Been Ladin

Ron Paul has been getting a lot of flak for saying he wouldn't have ordered the SEAL raid that killed OBL. Well, retired US Army Ranger John T. Reed (one of my heroes) also would not have ordered the raid, for several reasons; instead, he said it should have been done by the Air Force with three 2,000-pound bombs spaced 30 seconds apart. A "SWAT-type" raid (as he aptly describes it) was irresponsible grandstanding by our Incompetent-in-Chief.

The SWAT approach was simply too risky—again, assuming the fix was not in with the Pakistan Air Force and that the U.S. knew there were only three guys protecting Obama and they were not well armed and booby trapped and all that.
If I were in the military now and were offered the chance to be on or command this operation, I would have said, "No way. This is totally unnecessary. It’s strictly an Air Force operation."
Bin Laden was a symbolic military mission, not a valid military target like, say, Adolf Hitler would have been during World War II. Bin Laden was a financier and leader back in the day, but lately he seems to have evolved into a sort of elder statesman/philosopher with a Just-For-Men colored beard and an intermittent, lame TV show on al Jazeera. You do not risk men’s lives to kill such a person. If the chain of command wanted not only me but also my men to go on this mission, I would have gone to war with my chain of command fighting all the way to the president if necessary and resigning my commission in protest. I went to war with my chain of command over a lot less when it came to mistreating my men when I was an officer.

Drum and Dumber

/B/r/i/t/n/e/y/ /S/p/e/a/r/s/ Kevin Drum at Mother Jones magazine claims that

I voted for Obama in 2008 is because I trust his judgment. And not in any merely abstract way, either: I mean that if he and I were in a room and disagreed about some issue on which I had any doubt at all, I'd literally trust his judgment over my own. I think he's smarter than me, better informed, better able to understand the consequences of his actions, and more farsighted.

I couldn't agree more. Kevin, on whether you're less-intelligent than President Obama, I trust *your* expert judgement!

Good Question!

BRIAN LEITER ON BUDGET CUTS: “At some point these acts of brazen viciousness are going to lead to a renewed philosophical interest in the question of when acts of political violence are morally justified.”

I'll tell you when they're justified: when they're against rich white establishment law professors like that guy. How much do you make a year, Brian Leiter? More than the working stiffs in the unions, I'll bet. A lot more!

Well, it's time for *you* to take a pay cut and distribute to the rest of us whatever you make above the national average. Power to the people.

We know where you live.

Up against the wall, m**********r!

(It's okay for me to attack his ethnic group, since it's my ethnic group as well -- although I'm a graduate student in economics, rather than a law professor. See 0:56 in the court scene in Woody Allen's Bananas.)

Cloward-Piven: Bring It On

Maybe I'm overlooking something here; if so, please let me know!

The Cloward-Piven strategy was to overwhelm the system with a massive amount of both protests (possibly violent) and also welfare recipients; this was supposed to cause a breakdown of both public discourse and also of public finance.

The idea was that the status quo in both politics and public programs would not be able to handle the new situation and would have to be replaced by something else.

According to Piven, the activism of the 1960s and 1970s was this strategy in action.

As I understand it, those are her claims -- and I completely agree with them so far. Her mistake is believing that the response of the system would be to give in to the demands of the activists and welfare applicants, and replace capitalism with democratic socialism.

Instead, in the 1980s and 1990s the system -- I hesitate to say "Silent Majority" -- responded by voting for right-wing Republicans and moderate Democrats, and by pushing for welfare reform.

The reasons why her strategy failed are that the number of producers must be greater than the number of parasites (or else the entire society collapses into chaos) and also that the producers tend to vote and otherwise participate in politics more than the average parasite. (There are other reasons as well, such as the fact that free-market capitalism allows upward mobility for those who are willing to work, so a temporarily-unemployed producer is on the side of the producers, rather than the parasites.)

As a hard-core political activist I'd like to encourage Ms Piven to agitate as much as possible, because I look forward to the results of her tactics. Bring it on, baby! As Lenin said, "The worse, the better."

As William F. Buckley, Jr., remarked, there may be a million violent rioters; there are a million and one lampposts.

R.I.P., E.G.G.

Andrew Rilstone puts it better than I ever could. One life, furnished in early Gygax.

Bitter Sweet

I'm impressed, and not in a good way, with the new "game" from Twix (the candy bar). They actually managed to get me to agree with the Politically Correct femocrats at safercampus.org.

I don't know if you're aware that this ad campaign has provoked a very negative reaction among people; one website described it as an "interactive date-rape tutorial."

I'm a man, and I'm not Politically Correct, and even I dislike the fact that your company apparently thinks the best alternative to choose, at the end of the game, is to lie to the woman.

A relationship based upon a Big Lie is going to fail, and at least one person will be unhappy with it. Or, if you're saying that's okay because it's just a one-night stand and the guy will have sex, then I'm offended as a Christian -- someone who believes that sex outside of marriage is a bad idea...like eating too much candy.

Congratulations, though, on an ad campaign that actually makes me agree with Poltiically Correct femocrats about something! I'm putting this on my blog! (Oh, yeah, obviously your ad wizards don't know much about blogging, either.)