Posting Towards Gomorrah

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
I have to agree with you that there are several bitter overpaid suburban white males who post here, but I bet we disagree over who meets the criteria.

Depending on the scale you use, I'd argue that every poster on this Board is (probably) vastly overpaid.*

But I take the money.

S_A_M

* Maybe not the poor solo practicioners.

[Sidd Finch]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
I'm too stupid to have any concern when the generals responsible for running the war say that Rumsfeld threatened to fire anyone who questioned the failure to have a postwar plan.

Despite the complete failure to manage postwar Iraq, I am convinced that there was a plan, and that it was executed perfectly!

That's sad. But thanks for turning me on to the thrills of mis-quoting!

[Sidd Finch]

Originally posted by Spanky

What's the score?

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
Here's what I find odd- when these young people are volunteeering for the military you lot charecterize them as slightly dim and fooled into signing up. Once they are injured they suddenly increase in IQ and are now great candidates for congress? choose one side or the other I say.

This post served as the trigger for a number of random thoughts, perhaps with a common theme.

I don't think that is an entirely fair statement, Hank -- a bit overbroad. What lot?

Here's what _I_ find odd:

(1) If we surveyed this Board we'd find that one commonality on both sides is a distinct lack of people who have volunteered and served in our military. We'd also find that another commonality is a bunch of elitist attitudes -- whether we acknowledge it or not. The division is at least as much socioeconomic/intellectual as political. Unfortunate, but true.

(2) You'd like it if the Democrats were all a bunch of shriveled up, vegan progressives who drove hybrid cars and never showered -- it would suit your stereotype -- but that's just not reality.

(3) A statement from a MG who served as the military aide to then-DSD Wolfowitz that Rumsfeld threatened to fire the next person who said we needed a reconstruction plan for Iraq is _incredibly_ damning. The level of arrogance and incompetence it indicates is breathtaking, and it condemns the man who hired him and has stood by him at least as much.

(4) This is way overbroad, but still -- the second Bush Administration has performed with considerable incompetence with regard to the major complex tasks it has undertaken since 9/11. By this I refer to Iraq post-invasion, Homeland Security, Katrina planning and reconstruction, and Afghanistan post-invasion.

Common thread -- the parts that could be and were left to career professionals mostly went reasonably well. The parts relying on strategic planning, vision, diplomacy and competent leadership and execution by the civilian policy-makers have not.

Stand on your record if you can.

S_A_M

[SlaveNoMore]

And the week is young:

"It is interesting to note that while a lot of people in the world are asking the pope to apologise for his speech, I have never heard a Muslim say sorry for having conquered Spain and occupying it for eight centuries"

- Former Spanish Prime Minister José Maria Aznar

[Sidd Finch]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
And the week is young:

"It is interesting to note that while a lot of people in the world are asking the pope to apologise for his speech, I have never heard a Muslim say sorry for having conquered Spain and occupying it for eight centuries"

- Former Spanish Prime Minister José Maria Aznar

That's a good quote.

As for the Pope, I can only wonder what he was trying to accomplish. Honestly, I wonder if he knew.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Sidd Finch
That's a good quote.

As for the Pope, I can only wonder what he was trying to accomplish. Honestly, I wonder if he knew.

I honestly think everyone with a public voice should start saying/printing things like the Pope said, every day for a year. Get the rabble rousers over it.

LGF is reporting an opera was just cancellled because in the last scene the severed heads of Jesus and Mohammed and some others are pulled from a bag. This prior restraint censorship is really starting to get out of control.

[SlaveNoMore]

Sidd Finch
That's a good quote.

As for the Pope, I can only wonder what he was trying to accomplish. Honestly, I wonder if he knew.

Whatever he was trying to accomplish, they proved his point.

eta
An excellent op-ed on this topic from the Canadian National Post.

Through coersion, they are winning the battle:

Islamists don't want to persuade; they want to coerce
George Jonas, National Post

To counter any suggestion that Islam is a violent religion, Muslims attacked churches in the West Bank, Gaza and Basra this week. In Somalia a religious leader named Abubukar Hassan Malin echoed a British religious leader named Anjem Choudary who seemed to be in agreement with a religious leader from India called Syed Ahmed Bukhari that Pope Benedict XVI had to be forced to apologize.

