Thoughts and prayers

I have not listened to Rush Limbaugh for literally years, ever since I got tired of the constant “inline” ad breaks and frankly what I considered to be an alarming trend in his love of his own voice resulting in fewer and fewer minutes of caller input.  And in general, three hours of political yak yak in the middle of the day during the Obama misAdministration didn’t sit well on my stomach, most days.  Bottom line, the signal to noise ratio had dropped considerably, and I had better things to do.  (Maybe this has changed but it’s too late for me to go back to find out.)

So despite the fact that I know he’s long been a connoisseur of fine cigars, it nevertheless came as a shock to hear that he had announced his diagnosis of advanced lung cancer.

Naturally, this announcement brought out the usual gleeful left-wing suspects talking about, for instance, what a great world it would be without Rush Limbaugh in it, and so forth.  But at least one person on the left took the high road, instead:

Now, I don’t care for her politics, but damn, the lady is a class act. If the rest of the Democrats had half her grace and honesty, this primary season might be bearable. They could (and will) do a lot worse than nominate Ms. Gabbard.

All the best to Rush. Cancer is apolitical and indiscriminate. We should support its sufferers ditto.

The next pandemic

We get so up in arms about the stupidity of anti-vaxxers that sometimes we overlook the fact that the next pandemic might not have anything to do with anti-vaxxers at all.  H7N9 flu virus may be next on the agenda. China is refusing to provide samples to the CDC, in violation of WHO protocols.  Shades of SARS in 2002.

This might help explain why doctors are advising that children receive this year’s flu vaccine as soon as it’s available.  (H/T:  Instapundit.)  Even though the current vaccine isn’t tailored for H7N9, it still might provide some limited immunity.

Anyway, John Ringo, call your office:

In a town called Jungbao, a lot of people suddenly got sick. Really, really incredibly sick. Dying sick. There’s all sorts of estimates. Jungbao is about the only place that people are starting to open up the mass graves to get a count. And what exactly happened might never be known. Currently, the best estimates I’ve found go like this:

A lot of people got sick. The local medical boss, who was a WHO reporter, contacted Beijing with his estimate that H5N1 had become human to human transmissible and had, possibly, become more lethal. He wanted to report it to the WHO. He was told to hold the fuck on.

— John Ringo. The Last Centurion (Kindle Locations 363-367). Baen Books.

Just sayin’.  True, it’s probably more that China is in a snit over Trump tariffs than anything else at this point…but in the world of viral pandemics, things could go pear-shaped in a hurry, and a snit over economic inconvenience is no reason for China to be withholding flu samples from analysis.  Virus don’t care if you’re Chinese or American, when all is said and done.

This is, for what it’s worth, just another pressing reason for humans to get the fuck off this rock and out, at minimum, into the rest of the solar system.

UPDATE:  Perhaps I wrote too soon.  “Emirates plane carrying sick passengers lands at JFK airport, officials say.”  The flight originated in Dubai.  “The [Emirates] spokesman also initially tweeted that the flight from Dubai stopped in Mecca, where there’s a flu outbreak. He later clarified that some of the passengers came from Mecca and the flight was a direct one from Dubai to New York City.”

Great.

Hugo away now (part 2)

I’ve written before about my attitude regarding WorldCon and the Hugos — short synopsis, overrun by progs and no longer worth the dime.

SJWs being SJWs, it’s only gotten worse.

A panelist’s bio on the WorldCon site, apparently lifted from another website (and we’ll not go into the ethics and general laziness of that; the con should have required each panelist to provide their own picture and bio) was edited to “normalize” the odd gender pronouns the panelist preferred — apparently because whoever was formatting it for the WorldCon website thought they were typos.  Not going into that insanity either; it’s been well covered by Mad Mike and crew on Facebook.*  Bottom line is that this “triggered” the panelist, who got all huffy and opined that it would not feel safe at WorldCon.  (In other words, the usual snowflake response of someone who doesn’t understand that the world doesn’t give a fuck about its pretentious bullshit.)

