth’s north magnetic pole is drifting away from North America and
toward Siberia at such a clip that Alaska might lose its spectacular
Northern Lights in the next 50 years, scientists said Thursday.

The story goes on to say “exactly why this happens is a mystery”.
No it isn’t, or no it won’t be as soon as the unenlightened masses grasp the
truth: It’s all George Bush’s fault for not ratifying the Kyoto treaty.

You see, Halliburton has plans for making huge profits in the
navigational-equipment market. The pole shift is a nefarious
neoconservative plot to make all existing compasses obsolete. Mwa ha
ha. But you can stop it — just hook up with your local pathetic
Communist-remnant organization and take to the streets screaming “No
war for magnetite!”

(The preceding is satire. Any resemblance to actual moonbat conspiracy
theories is not coincidental in the slightest.)

Dec 06

Secret prisons

I’m having real trouble understanding the current flap over allegations that
the CIA is running secret overseas prisons for terrorists and enemy combatants.
I would prefer not to believe this is just another outbreak of reflexive
anti-Americanism, but I don’t see any principled case against what is
being alleged. Can anyone explain it to me?

Continue reading

Dec 06

Just desserts

There comes to us from Iraq the news that a terrorist group
calling itself Sword of Truth has kidnapped four people from a group
called Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) and has threatened to kill
them unless some demands for the release of certain terrorists from
Iraqi jails are met. What makes this interesting is that CPT exists
to oppose the U.S. occupation; that is, they are in effect (if not by
intention) allies of the terrorists threatening them.

When I first learned this, my first gut reaction was to think “Ha!
Off with their heads!” My second reaction was to feel ashamed of my first
reaction. How have things come to such a pass that I find myself
rooting for terrorists to kill Westerners?

Continue reading

Nov 28

Riots in France declared over

The Brussels Journal reports that the
French government has officially declared the banlieu riots over. The
article continues:

Police figures are at exactly 98 cars torched on Wednesday
night. This, the police say, is a normal average. Consequently
the 20th consecutive night of violence was declared the last one.

Yes, you read that correctly. 98 car-torchings a night is
“normal” in the glorious Fifth Republic in 2005. Civil order in the
banlieus has collapsed, but instead of addressing the breakdown the
French response is to define it out of existence. (In other breaking
news, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ol’ George Orwell is
spinning in his grave.)

The American mainstream media, alas, have so much invested in the belief
that Eurosocialism is what we ought to be doing that they’ll
certainly take this as an excuse to drop the story. They’d rather cover
fictional riots in New Orleans than factual ones in Orleans, if only because
they can more easily blame George Bush for the former.

The article also observes:

…the French state was obliged to borrow money last week to pay the
wages of its civil servants. The money has run out. One must
concede: this is no example of a strong state.

My previous prediction
stands. We’ve seen only the beginnings of the reckoning for decades
of folly. I expect to have the last laugh on every single one of the
useless idiots who insisted on the superiority of “humane” European
welfare-statism over American cowboy capitalism. But I don’t expect to
enjoy that laugh very much, because the payback is going to be brutal,
bloody, and horrible.

Nov 17

Why “Commons” language gives me hives

A bit of blogging for the record here. Doc Searls wrote:

“The Commons” and “the public domain” might be legitimate concepts
with deep and relevant histories, but they’re too arcane to most of
us. Eric Raymond has told me more than once that the Commons Thing
kinda rubs him the wrong way. […] (Maybe he’ll come in here and
correct me or enlarge on his point.)

This is what I emailed him in response:

Continue reading

Nov 13

Peak Oil — A Wish-Fulfillment Fantasy for Secular Idiots

Secularists and leftists enjoy sneering at conservative Christians who believe in the Rapture and other flavors of millenarianism. Reasonably so: it takes either a drooling idiot or somebody who has deliberately shut off most of his brain, reducing himself to an idiotically low level of critical thinking, to believe such things. The draw, of couse, is that each individual fundamentalist implicitly believes he will be among the saved — privileged to honk a great big I TOLD YOU SO! at all those sinners writhing in the lake of fire.

