A basic fallacy in the peacenik rhetoric

I posted this to the Pagan Conservatives list as message 10300. There's a general semantic point about some of the commentary made about involvement in Iraq which I felt was worth mentioning out in a more open location.


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Cutting and pasting my way to general confusion,
I wrote:

> > but opposing this war is the
> > Conservative thing to do.
>
> Why? Because you said so?

> Measured by that standard, Michael,
> police work could not
> be justified.

A little cryptic, I suppose -
insert this passage which I
cut, between those two lines:

"Our troops swear to support and defend the constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic, but to do that, they need a clear and achievable goal."

and perhaps all becomes a little more clear.

Consider the circumstance of a Police
Department. It wages an unending war
of sorts, against a series of enemies
(various criminals and criminal groups),
many of which have as little or even
less regard for human life as the
so-called Iraqi insurgents (many of
whom, on capture, turn out to not even
be Iraqis), are at least as crazy, and
will scream up a storm about how the
police are an occupying army, oppressing
them by denying them their imagined right
to run wild, Given the free reign it
desires, this criminal element would,
in short order, first destroy all freedom
and then civilization itself. The police
have no exit strategy from this war, in
that they have no prospects of ever
fully eliminating the criminal element.

Using the language as Michael and his war
demonstrator friends have abused it, we
would have to conclude that this domestic
army or ours (the police force) has no "clear
and achievable goal", and thus must withdraw
and give the streets over to their enemy.
Well, that would just be asinine - we would
be signing our own death warrants, based on
an argument one could use to do away with
trash collection. I mean, after all, what's
the point to your garbage can being emptied,
when its only going to get filled again
the next day?

In a case that extreme, obviously I'm being
facetious, but this points to the logical
absurdity of the argument advanced by Michael
et al, and why it is a gift to his faction
to speak of what is taking place in Iraq as
being a "war". It is not. It is, like police
work, a series of squirmishes in each of
which our forces most decidely do have a
clear and achievable objective - kill or
capture the specific offending parties
responsible for the specific incident,
something that our forces have successfully
done time and time again. This simple reality,
the peaceniks try to obscure by lumping all
part and future engagements together as if
they were a single event, thus defining the
possibility of victory out of existence. It
is nothing more than the rhetorical equivalent
of blue smoke and mirrors, glossing over such
minor issues as whether or not the intensity
of the engagements is likely to be maintained
on an indefinite basis.


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End of post. This is, of course, precisely the issue that our good friends, the demonstrators, try to "settle" by posturing, acting as if their position that the insurgents would come in infinite numbers could be made into fact, merely by their willingness to be assertive enough on this point. In point of fact, rear guard support for what's left of the Hussein regime is anything but a holy war - Hussein was a military strongman, not a cleric or other religious leader and certainly no holy man. The war, if one wishes to dignify a series of violent criminal acts by such a title, is one waged against the Iraqi people in order to bully them into not taking control over their own lives; it is wholly illegitimate, devoid of anything noble, and we are expected to believe that the passion behind it will prove inexhaustable, indefinitely.

I suppose that we are then to conveniently forget that the Islamic world has, itself, been under the heals of a series of conquerors - Mongol, Turkish, European - a number of them engaging in what can legitimately be called "imperialism", often brutalising the conquered. There was no higher purpose to the incursions of the old empires; they were ruthless, self-interested grabs for power and wealth - oh, and what do you know - those (again, illegitimate) aquisitions were consolidated. One does not see an unending bloodletting on the part of the occupying forces. What one does see is the spirit being beaten out of the people by one conqueror after another, and Hussein was merely a continuation of that bad tradition.

The people of Iraq didn't choose him. Geopolitical considerations chose him as a counterweight to Iraq, and some of our sorry excuses for allies then armed a madman to the teeth, so tilting the balance of miliary power in Iraq that several dozen insurrections against Hussein were crushed with ease. Why should the West be there to help the people of Iraq, first against the larger local bully (Hussein) and the smaller bullies that have followed? Because what happened to those people was not their fault, because so many of them fought so heroically to escape it, and because if our compassion is to be anything more than an act, it must force us to see that there must, finally, come rest for the weary.