So now, the whole LGBTQwhateverthefuck community is up in arms and the WorldCon committee is finding itself bombarded by demands and general pissyness from said community.  It was gigglesome to start with and now it’s completely off-the-rails insanely hilarious.  This sad person has decided to form a so-called “Queer Rapid Response Team” for WorldCon.  Now, given that I’ve never heard of this person and never read any of their work, their authority to do something like this escapes me; but there you have it.  Apparently due to the preferred pronoun “gaffe”, the queer community has decided that they are going to be suppressed at WorldCon (the opposite is more likely true, since most of WorldCon these days is SJWs), so this “team’s” brief is “about making sure [they’re] allowed to operate within the convention itself.”  Give me a fucking break.  Have you never BEEN to a convention?  Nobody fucking cares about your quirks.

I submit to you that this is another self-inflicted wound in the entirely-avoidable Death of a Thousand Cuts being suffered by WorldCon over the past half-decade or so, which are entirely due to its Gramscian capture by nutbags on the left.  When Mad Mike says on Facebook, “When you watch WorldCon self-immolate”, followed by

it’s pretty clear that the non-unhinged contingent is just sitting back watching the world burn at this point.  Well, and snarking about it, of course.  Because it is entirely snarkalicious.

My advice?  Fuck it, support and attend LibertyCon and/or DragonCon, or one of the other ‘cons where normal, rational people organize and attend.  Nominate and vote in the Dragon Awards, screw the Hugos.  They’re toast.

Heinlein was right, although the progs ruling WorldCon would never admit it:  These are indeed the Crazy Years.

________________

* I’m surprised this hasn’t shown up on his blog yet.  I suppose he’s been busy 🙂

Turnabout is fair play, except when it isn’t

At work, we recently had a customer who wanted to partake in the training courses for our software.  Training is generally done by one of our consultants, who (these days, anyway) does a GoToMeeting or Skype screen-sharing session for that purpose.

It will probably not surprise anyone that I work with a bunch of left-wing progressive types.  That seems to be common in IT anymore.  But our product is purchased by companies and organizations that span the political spectrum.  And as a result, for many, many years, I have had to deal with certain customers whose ideology I considered (and still consider) repugnant. But by and large, the people I dealt with were gracious, intelligent, and kept ideology and politics out of the relationship.

And that’s fine with me.  In my opinion, we’re not doing business with their ideology. They are paying us a significant chunk of change for our product (and additional coin for the training), which in and of itself is non-ideological. What they do with it after they purchase it is their business, not ours (so long as they’re not spamming with it — we’re death on spammers). I’ve been dealing with people in business for a long, long time, and frankly all I care about is that their money is good.  Everyone with a message is free to distribute that message in any media they choose.*

Therefore it should come as no surprise that refusing to deal with a customer for ideological reasons is not a viable excuse in my book.  But we had two of our engineers who refused on principle to provide the training for this customer.  One said flatly that he did not know if he could control himself if he were required to train them.  The other made wishy-washy mouth noises about how he did not feel he could train well on this subject and asked to be excused — but I know what his political philosophy is, and I know he knows the product better than that.

We did end up providing the training, but we had to pull in one of the product developers to do it.  Which was interesting, but not optimal — he has other things to do and training is not his bailiwick.

So let’s think about that for a moment.

This really is not the same thing as the wedding photographer or the baker who is forced against his or her religious beliefs to use their creativity in support of events that go against the grain of those religious beliefs.**  Naturally, the left will claim that training a right-wing organization to use the company’s sofware is a violation of the personal beliefs of the engineers who refused to do that training, but hang on a sec.

The wedding photographer and baker are (more than likely, and in all cases to date I think they were) sole proprietors or, at most, partners in a family business — that is, working for themselves.  They are perfectly able to determine for themselves what jobs they want to take on, and what jobs they do not want to take on.  The fact that their religious ideology precludes them creating art for gay couples is what has gotten them in trouble.  Being honest about that didn’t help.  On the other hand, the people who entered their shops and offices and asked for their services more than likely did so for the specific purpose of landing them in court and forcing them to do things that they believed violated their religious freedoms.***

In our case, without a word being said by the organization in question other than “We’d like to pay for training,” our two brave engineers said “We’re not playing that” — and they did so strictly because of the ideological bent of the customer in question.

