Tonight on The Independents: ISIS Beheads U.S. Journalist, More Trouble in Ferguson, LP Senate Candidate John Buckley, Michael Moynihan, Plus Online Aftershow

If you thought the news this week couldn't get any worse, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) has released a video of one of its terrorists beheading the long-captive American photojournalist James Wright Foley. The executioner, speaking in British-accented English, warns that the also-captive journalist Steven Joel Soltoff will meet the same fate if the United States doesn't withdraw from Iraq. That piece of grim news will kick off tonight's live episode of The Independents (Fox Business Network, 9 p.m. ET, 6 p.m. PT, with re-airs three hours later).

Party Panelists Michael C. Moynihan (Reason contributing editor) and Julie Roginsky (Fox News contributor) will react to this grim business, and also to the latest depressing goings-on in the police state of Ferguson, Missouri. Later in the show, the duo will also respond to a new list of the world's most allegedly influential cities. Coming back on to analyze the ISIS horror is Independents regular Michael Weiss of The Interpreter, and joining the program for the first time to relay his Ferguson insights as a conservative criminal-justice reformer and ex-National Guardsmen who worked the 1992 L.A. riots is Chuck DeVore. Finally, Libertarian Party candidate for the U.S. Senate out of West Virginia John Buckley (cousin to William F.) comes on to talk about his potentially disruptive campaign. Read Buckley's interview with Brian Doherty here.)

The online-only aftershow begins at foxbusiness.com/independents just after 10. Follow The Independents on Facebook at facebook.com/IndependentsFBN, follow on Twitter @ independentsFBN, and click on this page for more video of past segments.

Comments

[Fist of Etiquette]

Well, at least there's Moynihan.

[GILMORE]

You sound disappointed.

at least there's no Chris Christie Dancing. And Julie is nice! I like julie.

At least...we hope no Chris Christie dancing. Ever. Again.

I am still disappointed no Bryan Suits.

[Max Power]

I'd rather it were Julie Borowski. And where's BAAALLLLKKKKOOOO???? (He's probably booked up this week because people are finally catching up on what he's been reporting on for years.

[GILMORE]

oh, whoops!

I thought it was Borowski as well.

I don't like this other one. why do their names have to be so similar? not fair.

Yeah, Balko's stock went up this month. he was there before it was cool.

[Max Power]

Roginsky [less than symbol] Borowski.

[jdfinct]

Balko was on a few nights ago

[Fist of Etiquette]

Moynihan even tops Suderman on the list of Top Men they have on the panel.

[Max Power]

Moynihan knows how to wear a suit.

[Rufus J. Firefly]

Hello.

Sorry for the victims.

Send in the drones.

[Longtorso, Johnny]

If You Don't Want To Watch A Guy Fuck A Snake, Here's A Description

[Rufus J. Firefly]

I watched it.

Truly disturbing.

[Heroic Mulatto]

Wait, what?

Your lurid curiosity wasn't satiated by the textual description?

[Gojira]

Pfft, that was obviously his first time fucking a snake. Too many rookie mistakes.

[Heroic Mulatto]

Still a better love story than Twilight, though.

[Rufus J. Firefly]

I'm all visual.

[GILMORE]

Just in case you thought the internet was a 'transformative medium that will reinvigorate our social and economic relations'...

"here's a guy fucking a snake"

[Atanarjuat]

For you lonely single guys out there, just remember that he probably has a nice girlfriend who has no idea the guy she took home for Thanksgiving last year is the patriarch of House Slytherin.

[Heroic Mulatto]

Well, allegedly, he does have an 8 inch cock.

An 8 inch cock that he chose to stick into a snake.

[GILMORE]

Animal rape is the worst kind.

[Derpetologist]

Here is a more wholesome snake video: Snake opens door

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bxc_55ur-J4

[GroundTruth]

"terrorists beheading the long-captive American photojournalist"

Makes the whole Iraq war thing so worthwhile, doesn't it?

Here comes that Islamic Republic of Iraq that many of us predicted about 11 years back. Sometimes it really sucks being right.

[Derpetologist]

If the snake fucker wasn't disturbing enough for you, here's the video of James Foley's beheading:

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=bc1_1408481278

[HazelMeade]

I'd rather watch a guy fuck a snake.

[GILMORE]

Now isn't THAT convenient...

[derpules]

http://cdn.memegenerator.net/i.....277444.jpg

[Otis B. Driftwood]

I'm not completely convinced this happened.

[Sudden]

And yet, on his knees and facing certain beheading, he chose to parrot the line of the men lopping his head off.

Fuck that. You're gonna die, die like a fucking man. Spit in their faces and tell that British raised shitstain holding the machete that God gave America the biggest dick on the planet so that it could piss all over you crazy Islamist cunts.

[derpules]

^This x1000

[PapayaSF]

Yes.

[Christophe]

They can cut a testicle off and redo the video when you feel more cooperative.

The only thing that really works is to kill yourself if you get the chance, so that they don't get the satisfaction of doing it themselves.

[perlhaqr]

Fuck that. Jump up and headbutt the motherfucker.

[Christophe]

Oh, trying to go out in a blaze of glory is probably what I'd try too.

What I was pointing out is that they have plenty of time to break your will before the camera rolls, and they can reshoot it until you play your part perfectly.

[Harun]

They do fake executions once a week, say.

Then you decide they aren't really serious and read out their message.

This is how they do it.

[HazelMeade]

The executioner, speaking in British-accented English, warns that the also-captive journalist Steven Joel Soltoff will meet the same fate if the United States doesn't withdraw from Iraq.

That's going to be a difficult demand to meet.

[Winston]

Does anyone remember this?
http://reason.com/blog/2012/03.....fornia-the

This happened a few months ago:
http://www.10news.com/news/kas.....adi-041714

[PapayaSF]

From the second link:

Fatima had been at odds with her Muslim parents for dating a Chaldean

"NO! There will be no Chaldeans in my house!!"

[Fist of Etiquette]

Prediction: So much pale skin.

[Fist of Etiquette]

INCLUDING FOSTER.

[Fist of Etiquette]

Do they know they can't joke around about beheadings?

[Grand Moff Serious Man]

Kennedy is just too headstrong.

[Winston]

The Headstrongs married the Armstrongs and that's why...

[Ted S.]

What about the Dopestrongs?

[Winston]

What about the Dopestrongs?
They had everything revoked?

Also I am disappoint Ted you didn't get my Duck Soup reference.

[Otis B. Driftwood]

+1 Firefly

[gaijin]

why are beheadings sacrosanct, while drones are comedy gold?

[Agammamon]

Beheadings are white people being killed while drones mean brown people are dying.

[gaijin]

This makes an unfortunate amount of sense. If some 'journalists' were droned maybe that would be unfunny too.

[gaijin]

It's like ISIS has a whole pen full of people to slaughter.

[Grand Moff Serious Man]

So can we resume using the word 'Islamofascism'?

[Derpetologist]

Fascism is a 20th century ideology. Islam is more Dark Ages stuff.

I think "savages" and "barbarians" are the best terms.

[BigT]

Fascism is an economic system. Islamo-terrorism or Islamo-barbarism.

[Grand Moff Serious Man]

Islamo-totalitarianism. Maybe a bit verbose but it is accurate.

[HazelMeade]

Personally, I think "savages" and "barbarians" are more accurate.

"Totalitarianism" implies that these people have the high degree of discipline and intelligence necessary for running a police state. But in reality, life in the Islamic state will be more like lots of random screaming, beheadings, and toyota-mounted machine guns.

[straffinrun]

Intifada la vida.

[HazelMeade]

Intifada la Vida Loca

[JW]

I'm going with Islamo-Cuntheads.

