Update: Ace seems quite unimpressed by Beauchamp’s joke, and seems to think it should have been viewed as a red flag by TNR editors.
I think the angle here is not that he was outright fabricating, so much as he was employing literary devices in his stories– playing a role in order to establish himself as a literary character for his coming novel, a hardass, seen-it-all veteran dripping with [Bad Ass Motherfuckerism]…
Despite the fact that, you know, while his service in Iraq is no doubt dangerous, he’s hardly seen much in the way of combat or actual danger. He’s seen the possibility of danger, but, alas for his book proposal, not so much the real sort.
To be fair, if there were a combat unit for chairborne quibbling, these guys would be Sgt. Fury and his Howlin’ Commandos.
The moral objection to the first half of the movie typically goes that the movie is violent, and that violence on the screen is objectionable. This is an idea in which I find little merit, from a Judeo-Christian perspective. Recall that in the Old Testament, stonings (a particularly violent form of execution) were to be performed in front of the entire community, so as to encourage the rest of the community would learn to have the proper fear. Violence qua violence is not objectionable, but Mr. Cella is right to note that violence should only be used on the teaching of serious moral lessons. This is a fair observation.
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Uh.
You know.
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I thought that we as a people had moved beyond public stonings as a tool of moral enforcement. Since we’re, you know, supposed to be allegedly better than Islamic fundamentalists who support stoning alleged adulteresses and whatnot. And since we’re, ohidon’tknow, not living in the damn Dark Ages anymore. What the hell.
But as with everything in the world, I suppose there are always new lows to reach. I’m beginning to think that a lot of these guys are like authoritarian versions of G.G. Allin. Their entire goal is to violate, sodomize and defile every single form of human progress and knowledge ever established, just for the sake of making liberals mad and getting a good larf. As performance art it’s rather brilliant; but unfortunately, much like the dumb Norwegian death metalheads who took Black Sabbath lyrics literally and actually started killing people, there are folks like Dick Cheney who think these guys’ hyper-ironic rants are serious policy prescriptions.
As many of you know, I have a soft spot for Good Libertarians, i.e., small government folk who believe that it’s probably unwise to give the government the power to indefinitely detain and torture people. Mona, who blogs frequently at Jim Henley’s place, is one such Good Libertarian, and she’s looking for work. If you have some extra dough to flip her way or know of any employment opportunities that match her qualifications, give her a hand, a’ight?
If someone ever invents a computer screen that administers Prozac, please let me know. I really need it sometimes.
Gavin adds: If I can engage Mr. Yankee’s self-congratulatory remarks about debunking the alleged ‘square-backed pistol cartridges’ for a moment here, I’d just like to point out that the Glock 9mm is exceptional among pistols in that it has a square-profile firing pin.
That is, if you see a used casing with a square indentation on the back, you can be pretty sure that it was fired by a Glock.
As they were concealed behind a subscriber-only firewall, I was unable to read the entire Beauchamp articles while crafting Parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, and XVI of this definitive series exposing the sloppy so-called ‘journalism’ of the MSM.
Case in point: Mr. Spades reads a Salon article about the conflict between religion and science in Islamic countries. The article’s primary subject, Turkish-American physicist Taner Edis, explicitly argues that Islamic fundamentalism has badly damaged the advancement of science in Islamic countries, particularly science that conflicts with Koranic teachings.
The story’s reporter, Steve Paulson, asks Edis several devil’s advocate questions, such as, “There are some Muslims who talk about the need for an ‘Islamic science’ that’s quite distinct from Western science […] Does it make sense to talk about an Islamic science?” and, “Many historians would disagree with your assessment that what Muslim scholars did during the Golden Age wasn’t real science.” Mr. Spades takes these questions to mean that the interviewer is (I’m not making this up!) a pro-Islamic creationist:
I never thought I’d read such an impassioned defense of Creationism in Salon magazine. But then, I guess I should have realized just how many of their other shibboleths they were willing to jettison if they were found to be in conflict with Multicultural imperatives. Truly eye-opening and jaw-breaking.
Hey, Christian conservatives? You want to win your creationism cases? Start bringing in Muslim creationists. And watch your liberal opponents suddenly finding it much more plausible that God — or, rather, Allah — created the earth, the animals, and humans directly.
Roy pwns Mr. Spades in a typically amusing fashion. Even Eugene Volokh gets in on the act and tells Mr. Spades that it’s unwise to assume that “that each of the interviewer’s questions expresses the interviewer’s personal views.”
Challenged from both the left and the right on his gross misreading of the Salon piece, Mr. Spades responds by saying… well… shit’s about to get real ugly, peoples: Read the rest of this entry »
The Baron Bodissey posts the following disturbing news from a Russian correspondent who reports that violent radical Islamists have made a secret alliance with degenerate violence-hating hippies. Let’s read, shall we?
Recently we have observed an unexpected convergence of the Left-pacifists with Islamists on many issues. However, if one looks critically at the Pacifist movement, one will find many resemblances between that and Islam. Those resemblances may point at intrinsic ideological similarities between both movements.
I can’t wait to see where he goes with this. Hardcore Islamists are against drinking, drugs and women’s rights; hardcore hippies like to get high and boink a lot. Something tells me there’s not going to be too much common ground here.
However, the important difference between the two political movements is that Islamism has its principles in writing, whereas Pacifism has not developed any final version of its principles. UN declarations can be thought of as rough drafts, but they haven’t achieved their final form yet.
So one key difference is that one group has a set of principles while the other one doesn’t. Got. Cha.
Below I have listed some of those similarities:
1. Islam requires Jihad, which is the struggle to spread Islam all over the world. Pacifism requires struggle for Peace all over the world.
And McDonald’s requires the struggle to sell shitty food all over the world. I guess Grimace and the Hamburglar are part of the Muslamohippiesatanonazi cabal as well?
Ah, FOX and Friends. One of the few television shows brave enough to discuss whether the deaths of thousands of Americans might be good for our national morale:
What makes this thinking so fundamentally flawed- other than its desire to see thousands of innocent people killed- is its belief that unity achieved through collective fear is a healthy thing. The sort of unity we had after 9/11 scared the living crap out of me, frankly. I knew formerly Marxist friends pledging their blind allegiance to Bush. I knew formerly sane people who wanted to start wars with every country in the Middle East. It was a frightening time, to say the very least.
Iraq was the tragic result of this national groupthink. Although it’s easy to portray the Iraq war as the project of bloodthirsty neocons who had been hellbent on overthrowing Saddam for years (and this is true to a great extent), it wouldn’t have been possible to carry out if several otherwise sane people hadn’t signed off on it. People such as, say, John Edwards. The Iraq war was essentially one great national brain fart. And for the folks on FOX and Friends, it’s been just swell. God help us all.