However.

The two engineers aren’t the company.  They don’t own the company, they don’t call the shots.  But they got away with it anyway, because the boss isn’t the kind of guy to fire someone for that sort of thing.  And frankly, at least one of them would probably sue him if he did.

Nevertheless, they got away with something that a number of folks on the other side of the political spectrum got called on the legal carpet for.  The company didn’t suffer because we found someone else to provide the training.  But our engineers hid behind the corporate monolith and none of that got out to the customer, who was just happy to be trained.

Because I know the makeup and history of the customer, I have exactly zero doubt that, had either of our engineers been independent consultants who had refused to service the customer’s request for training and said it was because of the customer’s ideology, they would have wound up in court answering a judge’s questions as to why not.  Turnabout is fair play, and the customer would not have hesitated to file that sort of legal grievance.

Hiding behind the corporate wall, though, these two got away with it.

And that irritates the hell out of me.  Because I’m absolutely certain both of them think — no, they firmly believe — the wedding photographer and the cake baker were wrong.  That they don’t see their own situation the same way only proves once again that progressives don’t give a fuck about you — it’s all about them and their feelings.

______________

* Recipients of the message, however, are also just as free to dump it straight into the trash.

** Which is my round-about way of saying, “in support of gay weddings”.

*** Frankly, they would have been better off saying, “Sorry, our schedule is full up and we simply can’t take any new orders/jobs right now.”  And I’ll make the point that it seems like refusing to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple due to strongly-held religious beliefs about homosexuality doesn’t sound all that different from refusing to serve blacks or Irish or Jews because of the color of their skin or their national origin or their non-Christian religion.  If you start saying you won’t do X for person Y because of Z, when Z has something to do with the other person’s beliefs and prejudices, it’s a goddamned slippery slope back to the back of the bus or separate drinking fountains or simply refusing to serve someone because you don’t like their ancestors back in the old country.  And it’s VERY hard to reconcile the fact that on one hand, we have the concept of freedom of association and freedom of religion, while on the other hand, we have the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Acts which say we’re supposed to treat everyone the same.

And yeah, this is a footnote rather than a full-on philosophical post of its own, because I am fucking confused about the whole thing myself.  It’s why I won’t take a real stand on the subject, other than to note that the only time anyone seems to care is when it’s a left-winger trying to force a right-winger to do something the right-winger doesn’t want to do, and never the other way around.  That’s the unfair part, and it’s the part I tend to focus on rather than worrying about people’s religious or ideological stances.

Either apply the law indiscriminately, or fuck the goddamn law.  And that’s my bottom line.

It’s come to this.

Nobody appears to be safe from the predation of women who “remember” being “assaulted” years ago — particularly by prominent men.  Viz.,

A woman claims that esteemed scholar, philanthropist and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel molested her as a teenager, squeezing her ‘ass’ at a charity event in New York three decades ago.

Oh, really?  Via Instapundit, Ann Althouse comments:

The man is deceased. It was 3 decades ago. The allegation is only that in a photo shoot, he put his hand on her ass. This kind of #MeTooism is diluting the category that we have been taking very seriously in the light of the Harvey Weinstein revelations.

I’m not approving of ass-grabbing. I have a problem with making an allegation this late against a dead man. And I have a problem with lumping things together the wrong way.

Like Prof. Althouse, I have to say I’m really tired of hearing about women who won’t come forward at the time, but show up years later (usually after the accused has made a name for himself and is worthy of being pulled down) with a cockamamie story of assault that’s been embellished by time and memory into more than it actually was.

Years before I met her, my wife was raped by a couple of low-life home invaders.  (I’m not telling stories out of school; most people who have known her long enough know about it, she just doesn’t make a big deal of it.)  She didn’t have any trouble calling the cops, pressing charges, and showing up in court to testify. I don’t know how much time those thugs did, but my wife wasn’t their only victim who showed up at trial — although she said it was like pulling teeth to get the other woman to testify. So I’m going to guess there were multiple counts and they both spent more than a few years behind bars after they were found guilty.  (I don’t know because she doesn’t know, or at any rate, doesn’t remember.)