What is the clear, overall objective of US involvement? To understand this, one must remember one basic truth. While many of our ancestors may have come from Europe, we as Americans are not Europeans, and we don't want to be; our world view is not theirs. By and large, we're the descendents of those who were smashed into the dirt back in our respective old countries. When we see the rear guard action on behalf of Sunni minority privilege, the outgoing upper classes using terror to put the Iraqi people 'back into their place', we look back at our own historical memory, and realise that we've seen this before.

What is our clear and achievable objective? When terrorist attacks on the Iraqi security forces being a wave of recruitments the next day, at a time when the Iraqi government is hardly the most secure of employers, we see a little of that objective being realized. We see the Iraqi people - not the Sunnis, not the insurgents, not the sociopathic darlings of American protest movements that some liberals might love to praise just to be controversial and win their 15 minutes of fame - no, we see the Iraqi people rising up, dusting themselves off, and seeing that they can take control over their own futures, that they don't have to bow and scrape to some faction just because it's depraved enough. Freedom, kids, is more than an idea, it's a habit, one that one has to get into before it starts to mean something, and that takes time, but bit by bit, it does happen, and every time yet another Iraqi stands up to the savages who've made life for him and his so very much harder than it needed to be, our side wins a little more. Victory, like defeat, can come in increments.

Is democracy a new thing in Iraq? Perhaps. And it wasn't a new thing in Russia during the early 1990s? Or in Germany during the late 1940s? Or in ... a long, long series of countries before. Well, now it's Iraq's turn, and they've waited and suffered long enough, so let's be there for them.

Professional Chutzpah

Have a reciprocal link to Meetup.com? Something for you to think about ...

Today, I got a rather bizarre letter from a representative of Meetup, who wanted to know what had happened to my reciprocal link back to meetup. The answer was, of course, absolutely nothing - the link was (and still is at the time of this writing) where it always has been, and where it has been since the time I exchanged links with Meetup.com - on the page I send people to, if they are looking for other worshippers of the Olympians, a page clearly visible from this one, appearing logically enough underneath the link for "helpful resources". Making sure to reciprocate that link from the mirror to that page at Bravenet, avoiding even the appearance of impropriety, as far as reciprocity was concerned. (The link on the Meetup page in question went to the FreeYellow copy of the Almond Jar).

Where else would I have put that link?

Shooting first and asking clueless questions later, our representative yanked Meetup.com's link to this site on the basis that it wasn't being reciprocated, when in fact it was being reciprocated and had been, without interruption or evasion, for months. I found this rather annoying, and frankly a little suspicious, because Meetup asks you to tell them in advance where your reciprocal link is located, and mine had never moved. I was curious enough to look around the Reconstructionist Meetup Page, and guess what I didn't find?

Reciprocal links.

Not a one, nor did I find any clearly marked link to a list of links. Going to the sitemap for the Reconstructionist Meetup page didn't turn up any such links either. Where I finally found the links was on the actual physical map of reconstructionist meetup groups in the US. Why would it occur to anybody to look for links there, on a page few if any visitors will have much of a reason to be, anyway? If one is looking for a chapter in one's own local area, one doesn't look at a global or US map, one enters one's zipcode and does a search. What Meetup.com had done was take its supposedly reciprocal links, and obscured them by shoving them in an obscure location, offering not a hint as to where one might go to look for them. To make matters worse, if one views the links, shoved down on the bottom of that map page as they are, in my current setting (width=1000 plus change), the notice "1 day until United Reconstructionist Religion Meetup Day" drops down over the links, chopping off the beginning of the title of each link. Having shoved us into a table in the kitchen, one might say, they've gone on to drop the oven door on top of us.

There have to be standards. Meetup is clearly not living up to the spirit of the agreement it made with the webmasters it exchanged links with, when it places its own links in a place where so few will find them. Those of us who've engaged in that exchange in good faith shouldn't have to put up with that, and there's little reason for us to do so. Culturally encouraged timidity aside, what reason does a webmaster have to want to hold onto a link to his site that has been rendered useless? And when you consider how many Meetups have closed down because of lack of interest, in many cases nobody being interested in taking over as their organizers, one is left with the fact that Meetup.com is not a site on its way up. So why take any fertilizer out of them?