Forced? Bukhari left it open how, but Choudary felt that subjecting the Pontiff to "capital punishment" may be persuasive, while Malin was inclined to think that the situation called for hunting down the Holy Father and killing him "on the spot." And, perhaps to indicate that these were no idle threats, as the week wore on, an Italian nun was murdered in Somalia, along with two Assyrian Christians in Iraq.

What did the Pope do? As most readers know, he quoted a remark made by the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaeologus: "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

Was the anointed of Byzantium on to something? The Pope certainly didn't say so. He just quoted the beleaguered emperor, who -- being squeezed between hostile Turks and demanding Venetians at the time -- had vented about the Prophet and his bellicose followers in conversation with a Persian scholar. Little did he suspect that his words would hit the fan nearly 600 years later.

"The infidelity and tyranny of the Pope will only be stopped by a major attack," announced al-Qaeda from its cave on the Afghan-Pakistani border. Al-Qaeda's political arm in New York, a.k.a. the United Nations, took no position, only using the opportunity to condemn Israel for one thing or another.

Why do some Muslims have such an uncanny talent for proving the case of their critics? When accused of violence, they threaten violence. Better still, they engage in it. "Call us unruly and we riot," they say, in essence. "Call us murderers, and we kill you." Don't they see that this makes them a joke?

Well, no, they don't -- and they're right. Saying such things may make someone a joke in a debating society, but Islamofascists fight in a different arena. They don't care about winning the debate; what they want to win is their Kampf, better known these days as Jihad.

Lo and behold, they're winning it. By now the whole world tiptoes around the sensibilities of medieval fanatics. We take pains not to offend ululating fossils who cheer suicide bombers. Or raise them. We prop up rickety regimes whose sole contribution to modern times is to nurture ancient grievances and revive barbaric customs. We worry about the feelings -- feelings! -- of people who stone their loved ones for sexual missteps. We pussyfoot to protect the delicate psyche of oily ogres who amputate the hands of petty thieves, issue fatwas on novelists and cover up their hapless wives and sisters to the eyeballs.

We do this, obviously, not because we're impressed by the logic of the Islamofascist line -- "call us murderers and we'll kill you" -- but because we're intimidated by it. The Jihadists don't care about the quality of their argument. One doesn't have to, if one's aim isn't to persuade, but to coerce. The mullahs of militant Islam aren't worried about proving their critics' case. So some pundits think we're proving Benedict XVI or Manuel II right, imams Choudary and Malin might say. Big deal. Logic may be essential for pundits. It isn't essential for our followers who are willing to blow themselves up to get their way.

[SlaveNoMore]

I was ahead of the WSJ editorial page by 2 days:

Declassify the Terrorism NIE
How to defeat selective politically motivated leaks.
Tuesday, September 26, 2006

As media scoops go, those based on "classified" information seem to have a special cachet. But judging from the latest, selective intelligence leak about terrorism, we wonder if anyone would bother to read this stuff if it didn't have the word "secret" slapped on it.

That's our reaction to Sunday's New York Times report claiming that a 2006 national intelligence estimate, or NIE, concludes that "the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse," according to one of the unidentified "intelligence officials" cited in the article. This is supposedly because the war has provoked radical Islamists to hate America even more than they already did before they hijacked airplanes and flew them into buildings. If this is the kind of insight we pay our spooks to generate, we're in more trouble than we thought.

It's impossible to know how true this report is, of course, since the NIE itself hasn't been leaked. The reports are based on what sources claim the NIE says, but we don't know who those sources are and what motivations they might have. Since their spin coincides rather conveniently with the argument made by Democratic critics of the war, and since this leak has also conveniently sprung in high campaign season, wise readers will be skeptical.

The White House responded yesterday by saying the full NIE on "Trends in Global Terrorism" is far more nuanced and complex than the press reports claim. Spokesman Tony Snow added that one "thing the reports do not say is that war in Iraq has made terrorism worse." So here's our suggestion for President Bush:

Declassify the entire NIE.