[Headless Body of Agnew]

Douchelamism?

[Sudden]

I heard Niall Ferguson give a good talk about Islamism recently. He objected to the term Islamofascism because he said that the caliphate Islamist movement has far more in common with communism. It opposes the charging of interest and the basics of finance. It is international in its outlook and ambitions. And the tactics deployed are reminiscent of the agitprop and terrorist campaigns of the Bolsheviks in Tsarist Russia.

[Knarf Yenrab!]

Krugman says that it is too so Islamofascism, and anyone who says otherwise is derping.

(if you can find the link to the lecture quickly, please post it--I'm having trouble googling through all his material to one particular lecture video).

[Sudden]

Conversations with History: Niall Ferguson

The discussion about the Islamists starts around 49 minutes. It's from 2006.

[Knarf Yenrab!]

Many thanks.

[Knarf Yenrab!]

The criticism of Saudi Arabia at the end is particularly important. The US has established this back-scratching network of allies in the Middle East--just like it did with Saddam before his objections to slant-drilling suddenly made him bad--but it's far from clear that the allies of the federal government share any common ideology, unlike the European alliances the US has made in the past.

When your allies are channeling their profits into Islamist education throughout the ME, that's a good sign that you need to be more selective in your choice of friends.

[Winston]

If they called it Islamocommunism then the proggies would be lining up to endorse Islamic theocracy. Assuming that you think they don't already support it that is...

[Derpetologist]

Progs are already lining up to defend Hamas. Because victimhood, I guess.

[HazelMeade]

Not really. The reason the left supports Islamist militancy is because they see it as an ally against capitalism.

[Irish]

Theodore Dalrymple referred to it as Islamo-Leninism and his logic is pretty solid:

There are many other parallels between Leninism and Qutb's Islamism, among them the incompatibility of each with anything else, entailing a fight to the finish supposedly followed by permanent bliss for the whole of mankind; a tension between complete determinism (by history and by God, respectively) and the call to intense activism; and the view that only with the installation of their systems does Man become truly himself. For Qutb's worldview, therefore, the term Islamo-Leninism would be a more accurate description than Islamofascism.

[Calidissident]

Eh, he's mostly noting superficial similarities. At the end of the day, their doctrine is not communistic and labeling it as such seems to me to be more of a cheap political accusation to lump all your opponents into one group. There are also a lot of differences between different extreme Islamist groups.

[Dave C]

He is not claiming they are economic Communists, but political Leninists.
Subtle but important difference.

[Irish]

Exactly. The issue is the logic of 'determinism,' anti-Capitalism, and a supposedly blissful end game in which there is a universal brotherhood of man.

Communists claimed there would be a 'new socialist man' who would think collectively rather than individualistically, and fundamentalist Islam, at least as expressed by Qutb, believes there will be total peace once everyone accepts the dictates of the Prophet and Allah because if everyone obeys Islamic law there can be no violence or strife.

These are very similar philosophies even if one is based on materialistic atheism and the other is based on Allah.

[Calidissident]

Pointing out abstract similarities in philosophies does not indicate a fundamental similarity in the systems. I'm sorry, but this reminds me too much of leftists cherry picking and using mental gymnastics to equate libertarianism with some different, nefarious group or philosophy. There are much more sensible terms than Islamo-Leninism to describe extreme brands of Islam.

[Dave C]

Care to elaborate?

[Calidissident]

I think that terms like radical Islam, Islamic fundamentalism, Islamic extremism, etc. are all far better and more accurate than Islamo-Leninism, or Islamofascism for that matter. Especially as an umbrella term, which these terms are almost always used as.

[Dave C]

Well maybe the term "Islamo-Fascism" is a little to trite. But the point being, Qutb is considered the intellectual who inspired a lot of post WW2 Sunni radicalism (He was part of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt: Nasser had him executed).

Not sure if he had any influence on the Shiites.

[Calidissident]

And I'm saying that Qutb, in addition to not representing the views of all Islamic jihadists, was not, in common usage of the word, a Leninist. Using the term to mean that his philosophy in some ways operated politically in ways similar to Leninism is ambiguous and misleading as the term Leninism is generally understood to have a specific philosophical meaning as a branch of Marxism and Communism, and is not just a way to operate politically, independent of ideology. I really don't see how the term Islamo-Leninist is actually motivated by creating the most accurate label for the phenomena it attempts to describe, rather than a politically motivated creation.

[Dave C]

The article highlighted the similarity between Marxist dialectical materialism and Qutb's dialectical Islamism.

Who are these these other Islamic jihadists who disagreed with him? (intellectuals, not head choppers)

[Calidissident]

Pick any Shiite one, to start.

[Dave C]

I qualified that in my previous comment.

[Irish]

He actually isn't lumping all Islamic fundamentalist groups together though, since he explicitly says 'For Qutb's worldview.' His point is particularly about Sayyid Qutb who actually does have some similarities:

[Islam] does not face practical problems with abstract theories, nor does it confront various stages with unchangeable means. Those who talk about Jihaad in Islam and quote Qur'anic verses do not take into account this aspect, nor do they understand the nature of the various stages through which the movement develops, or the relationship of the verses revealed at various occasions with each stage.

That sounds an awful lot like Marx's historical dialectic. Moreover, the Iranian army is notably called the 'Revolutionary Guard,' the Caliphate shall be global in the same way the revolution was supposed to be, and there are a host of other similarities.

There's also a long history of socialist thinking in Islam.

Ab? Dharr al-Ghif?r?, a Companion of Prophet Muhammad, is credited by many as a principal antecedent of Islamic socialism. He protested against the accumulation of wealth by the ruling class during 'Uthm?n's caliphate and urged the equitable redistribution of wealth. The first Muslim Caliph Abu Bakr introduced a guaranteed minimum standard of income, granting each man, woman, and child ten dirhams annually.

[Dave C]

Good article.

[Irish]

I agree. I vehemently disagree with Dalrymple on some of his socially conservative beliefs, particularly the war on drugs, but he's a stupendous writer and is a bright guy.

[Red Rocks Rockin]

His observation about political correctness--that it's designed to create a society of emasculated liars because they are easier to control--is the most succinct description of that odious philosophy I've ever seen.

[Gluesponge]

The irony of his "self determination" speech (Captain "Noshowingface") is that ISIS is not rallying muslims but slaughtering them. And forget the non-muslims... the true islamic "conversion" technique... join or die. Why aren't there lines around the block signing up for _this_ religion!

It would seem that the dream of an Islamic nation (a-la Iran) is becoming harder and harder to sell without guns and terror.

Go figure. 🙂

[JeremyR]

Are you kidding? People from the UK are heading over there in droves, including presumably the guy in the video (give his accent)

Osama Bin Laden was right - people like a strong horse.

[Harun]

I'm enjoying all the people on Reddit who opposed Iraq saying that now they want to kill these guys.

Note: many of these guys were fighting i Iraq as part of the insurgency. They just laid low until ISIS came around to wake them up.

[Fist of Etiquette]

I shan't be watching any of it.

[Max Power]

I watched that Vice thing about ISIS/IS the other day. They're pretty fucked up.

[Grand Moff Serious Man]

I'm also in favor declaring all members of ISIS hostis humani generis: enemies of all mankind and thus under no legal international protection.

[Derpetologist]

I have the awful feeling that Muslim terrorists won't throw in the towel until a whole lot of people are dead.

[HazelMeade]

Hopefully mostly them.

[Cdr Lytton]

Muslim terrorists won't throw in the towel

Racist!

[Derpetologist]

You saw what I did there.

/not really, it was just the first phrase that popped in my head.

