And Jingo Was His Name. Ohhh.

The idea of "freedom of speech" is one of those things that resonates across the political spectrum, even if different people have radically different ideas about what exactly it means. What I think it means ultimately is that everyone has a right to be wrong, and even to be an obnoxious asshole about it. (See:  Party, Tea.) As long it doesn't pick anyone's pocket or break their arm, it can't -- and shouldn't -- be squelched.

So Bradley Cooper bought the film rights to deceased SEAL sniper (and serial fabulist) Chris Kyle's life, and got The Chair Haranguer to direct it. Oscars for everyone! And a perfect opportunity for Joe Average to refuse to flex his brain muscle one more blessed time. Who knew that people only want to see war movies where your side is clearly the good guys?

That's not to say that Michael Moore didn't know what he was instigating with his tweet about snipers being cowards. Moore has certainly made some wonderful movies and excellent points in the past, but he fails to understand what pretty much every liberal save Bill Clinton (who is a "liberal" only in the most technical sense, and only in comparison with the full-blood psychopaths on the other side) fails to understand -- the average 'murkin does not want the facts or discussion. He wants affirmation. He does not want to be challenged in his thoughts about The Troops, although he has yet to write his duly elected representatives to, you know, pay them better.

Even though the US military is obviously the largest in terms of firepower, one of the largest in terms of manpower, and by far the largest in area of deployment, there is actually only a very small percentage of Americans who serve or have served in the military, or even have a family member or friend in the military. Consequently, they are treated with a weird mix of misplaced reverence and outright ignorance. I'm not sure what you do, or why you do it, but I worship you for it, but not enough to keep you off food stamps, or to only send you to die for worthwhile causes. That's what all the ceremonial mumbo-jumbo boils down to, when the rubber meets the proverbial road.

Ceremony ends up mattering more than the people themselves; we would rather fold giant flags in football stadiums and participate in the obligatory 7th-inning stretch ritual than, I dunno, make the VA functional, get them jobs and counseling when they need it after returning. It's much easier to endlessly deal the more-patriotic-than-thou card off the bottom of the deck, than to think or do or say anything remotely useful to anyone besides themselves. Wrap it in a flag with plenty of empty benedictions, and you got yourself any random battle of twits virtually anywhere in this here fine country. It's not that difficult.

Here's what I suspect Joe 'murka's real take on snipers is:  their snipers are cowards, ours are heroes. That's all it ever is.

All Poodles Are Dogs, But Not All Dogs Are Poodles

I've seen Ayaan Hirsi Ali in a number of interview and panel segments over the years, and I get where this writer is coming from, in that Hirsi Ali is one of the more caustic critics of Islam in general, and militant Islamists in particular. I suppose having one's clitoris forcibly removed, and having a friend murdered in the street, with a death threat to oneself attached to said murder victim, will sort of do that to a person.

That said, it is a crude comparison at best to categorize the collective lumping of over a billion individuals in with the few thousand most violent practitioners, with anti-Semitic or anti-gay criticisms. It shouldn't even need to be said that, while perhaps Jews and gays no longer face the horrors of genocide or systematic violence, it really hasn't been all that long since they did face those things (and in fact still do in many countries -- how are gays faring these days in, say, Uganda or Iran?).

It is not fair to insinuate that all Muslims are responsible for the actions of a small but virulent percentage of lunatics, but when seemingly nothing at all is said or done in that regard, it doesn't absolve them from any responsibility whatsoever to address the issue. The experiences Hirsi Ali has endured in her life, both from outdated "cultural" traditions and from ideological fanatics, are real, and for many areas in the world, still normative. I mean, ten bucks to the first person who can guess the religion of the folks behind this, or this.

I don't know what to make of people who emigrate to other countries that already have long-established legal systems, and expect those new places to conform to the female-hating third-world holes they left behind. It can be difficult to parse cultural norms from religious precepts in many instances, but uh, I can assure you that as a decadent, hedonistic westerner, I am a great deal more offended by the consistent treatment of women as illiterate chattel, than they are by a satirical drawing of the prophet (PBUH). But since I am a rational person, and not guided and goaded by this or that collection of Levantine folk tales and regressive sky-buddy whispering, I can fight their bad ideas with better ideas, and still express my resentment at my own gubmint thinking that it can and should handle the situation with a fleet of killbots raining hell on villages. Some of these folks seem not to have made that seemingly modest intemellectual leap.

