A quick test

Maybe I'll have time to write a full post this weekend. Until then, a geekery test.

( Now revealed: A Big Geek! )

Indispensible reading

for the combination of directed political rage and humor: The Poor Man.

This

Photographs of atrocities perpetrated by Muslims follow, and the justification for the Global Vaguely-Defined Endeavor Generally In Opposition To Some Nebulous Foreign Evil (GVDEGIOTSNFE) has finally become entirely pre-verbal. Perhaps it is better this way; I don’t know. But it does sort of make one long for the days of Steven den Beste and Victor Davis Hanson and all those other dudes with their austere tripartite names and their military histories and their impressive connection to the classical tradition of Thucydides, Pericles, and Triceratops.

and this

Watching the overt case for war fall apart was like watching a fat man do a bellyflop into an empty swimming pool--kind of funny, in a perverse way, but mostly just painful to watch. I was prepared for the lack of connections to al Qaeda, so that was no big surprise, although finding a country in the Middle East that has that little to do with the deaths of 3,000 people on 9/11 is kind of an accomplishment. I figured that Iraq didn’t have much in the way of a nuclear program, because that should have been relatively easy to find, but what kind of country doesn’t have any chemical weapons at all? If you had asked me before the war to name a country that had really had literally zero chemical weapons, I would probably have said "I don’t know, like, Andorra, maybe", and if you asked me today, I would have to say “Iraq, and maybe Andorra”. I still don’t get that. I’d much rather be tasked with making some poison chemicals that making, say, a rifle--pour bleach and ammonia in your bathtub, and you’ve got chlorine gas, and you can enjoy in the privacy of your own unventilated bathroom the same protracted death as unknown thousands of soldiers in WWI. Now, making it into something that can be delivered on the battlefield is presumably harder, and I’ve got no clue how you do it, but come on. Tweakers with no teeth who haven’t slept since 2002 manage to make high-quality methamphetamine in a rural Kentucky outhouse, and an oil-rich nation of millions can’t even field a few crappy chlorine gas canisters? I'm rambling a bit here, but the drop from impending mushroom clouds to jack fucking shit is a hell of a fall. I’m just saying.

lead smoothly into this:

There has been a cost for this insistance on the use of violence, and the cost has not been borne primarily by webloggers feeling protective of their pet theories. The cost has been borne by our soldiers, and especially by the people of Iraq, and the cost has been staggering. This was not unpredictable--it was a given when you insisted on war. For this reason I don’t like to put up pictures of the dead. I don't think you gain any real insight from them, I think they are revolting, and I think it is especially disrespectful to so use the death of a person you had no connection to make some kind of political point. On the other hand, it does focus the mind on these things, so maybe it's one of these unpleasant necessities. So here are a very few of the many Iraqis killed or maimed by violence during and after the invasion. I don’t know what caused these things, whether it was coalition bombs or Saddam’s bombs or insurgents or terrorists or whatever, but I can say with a very high degree of certainty that had we not invaded Iraq, these people’s lives, and the lives of their families, would not have been cursed with this horror, and this goes for the unknown tens of thousands of people who didn’t happen to suffer in front of a camera lens. If you want to justify this war, you have to justify their deaths, and their suffering, and you need to do better than trotting out pictures of bad things their co-religionists have done. It is disgraceful.

Not many writers can pull that off.