[Fist of Etiquette]

Yeah, let's cram the two top stories in the first 12 minutes so we can move on to actresses talking about vaccinations or rappers slapping their women or whatever the fuck.

[Heroic Mulatto]

Coming back on to analyze the ISIS horror is Independents regular Michael Weiss of The Interpreter, and joining the program for the first time to relay his Ferguson insights as a conservative criminal-justice reformer and ex-National Guardsmen who worked the 1992 L.A. riots is Chuck DeVore.

It's a double feature!

[Grand Moff Serious Man]

While I'm glad that the Ferguson stuff is finally bringing the thuggishness of cops into the international spotlight, I am also troubled at the unremitting hostility to any evidence that would suggest that maybe the shooting itself was justified.

Kind of like a Trayvon for the civil liberties crowd.

[Max Power]

I'm worried the thuggishness/militarization angle is going to get lost on a cloud of arguing about racism and hand-wringing about black culture and rioting/looters.

[Sudden]

I said this the day after it happened. The story will get turned away from police tactics and turned into race-bait. And it has.

And as surely as that has happened, it becomes increasingly likely that the only thing separating Michael Brown from ISIS is an underlying ideology.

[PapayaSF]

And there's now a connection: one marcher in a demonstration had an sign that said "ISIS here." I think it may have been an invitation....

[Sudden]

Islam has long preyed upon African Americans. One need only look at the ongoing resonance of Malcolm X for evidence. Not to mention that much of the successful terrorist recruitment in Europe started in the jails of that country. The weak and disenfranchised will always flock like moths to the light that offers them an alternative.

[Calidissident]

To be fair to Malcolm X, his views changed a lot near the end of his life after his pilgrimage to Mecca, and subsequent conversion from NOI to Sunni Islam.

[PapayaSF]

Nation of Islam has a fascinating and rather disturbing history. Which "brand" of Sunni Islam did he convert to? Wahhabi Islam is the variety that controls Saudi Arabia and Mecca. They're pretty much as extreme as NOI, just a little less cult-like and with a lot more money.

[Gluesponge]

If one is to believe the Spike Lee movie on the subject, Malcolm converted to the "Peace Love and white robe" islam... the one I can't seem to find anywhere, in spite of all the frothing idiots who claim it's a religion of peace.

I'm convinced that even if the West never meddled in the Middle East, and let them throw off the Ottoman yoke themselves, they'd still have a reason to hate the West. We're not muslim.

[Irish]

I'm convinced that even if the West never meddled in the Middle East, and let them throw off the Ottoman yoke themselves, they'd still have a reason to hate the West. We're not muslim.

See, the problem with your argument is that Muslim countries actually WERE becoming more western and secular before they regressed and fell under the sway of fundamentalism.

Here's Afghanistan in the 50's.

Tell me: Can you tell the difference between the people in that picture and slightly swarthy Americans in the same time period? Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey and several other Muslim countries were on their way to being secular, liberal and democratic nations before being forcefully dragged backwards by thuggish fundamentalists.

[Gluesponge]

See, the problem with your argument is that Muslim countries actually WERE becoming more western and secular before they regressed and fell under the sway of fundamentalism.

I've wondered what turned them into fundamentalists. I can't think solely that it was solely the West's meddling.

If we (the West) didn't go a redrawing and throwing this group with that one, I wonder if they'd have been sufficiently secular enough to shrug off the nuts who wanted to go all fundie on their countries.

I can honestly say I don't know. Because there have been times that you see smack dab in the middle of the cesspool places that are prospering right now. It's fun to speculate though.

[PapayaSF]

I've wondered what turned them into fundamentalists. I can't think solely that it was solely the West's meddling.

No, not entirely. Yes, we meddled, including funding some anti-Soviet Islamists, but a big part of it was a sort of modernist exhaustion, a backlash against the failure of the post-WWI Kemalist/leftist/secularist ideologies. There was a turn to religious "fundamentals," similar to the mini-rebirth of Christianity and conservatism in the US that dates (more or less) from the '70s.

[Calidissident]

I can't find anything indicating which branch of Sunni Islam he adopted, but he did repudiate his previous racism after his pilgrimage, and I don't see any obvious indicators that he adopted wahhabi islam

[Irish]

Not to mention that much of the successful terrorist recruitment in Europe started in the jails of that country.

Fundamentalist Islam definitely preys on the weak willed and feeble minded. You also see a lot of Western women who are lost and unhappy ending up marrying into a fundamentalist family and essentially giving up their rights as free western women in order to be the slave to their husband.

See: The wife of Tamarlan Tsarnaev who married in to a fundamentalist situation where her husband beat her and called her a whore.

[Red Rocks Rockin]

See: The wife of Tamarlan Tsarnaev who married in to a fundamentalist situation where her husband beat her and called her a whore.

And THAT'S why fathers have a responsibility to be loving, strong role models to their daughters. Your baby girl is going to be a hell of a lot less likely to end up with pieces of shit like that if she's shown how a man should really act.

[Irish]

It also seems that there was a fairly muted feminist outcry to that. Can you imagine if a right-wing fanatic bombed a federal building and turned out to be a wife beating misogynist? It's all Jezebel would talk about for 2 years.

[PapayaSF]

Yeah, I noticed how the left was pretty outraged about the Taliban in Afghanistan, right up until 9/11. After that, their desire to oppose white/Western privilege and all right-wingers took precedence over outrage about Muslim treatment of women. It's a bizarre form of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."

[Knarf Yenrab!]

I was raised among fundamentalist Christians, and the vast majority of them are not assholes, not to women or one another. They're normal people--probably better than your average person in interpersonal ethics--who believe crazy things because they follow an anxiety-riddled religion that's at odds with post-Enlightenment thought.

Once we can get the crackpot Islamists to the point where we've gotten the YECs--to offering pointless, harmless talking points and teaching their children falsities rather than murdering innocents--we'll be doing well.

The key to that is using markets to move kids away from the monoculture of Islamism toward the dizzying variety of ideas and entertainment that is the world (being honest, the mostly Western world). Finding ever more effective ways to open up the Internet in repressive nations to provide 21st-century samizdat is the most important step if that's going to happen.

[PapayaSF]

Knarf, I was with you until the last paragraph. Unfortunately, exposure to the Western world doesn't always help, and often makes extremist Islam seem more attractive. See the history of the Muslim Brotherhood, the suburbs of Paris and other European capitals, etc.

I think we're in a religious war, as awkward, politically incorrect, and un-libertarian as that may be. I think we need a more powerful memetic weapon, perhaps a direct assault on the validity of the Koran.

[JohnTheRevelator]

No, that's exactly what we don't need. Contrary to the impression you get from the terrorist-romanticizing lost children of the lefty media, the vast majority of muslims are pious, conservative, but peaceful and nonpolitical people who just want to live their lives. It would be grossly counterproductive to play into the Islamist propaganda that western people are waging some sort of new Crusade.

What we could do, that might shorten the long game of whack-a-mole with extremists, is adjust our selection of friends and allies to favor the more liberal and freer peoples of the Mideast over the kings and dictators who subsist on western welfare while repressing their people and paying the various extremists to channel the discontent into anti-western violence.

[Winston]

I'm also troubled by the tendency of certain posters to indulge in their inner Jacobin.

[Fist of Etiquette]

Moynihan steals Foster's contrarian schtick. Politicize it!

[Jensen]

Goddammit Isis, would it kill you to build a guillotine? It slices, it dices! It can behead a dozen infidels in two minutes!

[Heroic Mulatto]

Did Muhammad (praise be upon him) use a guillotine, you kafir pig-dog?

[Derpetologist]

Mighty Mo didn't have RPGs or Ak-47s, if I recall.