It might be more productive for concerned Muslims to address the fanatics in their attic already, instead of raising false equivalences about what sort of speech is offensive, as if the typical respective reactions to being offended were remotely the same -- someone maybe losing their job for talking shit about Jews or gays, versus riots and violence over comic strips and movies.

Off-topic but still fun, given the post title:  the one and only Ken Ham discourses on poodles.

Animals With Human Faces

So this happened within the last 24 hours. I think most of us would like to think that zoos are artifices of nature, sort of a cocooned Edenic environment where exotic fauna are gathered and stewarded with love and care.

But as we continue to be the only animal that deliberately fouls its own nest -- and indeed accelerate that hideous dynamic -- the truth is that zoos are museums, storage sheds for species that are murdered and poached into extinction, because small penis or some other lame excuse. (And yes, I sincerely hope that anyone involved on either end of the poaching game gets eyeball cancer and dies in agony.) We overbreed and overcrowd without a care for a damned thing, destroying habitats with the mindless vigor of a swarm of army ants, but it's other species that need to be "managed." Right.

I honestly have no clue why we search for "earthlike" planets out in the celestial firmament. So we have more things to butcher and despoil, so we can exploit and destroy ever more inconvenient creatures? Maybe the reason so many of us are drawn to post-apocalyptic fiction is that, despite the chaos and turmoil that drive such narratives, there is also a restoration of balance, which we no longer have any sense of.

Nature bats last, always, and it will be a hard rain that falls.

Syria-sly, Folks

These geopolitical strategies and predictions are interesting enough, until considering all the possible ramifications and permutations give even the most astute observer a ginormous headache. But no matter, we are apparently going to pimp-slap Syria, even though it will definitely jack oil prices up on a precarious world economy, and has enormous chances for flaring into a serious regional conflict.

Everyone should be able to agree that Bashar Assad is a turd of a human being, following closely in the bloody footprints of his old man. The Alawite regime in Syria is overwhelmingly outnumbered by a Sunni population, and like Saddam Hussein, can only hold power by the most ruthless of means, since they don't actually represent any real constituency other than themselves.

But the trick here -- and this is where Obama and the would-be humanitarians need to pay close attention -- there are no good guys here. Americans hear "rebels" and they think of George Washington's ragtag bunch at Valley Forge, or valiant "freedom fighters" striving for Good in the cruel face of ineffable evil. Or they think of Star Wars.

But all indications of the Syrian rebels are of loose militias of jihadist animals -- one cell was busted in May in Turkey with a couple kilos of sarin gas. Whether or not Assad actually used sarin, it appears that the rebels would be more than happy to give it a spin as well, should the opportunity present itself.

(And not to play devil's advocate for horrible forms of weaponry, but why precisely is sarin so much worse than, say, cluster bombs? Either one seems like a pretty miserable way to go. The idea that the use of cluster bombs is somehow acceptable or moral because we "deeply regret" the civilians and children who come across unexploded bomblets is pretty monstrous in itself.)

So there are no good guys in this, and we have a consistent recent history of going into places we know nothing about, blundering through and fucking things up. If Obama thinks this might be his Kosovo, a quick in-and-out six weeks of air sorties followed by a peacekeeping camp of Burger Kings and workout gyms, he's almost definitely wrong, to the extent that you could bet serious money on it.

Remember when the Arab Spring was a thing? Good times. How's all that turning out now? The problem is that we know nothing about these countries, or how their people feel about us, or how the best move for us is to stay the hell out of their shit altogether for a while. Yes, Russia and China will step in and reap the rewards -- and the headaches. Let them, they'll learn soon enough.

In fact, this has all the makings of a serious clusterfuck -- Iran will almost definitely do something in response, probably send Hezbollah over the Lebanese or Syrian border to provoke Israel to jump in. Not to mention that Russia and China have registered their vehement disagreement, so a supporting UN resolution will be practically impossible.

Hegemonists will respond -- rightly to some extent -- that it shouldn't matter what asshole governments think if we're trying to do the right thing, the humanitarian thing. And no, we don't let Putin or anyone else dictate our foreign policy for us.

But we also don't (in theory, anyway) go rushing into military action if the risks outweigh the potential benefits. And here, as we finally wind down and limp away from two costly, ill-conceived wars, as the world economy is precipitously positioned, there is almost zero upside and massive potential downside with this.

So of course we'll do it. We can't help ourselves, and more importantly, we haven't yet internalized that the world is no longer unipolar like we'd prefer, but apolar, with no clear single sphere of influence, just large competing interests, all ultimately at the service of transnational merchant princes with no particular loyalties.