It's not as if NIEs usually contain sensitive raw intelligence. They're more like Council on Foreign Relations reports, full of consensus analysis and glorified by the mere fact of being "secret." To the extent that any passages might compromise sources and methods, those parts could be redacted or summarized. Meanwhile, disclosure would give the American public a valuable window into the thinking that goes on at places like the CIA. Since some of our spooks are leaking selectively to make the President look bad, Mr. Bush should return the favor by letting the public inspect the quality of analysis that their tax dollars are buying.

Releasing the NIE would also show that the White House has learned something since 2003, which is when the last pre-election bout of selective intelligence leaks began. That leak du jour claimed that an October 2002 NIE had contradicted Mr. Bush's claims in his State of the Union address about Iraq seeking uranium in Africa. We happened to gain access to the complete NIE, however, and reported on July 17, 2003, that the leaked accounts were incomplete and misleading. The Senate Intelligence Committee vindicated our account a year later, but the Bush Administration could have reduced the political damage by declassifying that 2002 NIE immediately.

As for the substance of the 2006 NIE's alleged claims, does anyone doubt that many jihadis are rallying against the American presence in Iraq? The newspapers tell us that much every day. Whether the war in Iraq has produced more terrorist hatred than would otherwise exist, however, is a matter of opinion and strategic judgment.

We recall, for example, that one of Osama bin Laden's justifications for declaring war against the U.S. was American enforcement of sanctions and a no-fly zone against Iraq before the 2003 invasion. Bin Laden didn't need the war to hate us. More broadly, the liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan has deprived the jihadis of two safe havens and sources of funds. So while there are still many al Qaeda-type terror cells out there, there's no reason to believe they are any more dangerous now than before April 2003. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, one of the terrorists who was harbored in Iraq before the war, certainly isn't any more dangerous; he's dead.

The real issue at stake here is a political and policy fight over the future of Iraq. The Democrats claim that Iraq is a "distraction" from the war on terror and so a rapid U.S. withdrawal would leave the U.S. with more resources to fight elsewhere. Mr. Bush says Iraq is now the central front in the war on terror, and that withdrawing would create a vacuum that the Islamists would fill and give them a potential new state-supported base of operations. That's the choice voters really ought to be thinking about as they go to the polls in November, and if the NIE has something useful to say about that debate, Mr. Bush should disarm the selective leakers in his bureaucracy by making it public.

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
Whatever he was trying to accomplish, they proved his point.

eta
An excellent op-ed on this topic from the Canadian National Post.

Through coersion, they are winning the battle:

I agree completely.

S_A_M

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
I was ahead of the WSJ editorial page by 2 days:

* * *

That's the choice voters really ought to be thinking about as they go to the polls in November, and if the NIE has something useful to say about that debate, Mr. Bush should disarm the selective leakers in his bureaucracy by making it public

I agree with the WSJ too -- declassify it.

In fact, I was going to joke that, if the NIE was favorable to the Administration on this issue, they would have already secretly declassified it and leaked it to Novak.

S_A_M

[sgtclub]

Originally posted by Secret_Agent_Man
(2) You'd like it if the Democrats were all a bunch of shriveled up, vegan progressives who drove hybrid cars and never showered -- it would suit your stereotype -- but that's just not reality.
S_A_M

Unfortunately, the leadership cators to this demographic, so it is not unreasonable for someone like me, who is now unaffiliated with either party, to have that impression.

[SlaveNoMore]

Secret_Agent_Man
In fact, I was going to joke that, if the NIE was favorable to the Administration on this issue, they would have already secretly declassified it and leaked it to Novak.

S_A_M

Good one.

[Spanky]

A fight to define equality

By George Will

— A feisty 29-year-old white woman and a pugnacious 67-year-old black man are performing two services this autumn for Michigan and the nation. Their Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI) is promoting colorblind government. And they are provoking remnants of the civil rights movement, which now is just a defender of a racial spoils system, to demonstrate its decadence, even thuggishness.