[Sudden]

I swear to holy hell, every time I watch a clip of these guys I want to gather some of my well armed friends and launch a goddamned non-state action against these fucks, for the good of humanity.

These were the people I always loathed. No greater enemy of libertarians on the planet (short of their lack of power for the time being).

[Max Power]

Did you watch the Vice thing from the other week? There was a part where the morality police guy was traveling around in his van with his AK47 and making sure people's wives were wearing the right kind of vail and that people weren't eating during the day and checking the make sure shops were selling things for the right price. Just the banal authoritarianism was disgusting.

[Derpetologist]

And by some strange twist of fate, Muslim countries are all mired in grinding poverty.

Huh. I wonder why that is....

[Max Power]

Right. I say let those fuckers sell their sheep-meat for the sharia approved price and live in sandy hovels while they look at Americans in envy. Maybe then the normal people will be inspired to throw off the fucks.

[Sudden]

ISIS has global ambitions. Their recruitment snuff film essentially unveiled (punintended) their ambition for conquering "Rome" and the Iberian Peninsula within five years.

ISIS knows they can't govern, and besides, those cowards merely bloodlust and only find in Islam a convenient excuse for such. They will forever seek expansion to mask their internal failures.

[BigT]

Bahrain, Abu Dabi, UAE, and Saudi disagree. But sans oil, yes grinding poverty.

[Heroic Mulatto]

And what economy does Baharin, UAE, and Saudi Arabia have beside that accident of geology that was first discovered and exploited by the West? If the oil disappeared tomorrow, what would they have to prevent their return to an arid wasteland solely populated by nomadic shepherds and camel drivers?

[Derpetologist]

Not only that, but must of the work is done by foreigners, so they're not even learning anything. It's like a whole nation won the lottery and is just pissing the money away.

[PapayaSF]

Yeah, but all that oil means they've got the rest of the world by the balls. The Saudis have known this for 40 years, and have been playing a complex game of getting rich and promoting a strict version of Islam while acting "cooperative" and "moderate," especially in allying against those real extremists in the name of Allah who aren't actually true Muslims, even if you infidels think we all seem to act a lot alike. True, some Saudis fund them but hey, don't blame us, it's just a few millionaire nuts we can't control!

And supposedly they've rigged their oil facilities for demolition in case anybody gets any ideas....

[Rhywun]

Bahrain, Abu Dabi, UAE, and Saudi disagree. But sans oil, yes grinding poverty.

Malaysia also disagrees. Not that it doesn't have its problems. (For starters, all the rich people are Chinese.)

[Cytotoxic]

Dubai is actually a free-market city-state.

[HazelMeade]

They aren't technically sophisticated enough to build a guillotine.

Plus I think there is something about the symbolism that they dig.

[Derpetologist]

I know that halal meat slaughter rules prohibits stunning the animal first. Supposedly, the purpose of the rule is to remind all about the reality of killing.

[PapayaSF]

It's in the Koran. What more do they need?

[Gluesponge]

They had a Ronco Pocket Guillotine, but it broke in transit and they're still waiting for their replacement to come in the mail.

[Fist of Etiquette]

Sounds like someone is getting frustrated with interruptions.

[Jesus H. Christ]

No live stream.

[Max Power]

Ha, that guy called out Kennedy's tendency to interrupt.

[Fist of Etiquette]

The latency isn't helping.

[Grand Moff Serious Man]

Live coverage on the scene actually enlivens the show. Can we get more of that, please?

Blows retarded K-Walking out of the water.

[Max Power]

I don't really care for this guy though.

[BoscoH]

Kudos on the alt-text. I could not agree more. We're going to get dragged into this shit again because, while we cannot ignore evil, we lack the wisdom to just deal with it on appropriate terms.

[GILMORE]

which are....?

(and don't start the sentence with, 'not')

[GILMORE]

The Independents Attire Review, 19 August 2014

A Monkey Don't Need No Shirt-Edition

- Kennedy: If there's a neighborhood on the Color Wheel where Kennedy isn't welcome, I'm going to posit its somewhere in Bluetown. Why? I'm no scientist, but i think it has something to do with pale people having 'cadaverous' blue-undertones. That, and the neckline on this smock makes her look like she's going to put on a rubber glove, a mask, and start cleaning our teeth. Still, she'd be our *favorite* dentists assistant.

- Matt: The Pink Shirt *Rolls Deep* w/ Tie That Likes the Pink Shirt. What more to say? This is a formula noted in weeks past as a winner, and its reiteration is something we encourage. In addition, the re-appearance of Floppy-Collar Red Rayon shirt last week has reminded us how fucked up things can sometimes get.

- Kmele: Khaki Blazer brings grey shirt - not our favorite pairing, but well-matched with the dark, lightly spotted tie. We again note that Khaki Blazer is like the Leatherman Multitool of menswear - every man should have one, and use it as often as possible. Solid stuff.

Nits?niiyi'taki

[Max Power]

I think the pink shirt would look better with the navy suit. Matt should just retire the black suit.

Here's a song from a local band about a dental hygienist that your description of Kennedy reminded me of.

[GILMORE]

yes and yes and yes

[Derpetologist]

How about this: Give ISIS 1 week to surrender to the Iraqi Army. If they refuse, out come the daisy cutters- no prisoners, no survivors.

[gaijin]

But won;t they just embed themselves among the populations of civilians?

[Rufus J. Firefly]

Of course they will. They're rat cowards.

[Derpetologist]

No prisoners, no survivors.

The best way to get an enemy to stop using human shields is to shoot through them.

Or maybe I'm talking out of my ass. All I know is I hate these slime and want them to die.

[gaijin]

So nuke them all? I don;t know. I feel the same way about ISIS, but I can;t get past the idea that we'd be killing a lot of 'innocent' people.

[Derpetologist]

"The essence of war is violence. Moderation in war is imbecility."

-Baron John Fisher

I hate to say it, but it would probably be better if the US fought as the Romans and Mongols did.

[JW]

I hate to say it, but it would probably be better if the US fought as the Romans and Mongols did.

Or, not at all. How is this our fight?

FWIW, I'd like to see them all assume room temperature as well, but not by adopting the tactics of war criminals.

[Derpetologist]

Yeah, it's sort of reached "the only winning move is not to play" stage.

The US has been fighting in the Middle East my entire adult life, and it's even more screwed up than when we started.

It's time to pack it up. It's like a tire fire- if you try to put it out, you just make it worse. The only thing to do is grab a beer and watch it burn.

[Gluesponge]

I'm in the same boat as you... my whole life has been about the Middle East... my Dad was in the Navy in the go-go 80's and had to spend all my childhood at sea because Momar had a "line of death" or Iran mined the strait of Hormuz. It was annoying then, and it's annoying now.

Let them go whole hog on each other... Syria, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen... the whole pot.

Kick the snot out of them if they try to do it outside their playground and let them slaughter each other. No aid. No humanitarian assistance. They want self-determination, by FSM... let's give it to them.

I'm still a little angry about the beheading video, so I'm probably being more harsh than I should be. But I do believe we can leave them to their own devices and like Biology 101, natural selection will fix things.

[Calidissident]

I'm sure that slaughtering entire populations of cities in the Middle East would do a wondrous job of ending terrorism against America by Muslims.

[Derpetologist]

It ended Japanese war against Americans.

[Sudden]

Worked pretty damn well on the Japanese and Germans, two powers that were previously thought unyielding.

[Calidissident]

You're comparing a war between two nation states to a conflict against certain members of a religion that has over 1.5 billion adherents, forming the majority of the population in dozens of countries on 3 continents, with large minorities in many other countries, including millions in America. If all you care about is defeating ISIS at all costs, then that may work (though I don't think you would need to go that far). What do you do when the next Isis pops up? Or a terror cell in an allied country? Or when a pissed off American Muslim resorts to terrorism? How the fuck are people on a libertarian site seriously advocating genocide as a legitimate solution to terrorism?