The stupidity of this woman's actions, making a fuss about a meritless complaint at a time when her company, itself, was glaringly guilty of the very practice that they were wrongly accusing others of, was striking. It's like walking into a convenience store, starting to lift a pack of gum - and then pointing to the cashier and yelling "thief! thief!". What could one possibly be thinking about? If you're going to do something wrong, common sense should tell you to lie low - or better still, that you shouldn't be doing it. But I guess that's too much to hope for out of a "professional" these days?

I wrote back to our offending party, and having reminded her of where my nonconcealed link had been all along, told her that either Meetup.com would start living up to the spirit of the agreement that had been made, or that I'd yank my links and pass word along about what they were up to, so others who had exchanged links with them would know that they were being had. How a webmaster responds to that reality is completely up to him, but if somebody manages to browbeat one into giving him something for nothing, I think that it may be time to consider a little
assertiveness training. YMMV, my backside.

Starting my first blog

Hi. Just setting up this blog, and my thanks to Dan S. of rightwingofthegods for sending me an invite to join blogger.

The name of this blog is self-explanatory, if a little generic. What I put in the Almond Jar is carefully worked over, if not always adequately proofread, and occasionally returned to and slightly redone. With a blog, I don't know if one can do that; I'm guessing that one can't. What you see here is just what I've decided to jot down. Maybe it's going to be a little more spontaneous; certainly it's going to be more error prone, in the sense that it will include more comments that in retrospect I'll wish that I had phrased differently or maybe haven't even made at all. Such is the risk of blogging, I suppose, and of reading blogs.

There are two things that you won't see me do, probably. While I may occasionally retract a remark, I'm not going to apologise profusely for my occasional verbal missteps or even for a poorly thought out or unfair position. I try not to take those, but unlike more than a few polytheists of my past acquaintence, I don't pretend to be anything more than human. I make mistakes. Deal with it.

Sound a little arrogant? No, try a little exasperated with what much of popular culture has become during the Golden Age of Political Correctness - a joyless, unforgiving quest to find excuses to morally one-up everybody around one. Once there were discussions, now there are scapegoating sessions, and lot of the truly crazy dogmatism you've seen me and others document on our websites probably is a reflection of this. A reasonable level of humility used to win one a certain amount of moral credit; now, in some circles, it seems to be viewed as an advertisement of weakness, and a providing of free ammunition to those who wish to gain status by shooting somebody else down.

Hard to imagine a real discussion taking place in the presence of that much oneupsmanship; where is room left for a give and take? Arrogant? No, which brings us to the second thing you won't tend to see me do - turn hyperdefensive when I truly am in error. Which I will be, sometimes. Not taking any ... um, fertilizer ... is a matter of giving oneself room to back off from a bad position, because every tiny error doesn't become the basis for a catastrophic loss of face.

Looking at some of the things that one can see people going ballistic about on the Almond Jar (eg. the ancient Egyptians allegedly harnessing electricity!), I think that one can see the dangers of not giving oneself that kind of room. It's bad mental hygeine, in that it gets one out of the habit of recognizing and accepting the fact of one's own fallibility, and of the need for caution as one reasons out one's positions. It's the first giant step, in Paganism, toward fluffitude, one that I could end up taking myself were I so carelessly inclined.

By profession, I'm not a Classicist or a Historian or an Archaeologist. I'm a sort of Applied Mathematician in training who went out looking for a group to join, back when his leanings were more purely Reconstructionist, and found nothing but Eclectic Wiccan groups that tried to pretend that they were the same thing as Recons - and radically liberal eclectic Wiccan groups at that. This blog will be a moderately conservative one by my definition, which is to say one revealing me to be somewhere to the right of Ghengis Khan by the standards of some others. You have been warned.

Let's have fun. (Note: Originally posted 9:59 pm Central Time, Sunday, November 13, 2005; deleted original copy in order to delete spam in comment section).