In November Michiganders will vote on this ballot initiative: "A proposal to amend the state constitution to ban affirmative action programs that give preferential treatment to groups or individuals based on their race, gender, color, ethnicity or national origin for public employment, education or contracting purposes." Almost identical measures were passed by referendums in California in 1996 and Washington state in 1998, in similar conditions to those here: They were opposed by both parties, all so-called civil rights organizations, most newspapers and many business leaders. What is different in Michigan is the involvement of a particularly nasty organization and an egregiously political judge.


At age 19, Jennifer Gratz, denied admission to the University of Michigan, fought the university all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. It endorsed her argument that it was an unconstitutional denial of equal protection of the law for the university to add 20 points to the scores of black, Hispanic and Native American applicants. (The maximum score was 150; a perfect 1600 SAT earned just 12 points.)


Ward Connerly is a California businessman and former member of the University of California Board of Regents. He propelled to victory the measures mandating colorblind government in California and Washington state. With Gratz as its executive director and Connerly lending hard-earned expertise, MCRI collected 508,000 signatures, more than ever have been gathered for a Michigan initiative. In response, some opponents of MCRI have adopted four tactics, none of which involves arguing the merits of racial preferences and all of which attempt — in the name of "civil rights," of course — to prevent Michiganders from being allowed to vote on MCRI. The tactics have included:


Pressuring signers of MCRI petitions to say they did not understand what they were signing. Some talk radio stations have broadcast the names of signers, and opponents of MCRI have gone to signers saying, "Did you know you signed a petition against equal opportunity?" Two who recanted their signatures, saying they had signed without reading the measure, are federal judges.

Violently intimidating the state Board of Canvassers, which certifies that initiatives have qualified for the ballot. The Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action by Any Means Necessary (BAMN) disrupted the board's deliberations, shouting and overturning a table. Video of this can be seen at http://www.michigancivilrights.org .

Asking a court to rule that MCRI committed "fraud" because many who signed the petition supposedly were confused — the signers were presumably not competent to read and understand the initiative, the full text of which was printed at the top of each petition. A federal judge — Arthur Tarnow, a Bill Clinton appointee — sadly said he could not rule that way because, although he thinks MCRI is a fraud, whites as well as blacks were confused about it, and even if all signatures gathered in majority-black cities were invalidated, there still were enough signatures to qualify it for the ballot. So Tarnow contented himself with an extrajudicial smear of Gratz, charging that her "deception" had confused all Michigan voters, regardless of race.

Michigan ballots are printed by counties, so BAMN says it is asking local officials to assert an extralegal "moral authority" to leave MCRI off the ballot.

Because the plain language of MCRI is appealing, some opponents argue that MCRI would have terrible "unintended consequences." It might, they say, eliminate single-sex public schools (Michigan has none; eight of 3,748 schools have a few voluntary single-sex classes) and breast-cancer screening or might stop a Department of Natural Resources program aimed at helping Michigan women become hunters (the initiative concerns only hiring, contracting and public schools).

Given the caliber of opposition arguments, it is no wonder a Detroit News poll published Sept. 15 shows MCRI with an 11-point lead. Gratz says that if her group is outspent "only" five to one — Connerly was outspent that heavily while winning in Washington state — MCRI will become Michigan law.

Anti-MCRI demonstrators chant, "They say Jim Crow, we say hell, no." So, the rancid residue of what once was the civil rights movement equates Jim Crow — the system of enforced legal inferiority for blacks — with opposition to treating blacks as wards of government, in need of infantilizing preferences, forever. To such Orwellian thinking, Gratz and Connerly — and soon, perhaps, Michigan — say: Hell, no.

[Penske_Account]

Originally posted by Secret_Agent_Man
Depending on the scale you use, I'd argue that every poster on this Board is (probably) vastly overpaid.*

But I take the money.

S_A_M

* Maybe not the poor solo practicioners.

Like many of your quasi-comrades on the left S_A_M, you obviously lack the confidenc in your own abilities, self-esteem and knowledge of markets to discern what underpaid and/or overpaid is. For myself, with Slave as my witness, I am underpaid in re the relevant markets and thus the value added I bring to my clients is at a premium. For you, I suppose, if you are truly convinced of your overpaidedness, perhaps you have an ethical duty to refund something to your clients.