Cowboy Up

So, uh, if there's any intellectual consistency at all to the Twittard dickwads, I assume they're screaming at the top of their wittle wungs to carpet-bomb Missuhsippuh, like, yesterday, right?

That's the great thing about the 82nd Chairborne -- they always keep you guessing.

Game of Drones

The drone thing is not an easy call -- for one thing, their deployment has doubtlessly saved the lives of innumerable US service personnel who might otherwise be sent into imminently hazardous areas. (Which, yes, is where many of them are, and which is in fact their job, but we do want to minimize the hazards they face, right?) And Anwar al-Awlaki was a bastard on wheels, a traitorous little shit who incited a stateside massacre at Fort Hood, and was damned proud of it. In principle, I have little problem with turning such a person into a gooey splotch.

On the other hand, we do still believe in the concept of due process, don't we? We do try to minimize the "collateral damage" -- although, looking back at any US engagement of the past fifty years, from Iraq to Vietnam and Panama in between, human troops are just as likely to kill innocents as a drone, so that may be a wash anyway.

The most salient factor, though, and one that the current administration and especially its supporters would do well to keep in mind, is the precedent extrajudicial killings grant to future administrations. Given the propensity of large swathes of 'murkins to be bamboozled not just by plutocrat goons but the barmier ideologues who routinely ankle-bite them (and everyone else) in the name of gawwwd, they might want to think twice about granting these sorts of Robert Ludlum powers to the next Ricky Santorum.

Then again, the truly nuttier ones don't ask for legal justification in the first place. What this latest non-debate about one of our supposedly more treasured myths about ourselves shows is that the operating principle of the powerful is and always has been that it's better to (pretend to) beg forgiveness than to (pretend to) ask for permission.

Vote With a Bullet

Ho-hum. Another week, another massacre. Words fail at this point, you know, what else can you say on this miserable subject? Interesting debate over at Ed's nonetheless, with commenter Nick making some decent counter-arguments. Regardless, there are salient points and questions you just can't ignore in this context:

• Why it's easier to get firearms than to get over-the-counter decongestants.


• Why it's easier to get a gun than it is to legally drive a car.


• Is there anything at all, any scrap of token resistance built into the acquisition process, that gun absolutists can accept, in the reasonable common-good goal that deranged individuals not have a completely unobstructed pathway to being able to inflict catastrophic damage to crowds of innocents in a matter of seconds? Or is it just a shrug of the shoulders and a "gee, that sucks", until one of their own kids gets slaughtered by one of these goons?


• How does this inalienable right, this freedom, become more exalted and sanctified than any and all others? That is, we all concede absolute freedoms all the time every day, everywhere we go, because we have a utilitarian concept of what the "common good" entails. We acknowledge that the freedom to drive a car, and the freedom to drink alcohol, don't also confer an ability to do both at once. We get that you can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater, or make death threats, no matter how empty, against people. So where did we all decide that we can't erect any roadblocks, even modest ones, to lunatics acquiring AR-15s and cop-killer bullets, no questions asked? At what point did we all mutually agree that the collateral damage was just the cost of doing business?

None of this is said lightly; it's not fair to punish the vast majority of honest, responsible gun owners, for the actions of a deranged few. And as Nick points out repeatedly, pointing the finger at a deadly object does not remove all the underlying causes of the behavior that compels these individuals to commit these horrible crimes.

But we all put up with infringements to our absolute freedoms all the time; we put up with random police checkpoints for everything from seat belts to drunk driving, we allow ourselves to be felt up like strippers and herded like cattle, to ride on a goddamned plane. American life is filled with increasingly abusive and intrusive experiences, for the hollow promise of safety. There's even a new-millennium neologism constructed just for the phenomenon: security theater.

Would gun control (or bullet control -- or hell, just modest background checks and waiting periods) prevent all gun crimes? Of course not. But these acts, however meticulously planned, are on execution acts of immediacy, where everyone in that line of fire gets just enough time before the bullet hits to wonder whether a 72-hour waiting period or a background check might of thrown their wingnut on that day at that hour, just for a moment, just enough for a different quantum event.

Or is doing absolutely nothing infinitely preferable, because it might conceivably somehow infringe slightly on the god-given rights of people to buy a pallet of bullets to take out to the range? It's a tough question, and one that needs to be asked and examined by both sides of the debate, because simply chanting "Second Amendment" over and over again isn't cutting it.