Maybe my wife is unique, but she comes from a long line of self-reliant women and was taught to stand up for herself and not back down. I suspect far too few girls today are getting the kind of preparation for the real world that she got. For one thing, if someone other than me was to pat her on the ass, they’d probably pull back a bleeding stump. And if I did it in public without her realizing it was me, I probably would, too 🙂

So after a false start in the ’70’s, now it really will be “Scouts USA”.

Without that pesky “Boy” at the beginning.

What a horrible mistake. This isn’t how you fix the Boy Scouts, who are just as SJW-ridden as the GSUSA. The National Council has been panicking for years over membership decline, yet every liberal-pacifying solution it’s attempted since I was a kid in the movement has driven more families and chartered partners away — and hasn’t ever satisfied the liberals in any case.

I knew the Boy Scouts were on the way out clear back when I was a teenager, when they changed the program and started de-emphasizing traditional Scouting in favor of a more “urban” version — all to attract inner-city boys, who had less opportunity to camp and do stuff in the woods, into the program. Whoops, that failed.* And so have most of the changes National has promulgated over the years since. I got out when I was 14 and had better things to do with my time.

I got back in as an adult at 27, served as ASM, merit badge counselor, district committee member, unit commissioner, and finally ended up in the Scouter Reserve to keep my membership active for the past 15 years or so. A group I work with just chartered a Venture Crew for Amateur Radio at the local camp, so after four years working on that with absolutely zero help (and a lot of negativity) from the local Council, I’m back active as a Venture Advisor.  Yay me.

In 2019, when I turn 60, I’ll have 40 years of Scouting under my belt.**

And then I’m going to walk away. Because National won’t stop listening to the SJWs and go back to Scouting’s roots, which is where most people truly interested in Scouting would like to see it go.

_________________
* In Indianapolis, there is an entire district in the inner city that was carved out of the rest of the districts in the county at about that time, with the intention of creating that “urban Scouting” experience for the kids who lived down there. Except that, like the Indianapolis Public Schools, in the 40 years since then they’ve started running out of kids to serve. Because nobody with children lives down there anymore. It’s not just white flight, it’s everybody flight.

The last I heard, there were only one or two troops left downtown, and they were seriously considering merging that district into mine. What a waste of resources and forty years.

** 7 as a youth, 33 as an adult, and yes, they all count.

What happens in Vegas…

There’s really not much to say about the evil that took place in Las Vegas the other night, except that evil men will perpetrate evil, regardless of what you or I think about it, or what laws happen to be in place which purport to prevent it.

There’s been evil in the world for a long, long time, going clear back to the elder son of the first and second humans (if you accept the Biblical account).  You can attribute it to whatever you want, but really, it all boils down to human nature and mental illness.

Human nature is to be violent and take things — including lives — from other humans by force.  That’s not just the story we read so often in the Bible, it’s the story we read in the fossil record and in written history.  Someone always wants what someone else has.  The grass is always greener.  Laws had to be set down and punishments for their violation enacted in order to shame men into behaving — if not well, then at least acceptably.

And yet, evil continued to flourish, no matter how many admonitions and regulations and punishments were decreed and issued.  It continues to this day, often wrapped up in a quasi-religious wrapper* and delivered almost as a gift to the ever-hungry 24/7 news cycle.

Civilization is a thin veneer of good behavior for most human beings.  It is a set of rules and behaviors that make it possible for us to live and work together in communities.  These rules and behaviors are not innate to us.  They must be learned.**  And they can be thrown off at a moment’s notice, as was amply demonstrated during the 20th Century, and continues to be demonstrated today.  My father, who was a civilized man by any common or normal measure, taught me that armies are made up of civilized men who are able to throw off the veneer long enough to fight wars, committing acts that would be considered atrocities if they took place outside the framework of war (and sometimes are considered atrocities regardless, by the “civilized” rules of war).  He would have known; he fought in Europe in the Second World War, and toured Dachau after it was over, when US policy was to create as many witnesses as possible to the horror created by Nazi monsters — who in turn thought themselves civilized, even as they presided over the genocide of millions.***