It is therefore more than a little amusing to notice how prone these ‘sophisticated’ critics are to their own forms of idiotic millenarianism.

Continue reading

Sep 13

Suicidalism

The most important weapons of al-Qaeda and the rest of the Islamist
terror network are the suicide bomber and the suicide thinker. The
suicide bomber is typically a Muslim fanatic whose mission it is to
spread terror; the suicide thinker is typically a Western academic or
journalist or politician whose mission it is to destroy the West’s
will to resist not just terrorism but any ideological challenge at all.

But al-Qaeda didn’t create the ugly streak of nihilism and
self-loathing that afflicts too many Western intellectuals. Nor, I
believe, is it a natural development. It was brought to us by
Department V of the KGB, which was charged during the Cold War with
conducting memetic warfare that would destroy the will of the West’s
intelligentsia to resist a Communist takeover. This they did with
such magnificent effect that the infection outlasted the Soviet Union
itself and remains a pervasive disease of contemporary Western
intellectual life.

Continue reading

Sep 08

Impotent radicals

A minor SF writer of radical Marxist political convictions recently uttered a rather incoherent rant in which, among other things, she accused me of “simple-minded right-wing” views. I’m not going to name her because I don’t dislike the woman enough to want to add to her troubles. But I’ve heard this song before from other Marxists, and I can’t resist commenting on why I find such accusations darkly amusing.

Continue reading

Aug 29

Getting Orwell Wrong

The interpretation of George Orwell could be a paradigm for how dead literary figures get knocked from pillar to post by the winds of political interpretation. During his lifetime, the author of 1984 and Animal Farm went from darling of the left to exile for having been willing to write the truth about Communist totalitarianism in allegories too pointed to ignore.

With the end of the Cold War, forty-two years after Orwell’s death, the poisonous fog breathed on Western intellectual life by Soviet agents of influence slowly began to lift. It became possible to say that Communist totalitarianism was evil and had always been evil, without being dismissed as a McCarthyite or reactionary not merely by those agents but by a lot of “no enemy to the left” liberal patsies who should have known better. In this climate, Orwell’s uncompromising truth-telling shone even more brightly than before. For some on the left, belated shame at their own complicity with evil transmuted itself into more adulation for Orwell, and more attempted identification with Orwell’s positions, than at any time in the previous fifty years.

Then came 9/11. Orwell’s sturdy common sense about the war against the fascisms of his day made him a model for a few thinkers of the left who realized they had arrived at another of Marx’s “world-historical moments”, another pivot point at which everything changed. Foremost among these was Christopher Hitchens, who would use Orwell to good effect in taking an eloquent and forceful line in favor of the liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq. For this, he was rewarded with the same vituperation and shunning by the Left that had greeted the publication of Orwell’s anti-totalitarian allegories fifty years before.

Hitchens, who coined the term “Islamofascist” for the ideology of Al-Qaeda and its allies, is in particular responsible for having given renewed currency to the following Orwell quote addressing the war against the Nazis:

Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically
help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, he that is not with me is against me.

Reading it in its original full form, in a 1941 essay Pacifism and the War published in Partisan Review, only makes it clearer how directly the quote applies to the War on Terror.

Stung by this, various creatures of the pro-Islamofascist Left (and, alas, some liberal and libertarian patsies who should have known better) responded by asserting that Orwell repudiated this position in his 1944 essay As I Please. But a careful reading of this essay shows that there is less here than meets the eye.

What Orwell actually warns against in this essay is not the concept of “objective pro-fascism”, it is any unwarranted leap from noticing that someone is objectively pro-fascist to assuming that the person is intentionally pro-fascist. Orwell explains that confusing these categories is dangerous because it can cause you to mis-predict peoples’ behavior.