[Irish]

You're comparing a war between two nation states to a conflict against certain members of a religion that has over 1.5 billion adherents, forming the majority of the population in dozens of countries on 3 continents, with large minorities in many other countries, including millions in America.

This, a million times. Calidissident consistently has the most reasonable and accurate posts on this website.

The exact same idiotic argument was used by Kurt Schlichter in his recent idiotic column at Townhall about how we need 'total victory' to defeat fundamentalist Islam. The examples he used of pursuing total victory were the obliteration of Carthage by the Romans, the defeat of Japan, and the American Civil War - totally ignoring the fact that all of those examples involved traditional armies fighting one another on behalf of competing governments.

The Islamic menace is vastly different because it has no borders, has no capitals, and does not raise armies in the traditional sense. Comparing that to traditional nation states combating one another is ludicrous.

[Calidissident]

Thank you Irish, that was exactly my point. Though I implied it, I meant to directly add that the enemy in this is not fighting a conventional war, or even a guerrilla campaign like the Vietcong were, for the reasons we have described. Heck, there isn't even one "enemy." ISIS and freaking al-Qaeda even hate each other, not to mention Iran, their allies, and many other groups. There is no head of the snake to cut off like there was in Carthage, Japan, Germany, the Confederacy, etc.

[Sudden]

The Islamic menace is vastly different because it has no borders, has no capitals, and does not raise armies in the traditional sense.

I concur, but it should be noted that the central threat with ISIS is that they are seeking to establish that with the Caliphate. Islamism itself will never die, much like communism in the abstract and even people with communist leanings did not die with the Soviet Union. But not allowing it to gain that state is a reasonable enough goal (that said, I don't think one that warrants the proverbial total war).

There is only one circumstance on the planet today that something approaching a total war strikes me as potentially justifiable: Israel in its dealings with Hamas and the Palestinians (which falls neatly into your "state" thesis).

[Calidissident]

They are attempting to establish that, but there's no way they're going to, because almost every other Islamic terrorist group that hates us also hates them. If ISIS had the support of Islamic terror groups around the world pledging their allegiance to them, then you might have a point in that regard. When even al-Qaeda thinks you're nuts, I really don't think your chances of establishing a base from which to unite the Islamic world into jihad against the infidels are very high.

[Sudden]

If they remain a strong horse, the rest of those organizations will follow. Or face full on insurrections from their adherents leaving/defecting.

[Sudden]

Ruthlessness in dealing with an enemy does not require wholesale genocide. Merely, it insists on achieving military objectives as efficiently as possible, without regard to the lives that are interrupted in the process. It's not a targeted campaign to kill civilians, it's only an insistence that the military objective must be paramount to other considerations.

And frankly, that's not what I'm endorsing. I'm actually sympathetic to the campaign of limited air strikes against ISIS because I do consider that strain of thought to be the central existential enemy in the world today, and ISIS is the first such group that has actually seized territory in significantly vast swaths, bringing civilian populations under its boot.

[Calidissident]

We were discussing the tactics used by the Romans and the Mongols, which at times were definitely genocidal.

[Derpetologist]

Was it genocide to bomb Axis cities? I'd say so. But if bombing cities works, do it.

ISIS controls an area about the size of Belgium. For all practical purposes, it is a nation.

Blow back is real, but if you kill a large enough number of the enemy, there's no one left to take revenge.

See the defeat of the Tamil Tigers for example. You can argue that the Sri Lankan govt killed too many civilians, but they did win.

[Calidissident]

"ISIS controls an area about the size of Belgium. For all practical purposes, it is a nation.

Blow back is real, but if you kill a large enough number of the enemy, there's no one left to take revenge."

If ISIS was the only thing we had to worry about, you might have a point. As we've discussed above, this is a global conflict. By the nature of this conflict, anyone with a weapon and a reason to kill can "wage war." How do you think Muslims around the world are going to react to the US going Ghenghis Khan on the cities of Iraq (in the name of protecting them from the ISIS hordes who are bad because they're slaughtering those same people)?

[Derpetologist]

And? I don't know if you've noticed, but there are plenty of Muslims who are pissed off at the US already.

The conventional armies of the Muslim world are a joke, at least compared to the US. As for solo jihadis, there are so few of them, it hardly seems worth worrying about.

Israel has been at war with the Arab world and to a certain extent the Islamic world for over 50 years. And the only reason they're still fighting them is because they believe in restraint.

I wonder if that restraint is the wisest policy.

[Dances-with-Trolls]

And the only reason they're still fighting them is because they believe in restraint.

What less restrained options would you suggest? I don't see any sea-level change in Islamic culture on the way that would eliminate the motivations for violence against Israel, and I can't think of any course Israel could take that does not involve them being bordered on all sides by Islamic majority nations. They are superior fighters, but they are vastly outnumbered. If they chose a scorched earth policy it could lead to a massive backlash. They can't do something that would unite the two halves of the ever boiling Islamic family feud against them or they will be crushed baring outside help. Which could lead to a WW3.

So what do they do?

[Derpetologist]

They managed get several decades of peace from their former enemies like Egypt, Syria, & Jordan by soundly defeating them. They bombed the crap out of Hezbollah 10 years ago and not a peep out of them. The Islamic world is already united against them, so I don't get the backlash threat.

I suggest giving an ultimatum to Hamas:

If you launch another rocket, we will bomb Gaza and we will not stop as long as there are 2 bricks stuck together.

And to the civilians of Gaza:

If you want to live, come to Israel and we will find a place for you either in Israel or elsewhere.

[Calidissident]

The Islamic world is united against them spiritually, but certainly not militarily. That could change if genocide or ethnic cleansing was used in Gaza, or the West Bank for that matter. The conflicts with other countries is fundamentally different from the conflict with Palestine, which involves two different groups of people laying claim to the same piece of land.

"If you want to live, come to Israel and we will find a place for you either in Israel or elsewhere."

Israel would never make this offer, they're not going to let Gazans move freely into Israel. And with this offer, why would Hamas operatives not pretend to be harmless civilians and then unleash attacks once in Israel?

[Derpetologist]

OK, what should they do then?

[Calidissident]

I'm not going to pretend to have all the answers to something as complex as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I do think, that at a minimum, Israel needs to end the settlement policy in the West Bank, which I think is the right thing to do even not accounting for political considerations. I don't pretend that this would solve everything, or even anything overnight, but I do think that steps like that make groups like Hamas less and less attractive to the Palestinian people. As long as the settlements are there, I don't blame any Palestinian who doesn't think Israel is actually serious about a two-state solution (to be fair, the same thing can be said about the Palestinians, Hamas particularly, for all of their heinous actions).

I personally don't see how total pacification of the Palestinians through force is possible without what would essentially be genocide and/or ethnic cleansing. Which, in addition to being immoral, would IMO prompt a major regional war, at a minimum, that would be far worse for Israel than dealing with Hamas on an ongoing basis.

[Calidissident]

Are we not discussing how to defeat Islamic terrorism generally? Or is this conversation solely focused on ISIS? They're a terrible, terrible organization, but they are one piece of a very complicated puzzle. The same with al-Qaeda. To think you're going to have a decisive permanent victory over Islamic terror the way we had over Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan is pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking. Slaughtering entire cities isn't going to bring about peace in this sort of conflict, and it's hardly the sort of actions that prove one's moral high ground in a conflict where the other side is evil for their usage of indiscriminate tactics against civilians.