Today, an entire region of the world protests that it is part of an old and respectable civilization, when in fact that “civilization” they tout is nothing of the sort, at least not by modern standards.  And that “civilization” has, by and large, declared war on the rest of the world, whether we like it or not, and whether or not the vast majority of its adherents go along with the loudmouthed, militant minority.  The veneer is quite thin in places in that region, and in other places it is essentially non-existent.  The mask slips a lot, particularly in Europe, where terrorist attacks seem to be the order of the day (and due to Europeans’ own fault, that will likely continue), but it is also beginning to slip here in our own country.

It is too early to speculate on just why a man transported an arsenal into a Las Vegas hotel room and started shooting, the other night.  We just don’t know enough.  The claims that he was doing the bidding of a terrorist organization seem off.  It’s easier to believe that mental illness of some sort was to blame, or some long-held grudge that couldn’t be satisfied any other way (which in its own way is a form of mental illness).

But what we do know is that the veneer slipped.  The man who killed more than 50 people and injured scores more dropped any pretense of belonging to Civilization (as Doc Smith used to put it) and gave himself over to base human nature, for some reason so far knowable only to himself.

And thus we come to the conundrum of civilization that has dogged it from the start.

You can make all the laws you want, including laws that go back to the beginning of history and probably before, that condemn murder as one of the most heinous crimes known to man.  You can make laws regarding who may own firearms and other weapons.  You can make laws stating that certain places are weapons-free zones.  You can make laws regarding the transport of weapons and whether or not you can purchase them across state lines, and what the procedures are for that.  You can flatly outlaw the sale of certain types of weapons and ammunition to the public.  You can infiltrate the schools and universities and teach that guns are bad and shape the minds of callow youths into thinking that if we just outlaw guns, all this bad stuff will go away.

But you can’t keep guns out of the hands of people who are determined to have them, if they are willing to break the law.****

And you can’t stop someone from settling into a hotel room way up in the air and opening fire on innocent people attending a country-western concert in the courtyard far below, if he is really damn well determined to do so.

The genius of civilization, though, is that it has convinced the vast, vast majority of us that it’s a Good Idea to wear that veneer.  It helps us get through life without mayhem.  It informs us that we need to help other people get out of the way of a madman raining bullets down on them, and try to help the ones who didn’t make it before they got hit.  It’s why people push other people out of the way of an oncoming bus, or otherwise risk their own lives to save others.  When it kicks in like it did in Las Vegas, it minimizes casualties that could have been a lot worse — and yes, some of our best die trying to help others who survive only because of that help.

Yet, because it’s a veneer, we can throw it off when we need to kill some son of a bitch who’s trying to kill us when he breaks down our door in the middle of the night.

The difference between a civilized man and a terrorist or a madman is that the civilized man knows when to throw the veneer off, and more importantly, when to put it back on.

Writing more gun control laws isn’t going to change that.  Murder is already illegal, and has been since the beginning of time.

____________

* If you think ISIS or al-Qaeda or Hezbollah (or, hell, the Iranian mullahs) are actually “religious” in the sense that Americans generally attribute to the word, you’re a fucking idiot.

** If you don’t believe that, watch any group of toddlers for awhile.

*** And they were not alone in this; nearly any “civilized” people has done the same throughout history.  The Turks; the Russian Communists; the Red Chinese; the Imperial Japanese; even we Americans, fighting our Indian wars in the 19th Century that any truly unbiased historian would have to agree constituted genocide by modern standards, even if it would not have been so considered at the time.

**** Just ask them in Chicago.

Title IX, phooey.

With all this talk of the DoE rescinding its “Dear Colleague” letter that prompted so much of the anti-male due-process suppression in sexual assault cases, I have to wonder:

Can someone actually explain why these cases are being investigated and “tried” by university disciplinary boards rather than being reported to the local or state police (and not the university police, who aren’t equipped for this type of crime) so that the can be properly investigated and tried in regular courts of law where most sexual assault cases are handled?