There is nothing exceptionable here, and nothing that repudiates the substance of the earlier quote. Yes, Orwell does observe “I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once”, but his “guilty” is a rhetorical flourish, a setup for his real point about confusing effects with intentions.

Both essays are examples of the determined stab, straight through cant to the heart of the matter, that Orwell did so well and so consistently. It was perfectly consistent with the rest of his work for him to observe that there is such a thing as objective pro-fascism, then insist that we not confuse that condition with intentional treason.

As for those who would like to use this “retraction” to take Orwell out of the fight…your behavior is objectively pro-fascist in precisely the sense he intended. At the very least, it is evidence of careless reading and sloppy thinking.

Aug 28

Katrina and the Kos

About twelve hours ago I toyed with the idea of writing a satire in
which the Bush-haters blame W. for the magnitude of the disaster
bearing down on New Orleans. I discarded the idea on the grounds that
it’s (a) not funny, and (b) not believable enough. I mean, who could
really imagine that theory even from a barking moonbat?

Shows you what I know. One of the contributors at Daily Kos has already
flung those feces,
before Katrina lands, yet. And — here’s the funny part —
the charge is already falsified by the facts on the ground.

I’m not a fan of George W. Bush. But when his opponents are
this transcendently foaming-at-the-mouth idiotic, it’s hard not to
wind up supporting him.

Aug 02

Libertarian realism

I hate war. Even when the results of defeat would be worse than
the results of war, I hate war. It kills people and makes government
stronger. But when the results of defeat would be worse, I face
reality and support war.

Our Islamist enemies want to kill us all — starting with Jews and
gays, but continuing to anyone who doesn’t convert to Islam and accept
shari’a and the whole nine yards. That’s not melodrama, it’s
reporting of the plain and simple statements Al-Qaeda uses in their
recruiting videos. They want to kill us all. They demonstrated
the deadly seriousness of this aim on 9/11.

The choice between “support the war” and “allow the pressure off of
enemies who want to kill us all” is not a difficult one. As a libertarian,
I’m deeply sorry we live in a world where governments are doing the fighting
for us, and I fear the consequences of the power they will amass while
doing so. But I don’t see an alternative.

If I had a magic wand that could instantly materialize a world of
private security agencies, insurance pools, and mercenaries capable of
fighting the war on terror, I would have waved it long before 9/11.
But I am not capable of changing the objective conditions of the war
any more than I am of changing the murderous intentions of our
enemies.

Though I’ve been accused of abandoning my libertarianism for a
conservative position, I still believe in the non-initiation of force
as strongly as I ever have. I saw one damn huge freaking initiation
of force on 9/11 — not just an attack on one city or one country
but an assault on Western civilization. Everything al-Qaeda’s
propaganda organs have said since confirms that is what they intend.

George Orwell, writing during World War II, wrote:

Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common
sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically
help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining
outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not
with me is against me.'”

If Orwell were alive today, I have no doubt he would view this war
as equally pressing, nor which side of it he would choose. And all
libertarians should heed his words. We’ve shown far too much of a
tendency to slide into denial about the war on terror and the
consequences of refusing to fight it.

Sliding off into denial and fantasyland is not noble, it’s an
abdication of our responsibility as human beings and members of a
civilization. If that denial becomes “the” libertarian position, our
statist opponents will damn us as for deserting our neighbors and our
civilization in its hour of need — and they will be right to
damn us.

Other libertarians may fail this test. I will not.

Aug 02

The “Bush Lied” lie

Today’s entry in the Belgravia Dispatch
does an excellent job of demolishing the “Bush lied, people died!”
canard so popular among the anti-war left — Greg Djerejian
echoes my own conclusions when he writes: “But if you dig into the
weeds of the investigations that have taken place — one must
judiciously conclude that he didn’t.”

But let’s suppose that George W. Bush had in fact lied about Iraqi
WMD during that State of the Union address. I long ago concluded that
I would not care if he had lied. To see why, let’s try looking at this from
George Bush’s (simulated) point of view…

Continue reading