[Derpetologist]

I'll stick with the general case. These organizations are finite. They only have so much money and so many men. Even if they pulled together, they are badly outnumbered and outgunned. Hit them hard enough, and they go down for good.

I'll qualify the total war comment- we should never target civilians, but we need to accept we will kill many if we want to get the bad guys.

When one side cynically uses the good faith & conduct of the other side, it is called perfidy.

[Dave C]

You have to get most of these ISIS turd forces out in the open in the Iraqi desert. I don't know if that is possible at this point.

If you can, then the USAF can incinerate them.

[Calidissident]

How do you do that against so many different organizations, most of which are not even remotely like a military you can easily and directly target, who are in so many different countries on different continents, etc.? Have you seriously considered the logistics of that? I mean, at a minimum, that's an invasion of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan, Iran, Libya, and do I need to keep going? Or do you think this can just be accomplished by bombs? And even assuming everything goes as planned, what happens when you leave and new organizations pop up?

[Dave C]

I'm talking about the ones in Northern Iraq. If they show up in significant numbers in a satellite spy shot, they get whacked. Gotta start somewhere.

Fuck you're stupid. I was talking about ONE region in Iraq. Fuck Pakistan.

[Calidissident]

I wasn't talking to you. If you didn't notice, Derpetologist and I have been having a conversation for a while, and my post was in response to him. He explicitly stated in his post that he was not just talking about ISIS and Iraq.

[Dave C]

Sorry, the sqrlz comment indenting system can be misleading.

[Derpetologist]

OK, how about this:
The US takes over Mecca and announces there will be no Hajj until all the Islamic terror groups give up. Also announce that any further terror attacks will result in the destruction of the city.

For good measure, demolish Al Azhar university.

Holding one city is a lot easier than occupying a country.

Some kind of crushing defeat has to be handed to them. Otherwise, they will fight forever. The only thing they seem to care about is their religion, so go after that.

I have had it with these fools. There can be no compromise, because they will not stop until either they win or they are all dead.

[Calidissident]

Your solution to pacifying religious fanatics is to attack, capture, and hold hostage their holy city? Good luck with that (not to mention our government would never "betray" our "friends" the Saudis).

I understand the desire for a short, simple solution to this problem. The reality of life is that there isn't always such an easy route, especially on something as serious and complex as Islamic terrorism.

[Derpetologist]

Worked for the Romans.

OK, how should the US defeat Islamic terror, if it can be defeated? Is it just something we'll just have to endure forever?

[Calidissident]

"As for solo jihadis, there are so few of them, it hardly seems worth worrying about."

Are those numbers permanently fixed? Quite a few people were upset by people killed by the US's "restrained" wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I don't think indiscriminately killing entire civilian populations of Muslim cities is going to help in that regard. Furthermore, I think solo and small independent cells are in some ways more of a direct threat than big groups. The London train bombers were homegrown and not direct agents of an external terror group, though a couple did go to training camps in Pakistan. The Madrid train bombings involved international participation, but there was never any evidence of direct al-Qaeda involvement. The Boston terror bombers were homegrown. ISIS and such groups are never going to pose a conventional threat to the US, and independent cells and lone whackos can pose as big a threat or more, even currently, via terrorism.

[PapayaSF]

The options aren't great. "Putting up with" Islamic terror forever is a poor option, because a goodly fraction of the Islamic world (it depends on how you count, but I'd say at least 5-10%) already support terrorists, think there's a religious war going on, and would be happy with the destruction of Judaism, Christianity, and much of the Western world. People sometimes claim it's a small percentage, but only a small percentage of Russians were Bolsheviks, and look what happened.

I think an explicit threat to Mecca is at least something to consider, though I agree it's problematic. And while few want to advocate religious war and genocide, at some point those may become the only options.

My long-term suggestion would be some sort of memetic warfare aimed at undermining Islam as a whole, by discrediting the Koran. Which is not hard to do, because early Islamic history and the earliest extant sections of the Koran do not line up with official Islamic history. Destroying the ideological basis for Islamic fundamentalism risks (among other things) alienating Muslim moderates, but it would be great to turn them all into versions of Mormons (a rather dodgy and violent cult that turned tame).

[Sudden]

I can;t get past the idea that we'd be killing a lot of 'innocent' people.

Methinks maybe you can, as you seem to recognize that 'innocent' might not be the best descriptor given the quotation marks.

I watched that entire hour long ISIS snuff-video/propoganda piece that posted here on a weekend thread last weekend. One of the things I noticed is that when they go into a new town, they have a session where they allow the population of that town to repent their apostacy (working with infidels), renounce, and accept ISIS and Allah as their masters. And the people do in droves, and none seem to give a shit.

The people of that region have a tendency towards being untrustworthy turncoats, without principles other than self-preservation. And abiding a force like ISIS is wholly akin endorsing them.

[Derpetologist]

In fairness, I'm sure refusing to attend those meetings is the practical equivalent of suicide.

[JW]

Are you actually being serious about unarmed 3rd world paupers standing up to these psychopaths and that they're worthless cowards if they don't? They want to see their family butchered in front of their eyes for being foolish enough to stupidly resist without any way to defend themselves?

This is is Cytotoxic level idiocy territory.

[Irish]

The people of that region have a tendency towards being untrustworthy turncoats, without principles other than self-preservation. And abiding a force like ISIS is wholly akin endorsing them.

Yeah, if my option was bowing to sociopaths or seeing my daughter raped, my wife beheaded, and my sons burned to death, I'd bow immediately and with great vigor.

If it makes me a coward that I don't want my entire family to be slaughtered, then so be it.

[Heroic Mulatto]

It's hard to say what one would do in such a situation until it actually happens, but I'd like to think that my family and I would have the moral courage to fall on our swords.

[JW]

I'd find another way, later. Get my family the fuck out of dodge and then come back to join any force that forms against them.

I think that's the better solution. My children's lives are worth more than simple pride.

[adifferentken]

Or preferably, go out with as many of the bastards as possible falling on my sword first.

[adifferentken]

This was meant as a direct reply to HM's comment, I like JW's plan better.

[Heroic Mulatto]

Hey, if you can bug out, then bug out. I'm talking about when you're finally hold up in Masada and there's no way out.

[JW]

In that scenario, I'll go with this plan: Feign fealty, get accepted into the ranks and frag as many of the motherfuckers as possible at the first opportunity.

If you're going to have to go out, do it with a little style.

[Cytotoxic]

It is good to see that I am not the only one who understands the necessity of killing and even targeting civilians in war. A free nation acting in self-defense or liberating the unfree has the right to do whatever is necessary for victory, including mass slaughter ex Hiroshima. It is morally obligatory.

Unlike a lot of people I am not too fazed by ISIS. I think they are pretty fucked strategically. Going all BIG SHIT on everybody was a terrible mistake especially picking a fight with the Syrian government. They had a symbiosis and that's a lot of why ISIS got as powerful as it did. Now they are a landlocked bunch of savages, many of them foreigners in a strange land, surrounded by hostile powers.

The real importance is in making friends with Kurdistan. A good first step would be LET THEM SELL OIL TO AMERICA.

[JW]

I rest my case.

Are you sure that's your final answer Sudden?

[Sudden]

Cyto's point is about the necessity of civilian casualties in war. I don't disagree with him there, entirely at least. I'd be far more reticent to go to war to begin with, but when you do, depending on circumstances of that war and the nature of the enemy being fought, I don't think you can always have the luxury of mitigating civilian damage. Not necessarily that you target civilian populations, just that you accept it as a consequence of war and that such consequences serve to fatigue the native populace with the govt/NSA that is bringing a superior army's wrath upon them.