I mean, look, university disciplinary boards are for investigating and punishing academic misconduct, not criminal misconduct.  I sat on a university disciplinary board once as a student member, in a case where three students were accused of cheating on an exam.  It was open and shut — even now I feel I’m bound by the rules set forth for that committee, and I can’t talk about it in detail, but the evidence was clear that two of them had been copying from one of them, and the worst part was, all three of them got the wrong answers anyway.  They all failed the course and, I believe, were suspended for a semester.*  That is the correct and proper use of a university disciplinary board.

But rape is not academic misconduct.  If a student accuses another student of it, their due-process rights are far better protected by real judges, prosecutors, and juries, than by university committees who have a jones for punishing males simply because they are male and feel that they have license to do so because a former Secretary of Education said, gee, maybe you should do this, because if you don’t, we might start restricting your federal funding.**

Every male student who has been kicked out of school by a university disciplinary committee for alleged rape since the Obama DoE sent out that egregious letter should be suing the school for all it’s worth, and demanding his day in court.

And the states that are looking at codifying the “Dear Colleague” letter into law — I’m looking at YOU, California — might want to take a step back from the precipice before they fall off of it.  Because, if universities can set up their own quasi-legal tribunals, suppress due process, and make their verdicts stick, what is stopping citizens from setting up Government Disciplinary Committees and finding state officials guilty in absentia of all kinds of misfeasance and malfeasance?  And then making their verdicts stick, at gunpoint?

No wonder blue states have so much riding on abolishing the First and Second Amendments.

________________
* And I know that caused at least one of them a problem, because he was here on a student visa that required him to be enrolled full-time while he was in the country (and he was the one who was appealing the “F” grade handed out by the instructor, for that reason).  Sucked to be him.

** Which raises another question, which is, “Why do we have a Department of Education that is funding state universities and putting them in this sort of a position in the first place?”

9/11 again

And I find that I’m having a harder time caring this year.  Oh, sure, I can and do still empathize with those who lost loved ones, and I’m still angry that anyone could actually be heartless enough to plan and execute such an attack (and damn glad the main pig-fucker is dead and tossed to the sharks).  It’s our increasingly-feeble response to 9/11 that I’m having a harder time caring about.

For all the initial calls to find the bastards and destroy them utterly, here we are, 16 years later, still playing whack-a-mole with the RIFs.  Of course for at least eight of those years, we weren’t serious about it, thanks to our unlamentedly-former so-called president.  And the guy before him, much as I liked the cut of his jib at the time, frankly didn’t go about it right.  (If he’d studied his father’s response to the invasion of Kuwait more closely, we’d have been a lot better off.)  And I’ll never forgive the guy before him for not taking Osama’s head when it was offered to him on a plate.  But I digress.

It was my great privilege to meet Harry Truman’s oldest grandson last Friday night.  Clifton Truman Daniel is a great man and a great American, and for all that he’s an antiwar no-nukes type, he is at least rational about it.  Hell, I even agree with him; I’d prefer never to see such weapons used in anger again.  On the other hand, you maintain the peace by preparing for war.

The point is, Mr. Daniel demonstrated that he fully and completely understood his Grandpa.  “Grandpa never reconsidered his decision to use the bombs.  His decision was based solely on the premise that doing so would save American lives.”*

How’s that old song go?  “Mister, we could use a man like Harry Truman again.”**  Because America isn’t Sally Field; we don’t really care if the world likes us.  We want the world to respect us sufficiently to fear our response if someone tries to pull something like 9/11 again.  That we are currently being threatened by a North Korean Louse That Roared with nuclear devastation and/or EMP attack only points up the fact that our leaders have been unserious in this endeavor.  For what it’s worth, it appears that President Trump is deadly serious about it, and the fat boy hasn’t yet actually achieved an understanding of that fact.  Which may end up being very messy, but when you kick the can down the road for 25 years, sooner or later it’s going to come to rest in an uncomfortable place, which it now has pretty much done.