Where it regards deference and bootlicking to theocratic tyrants, I suppose I was partly projecting my own circumstance (single, childless) on people there. If one has a family, I understand that they do what they can to protect that family. But having never been in that situation, I do wonder if there is a "at what cost/what good is protecting them if I leave behind a savage world" element to it.

[JW]

If one has a family, I understand that they do what they can to protect that family. But having never been in that situation, I do wonder if there is a "at what cost/what good is protecting them if I leave behind a savage world" element to it.

Trust me when I tell you that once kids arrive, your entire worldview changes. You will do anything to protect them.

When I was single and childless, I had no inkling of this. It's like a genetic switch that goes on when your first is born.

[JW]

Not necessarily that you target civilian populations, just that you accept it as a consequence of war

Of course, but that's not what you were saying.

Yours was along the lines of "Kill them all and let Allah sort them out." That's something a bloodthirsty, chicken-hawk loon like Cytotoxic would say.

[PapayaSF]

I agree that recognizing and supporting Kurdistan is one good short-term step.

[Dances-with-Trolls]

I would have the moral courage to fall on our swords.

Fuck that.

Bury the swords in the barn, say nice things to the evil man's face and when night rolls around dig up the swords, sneak into his house and cut his villainous throat.

[Gluesponge]

Did you also notice the little bit about them giving up their guns to the Caliphate too, along with their oath never to bring arms against the Caliphate? I thought that was funny... a Chicago-style gun-buyback, where the state got the guns and the citizens didn't get shot with their own weapon. It was a win-win!

That was a trying hour of film, but I watched it and realized that sanity left that place a long time ago.

[Sudden]

That was a trying hour of film, but I watched it and realized that sanity left that place a long time ago

It was painful to watch at times. But it filled me with a rage I haven't felt in quite a long time.

[Gluesponge]

The supreme irony of that film was that I could swear there was a dreamcatcher hanging from the rear-view mirror of the gunmen's car.

I got the same feelings deep in the pit of my stomach. It was the same feeling I got watching "The Memory of the Camps" about the Holocaust. The footage was uncovered from a Hitchcock documentary that was never finished.

When those ISIS nuts shot up cars, it hurt to watch.

[Sudden]

There definitely was. That caused me to literally LOL as well.

[GILMORE]

The "iraqi army" (the sunni ones) are more or less refusing to fight ISIS

And you can't bomb what is largely a guerilla movement out of existence.

[Derpetologist]

Maybe, but you can defeat them if they are dumb enough to attack all at once. If you could lure them into a conventional battle with the US, they'd get squashed.

[GILMORE]

General Westmoreland, that's a fantastic plan! Here's 100,000 more troops.

[Derpetologist]

Yeah, I was thinking about Tet too when I wrote that. Still, the Viet Cong were defeated in that battle.

Maybe a better analogy is the 2nd Boer War. That strategy would require harsh measures as well.

[Irish]

Maybe a better analogy is the 2nd Boer War. That strategy would require harsh measures as well.

Given that the Boer war ended in the first concentration camps and the British literally starving children to death, I think 'harsh measures' may be an understatement.

[Derpetologist]

And there is the heart of it. The first question to ask is this enemy a big enough threat to justify starving children to death, obliterating entire cities, and killing people by the tens of thousands? Because if the answer is "no", stay out of it.

[PapayaSF]

That was also the plan at Dien Bien Phu.

[Jensen]

I've been thinking about Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi...anyone got assassination ideas? Yeah, he might just end up a martyr, but it would probably royally fuck their chain of command up while various ambitious leaders try to get to the top spot.

[gaijin]

Well, when Osama was Terrorist #1 we leveraged human intelligence to get near him several times (before Obama singlehandedly killed him). With this guy, do we even have any friends close enough to him who would risk providing intelligence about him?

[Heroic Mulatto]

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi...anyone got assassination ideas?

Line the colons of the little boys he regularly sodomizes with arsenic?

[HazelMeade]

Killing Al-baghdadi will have no impact whatsoever.

Someone else will just replace him.

The only solution to this is to kill lots and lots of Islamic militants. And to keep killing them and killing them for a few generations until you have literally exterminated their genes from the gene pool. Call it anti-psycho genocide.

[Heroic Mulatto]

If Hulagu Khan couldn't do it, what makes you think we could?

[Derpetologist]

I don't recall any Muslims ever trying to invade Mongolia.

[Heroic Mulatto]

What's the Golden Horde, chopped liver?

Granted, the Golden Horde were Mongols who converted, but still....

[PapayaSF]

One thing would be to do what Hitler did to Stalin in the run-up to the war: the Germans created and "leaked" evidence that various Russians were actually spies working for them, and let Soviet paranoia do the rest. All those purges of the Red Army weren't just power struggles and disagreements over ideology, you know.

Such a plan requires a certain amount of knowledge of the people in the inner circles of ISIS, and a lot of clever spycraft.

[VG Zaytsev]

Video him being raped to death by a pig and vow that fate for all jihadi wannabes.

[Fist of Etiquette]

Foreigners are barbaric? Is that the takeaway?

[GILMORE]

The truly horrible thing about all of this is the rampant Islamophobia in America, really.

Any *educated* person knows that.

[Winston]

http://reason.com/blog/2014/08.....nt_4716448

[HazelMeade]

Yes, why DO Americans hate and fear Muslims? I don't understand it.

[Irish]

I don't even think there is very much Islamophobia in America. That's what's so bizarre. Is there any other country in the history of the planet that could have had a minority murder 3000 of its citizens in a sneak attack and have virtually no reprisals? Americans pretty much immediately realized Muslims as a whole weren't at fault and avoided collectively oppressing them.

Has a single Muslim been killed as a reprisal for 9/11? I can't think of any stories, and you'd think that would have been major news if it happened.

Islamophobia tends to consist of people saying something kind of mean or negative about Islam, at which point liberals throw a shit fit and pretend that this is just like Jim Crow.

[Calidissident]

There was a Sikh guy who was mistaken for being Muslim and killed four days after 9/11. There was also a spike in hate crimes against Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim in the time after the attacks. The Wikipedia article references shootings, but doesn't specify any other than the aforementioned example.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11#Hate_crimes

[Irish]

That still seems awfully small to me in a country of 300 million. Given the attacks on Israel in Europe due to their actions in Gaza, if Muslims crashed a plane into a major European government building during a single day where they killed 3000 people, the Europeans would be trundling them off to concentration camps within the week.

[Calidissident]

I agree that relative to other societies, around the world, and historically, the US is very tolerant in that regard. That said, in many ways that's not a very high bar, and a lot of American Muslims do regularly have to endure stuff like being called terrorists and otherwise attacked (I don't mean physically, usually) and made fun of for their religion (and in some cases, like that Sikh guy, for the religion ignorant morons assume them to have based on their appearance). That's not Jim Crow or internment, etc. but that doesn't mean it's not something that should be viewed as acceptable.

[Irish]

Completely agreed. I know multiple Muslims in America who are total secularists and don't deserve to get mocked for offenses committed by radicals.

Incidentally, have you noticed how much better America is at integrating Muslims than Europe? Gee, it's almost like a welfare state that allows people to hole themselves up in ghettos their entire lives might not be the best way to run a multicultural society.

[JeremyR]

If they are total secularists, they aren't muslims.

And no, given how many women I see in Burkhas here in St. Louis, I don't think we're doing such a great job assimilating them.

[Calidissident]

I didn't know that our very own JeremyR was the world's foremost Islamic scholar, here to lecture us what makes someone a Muslim!

And I seriously doubt you actually know what a Burqa is.

[Derpetologist]

How can you be Muslim and secular at the same time?

[Fist of Etiquette]

Love that scene.

[Fist of Etiquette]

That's how you do meta.