The real lesson and legacy of 9/11 is that nobody is our friend, and we need to start acting accordingly.  Donald Trump and certain members of his administration get it.  Many Americans are tired of all the putzing around and want action.  To be entirely honest, I originally wrote “and closure”, but I think Americans would be willing to support a long-term general cleanup of the asshole of the world if it had clearly-stated intentions and goals.  There’s only one problem with that.

The problem with America (note, “America”, not “Americans”) doing anything long-term is that we have these minor revolutions every couple of years that we call elections.  So everything we do is circumscribed by the two- and four-year election cycles.  George W. Bush found that out in 2006, and in a way, thank goodness, because we hung around in Iraq too long and were doing too many things wrong there.***  We could fix that problem, of course, at the cost of more of our already circumscribed essential liberties.  Or we could fix it by simply deciding, as a people, that we have the power to make the world be the way we want it to be, and dedicating our lives and treasure to that end — much as did the Romans.

As for the rest of the world, well, “Fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.”  I’m not particularly interested in their opinion and neither should you be.

___________________

* Paraphrasing a bit, but that’s the essence of what he said in response to a question from the audience after his talk.

** Yeah, I know.

*** His daddy had the right idea — kick ass, take names, then get the hell out — but didn’t hang tough quite long enough.  The true end game in Gulf War I should have been Saddam dead or in a jail cell.  Instead, that wound festered for another ten years and resulted in another war.  On the other hand, who knew what might have replaced Saddam.

Of course, Jerry Pournelle (PBUH) for many years opined that we should have instituted a Legionary Corps and literally settled legionary troops there much like the Romans did when they extended their frontiers.  With 25 years’ worth of 20/20 hindsight, I have to wonder if that wasn’t a better solution.  Although today I’d be inclined to simply hand the keys to the Kurds and say, “It’s all yours, boys.  Call us when you need air strikes or more ammo.”

That slippery slope is going to be quite a ride.

A friend noted that one of our local television stations had prematurely labeled church vandalism (Nazi-esque, pro-Donald Trump graffiti spray-painted on the exterior) in a southern Indiana county last February as a “hate crime”, prior to discovering that, in fact, the church organist vandalized the building as a protest against Donald Trump.

Talk about egg on their face.  But, nah, let’s talk about “hate crimes” instead.

On some level, all crimes are potentially hate crimes. Designating certain types of crimes as official hate crimes under law is an exercise in legislative opinion (and as a primarily-political opinion, it makes for bad law). It’s all well and good to fix in law that vandalism of a religious property is a hate crime, to be prosecuted with special attention to the mental state of the perpetrator; but once you have designated one thing as a hate crime, you’ve got a foot stuck in the door to eventually broadening the definition of a hate crime. And we’re already headed down that slippery slope, with “thoughtcrime” already being sanctioned, however unofficially, by the media and by various Internet services like Facebook and Twitter.

And you thought 1984 was just a book.  “Two-Minutes Hate,” anyone?

I, for one, strongly believe that tearing down Confederate memorials is a hate crime. Not because I hold any brief for slavery, or for the rebels and their ill-conceived secession and the war it engendered, but because to destroy or remove these monuments destroys our national history out of no emotion other than hatred for that history. As an historian, I strongly believe that we MUST embrace our history honestly, warts and all, and not try to erase the “uncomfortable” parts just to make ourselves feel better.

On the other hand, there are people out there who believe the opinion I just expressed is itself a hate crime. The next thing we know, it may become a hate crime to express opinions that are out of the mainstream.*  If you think that’s impossible, don’t think the First Amendment will protect us from that; remember, the Second Amendment is very clear that the right to bear arms is not to be infringed, yet there exists a multitude of local, state, and federal laws that significantly infringe the right. Legislators can always find a way to get around the Bill of Rights, and with the right (meaning the left) judges in place, they can take away God-given rights we have long thought inviolable.

Don’t be so quick to label anything as a hate crime. Or at least, wait until the investigation is complete and the facts of the case have been made public. Remember that a lie can make it around the world twice while the truth is still lacing up its boots.

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* Oh, wait — as I pointed out, it already is, on Facebook and Twitter.