[Fist of Etiquette]

Ha, not racist enough. Nice.

[GILMORE]

"taunting"...or, "tanto-ing"? Eh? eh??

groan

[Fist of Etiquette]

Foster is blaming the victim. Double nice.

[Max Power]

Spoon for the bumper music.

[Winston]

Where's the Tick when you need him?

[Fist of Etiquette]

OF COURSE WELCH IS GOING TO DEFEND THE FROGS. Oh, wait, he didn't really.

[Rufus J. Firefly]

I agree.

Paris is a joke.

[Winston]

It's a good place to trash your old car.

[GILMORE]

The only purpose of that list is, "FUCK YOU CHINA"

[Fist of Etiquette]

This is sabermetrics?

[Heroic Mulatto]

No, SABERmetrics actually attempts for a level of rigor in its analyses.

[Rufus J. Firefly]

As dumb as those 'most liveable cities' rankings.

[GILMORE]

Best cities in the world
(to get fucked up in)

- Prague
- New Orleans
- Lisbon
- New York
- Amsterdam

[GILMORE]

- scratch Amsterdam
replace with Reykjav

[Winston]

Prague is a good place to be defenestrated.

And Lisbon is a good place to commit regicide.

[GILMORE]

There is a neighborhood in Lisbon called Bairro Alto ('high neighborhood'?)... up on a the tallest hill... with 2-3 streets running up/down the hill that are nothing but bars and restaurants... and every night of the week, from 6pm to 6am, its a nonstop party.

the weather is perfect, the food is great and cheap, and there are tons of flirty women.

trust me. its the shit.

[Sudden]

Amsterdam I felt was overrated for getting fucked up. Add Edinburgh though.

[GILMORE]

Yes, which is why i scratched it *(although renting a houseboat on the canals? FUN TIMES)

Edinburgh i was thinking of adding but removed for 2 reasons. The Scottish, and Being Glassed. That said, "very old cities" are indeed awesome drinking towns and it is one of them (*Kiev was also going to be noted but then i figured that was too current-eventy)

Reykjav?k on March 5th(?) is the icelandic version of Mardi Gras, and is one of the best parties on earth

Its called Beer Day

[Sudden]

I will check in with reports on the quality of Krokodil from Novosibirsk. I have a feeling Russia will be an awesome place to be fucked up, in part because it will be scary as all hell.

[GILMORE]

I've heard generally good things about Moscow, with a few reports of 'watch out for aggressive pimps'

[Max Power]

New Orleans is my favorite place in the world. You can get real fucked up but it's OK because 1. everyone else is doing it. 2. you feel classy because you've been drinking sazeracs and absinthe.

[GILMORE]

which is why its #2.

next to prague, being nearly-falling-down drunk in Nola is almost just as 'to be expected'. In prague, however, its almost *classy*.

[Rhywun]

I have fond memories of same in SF of all places - but instead of a "party" atmosphere, most of the city is kind of dead at night, which lends a certain elegance to wandering the quiet streets, stumbling drunk through such sites as the convention center, and passing a forty around while sitting on top of Snob Hill.

[Max Power]

I like when they bring in the local libertarian candidate.

[Ken Shultz]

"The executioner, speaking in British-accented English, warns that the also-captive journalist Steven Joel Soltoff will meet the same fate if the United States doesn't withdraw from Iraq."

If they'd stayed up all night trying to think of a better way to make sure we do NOT withdraw from Iraq, they couldn't have come up with anything better than this.

What a complete disconnect!

It's like Osama bin Laden thinking that the United States would withdraw from the Muslim world if he targeted American civilians directly. Their ideas about how Americans think and how we respond to things is just so far off, it's amazing.

I saw disconnects like this when suicide bombings really started taking off. So many of them thought that when we saw that they were willing to sacrifice their own children for their cause, we'd realize how desperate they are and sympathize with them.

Instead, a lot of Americans just thought, "Wow, insects treat their children like that! Let's hope Israel exterminates them".

You'd think ISIS would do stuff like behead Americans because they don't want us to leave, but their assumptions about us are so consistently off the mark, I don't think it's that. They just have no clue how Americans think.

[Derpetologist]

I think that cuts both ways. We think we're being kind by avoiding collateral damage, but our enemies just think we're stupid.

[PapayaSF]

You're both right. The Japanese regime had a similar misapprehension of Americans before Pearl Harbor. Those Japanese who had lived in the US knew better.

[Sudden]

At the time, that may have been true. Today? America, and more broadly the West, is largely a collection of pussies as far as governance is concerned. Sure, we have a spattering of men, but we're outnumbered by sniveling little onesie wearing bitchboys.

[Heroic Mulatto]

ISIS, or any of the Islamocrazy Killers Corps, aren't a group of hardened, disciplined, professional soldiers either.

Let's be fair.

[Irish]

At the time, that may have been true. Today? America, and more broadly the West, is largely a collection of pussies as far as governance is concerned. Sure, we have a spattering of men, but we're outnumbered by sniveling little onesie wearing bitchboys.

Admittedly true, but the people in ISIS and other terrorist organizations are horribly trained, have minimal equipment, no air power, and, to be frank, are largely total morons. We don't need many real men to beat them in a stand up fight, it's just that they tend to be just smart enough to avoid a stand up fight.

[Cytotoxic]

ISIS is/was the best of the best in the Syrian uprising for fighting skill. Very experienced warriors who still managed to get their asses kicked by lightly armed Syrian Kurds everytime. Weird and amazing.

[PapayaSF]

The Japanese misapprehension of us was partly ignorance, but partly they were blinded by ideology, egotism and wishful thinking. ISIS is even worse, because they believe Allah is on their side and take the Koran as revealed truth, in a way that makes even the most fundamentalist Christians look like hippy Unitarians.

True, ISIS knows the US is now run by hacks and whiney PC semi-sympathisers, but their perceptions are still distorted, as can be expected with suicidal totalitarian fanatics.

How to fight them, though, is a hard question. I still think we should have declared war on Al Qaeda and all allied terror groups after 9/11, and then a long campaign of assassinations, drone strikes, black bag operations, and really heavy pressure on Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

[Irish]

I think that cuts both ways. We think we're being kind by avoiding collateral damage, but our enemies just think we're stupid.

Sort of like how the Western media was convinced the Arab Spring would result in liberal Democracy spreading gloriously in the Islamic world, even though the best organized political parties with the most support were all Islamic Fundamentalists.

[Cytotoxic]

It did in Tunisia and Yemen has improved. Morocco increased the pace of liberalization and Algeria improved a bit. Algeria is an awful warmed-over Soviet state. Lets not be reactionaries.

[Irish]

They've improved very mildly. On the other hand, Libya is infinitely worse off than it ever was under Qaddafi, Egypt had to have a military junta installed in order to remove their thuggish fundamentalists, Turkey crushed their rebellion and is tending into the Islamofascist darkness (did you see fucking Erdogan's election results?), and Syria's uprising gave birth to ISIS while butchering over 100,000 Syrians.

The very moderate improvements in Tunisia hardly make up for the con column.

[Sudden]

If they'd stayed up all night trying to think of a better way to make sure we do NOT withdraw from Iraq, they couldn't have come up with anything better than this.

What a complete disconnect!

It could be a ruse precisely to draw us further in. An external enemy raining death from the skies may be what they feel they need to get the Average Muhammad on their side.

[Gluesponge]

After watching the beheading video, I think you might be onto something. It's a taunt. It's the national equivalent of "red-rover". They think that if they humiliate an American citizen on camera and then behead him, they'll get us angry enough to escalate our military response. Which given the climate of the world today would be considered naughty and we'd be punished by the rest of the world.

Seems rather far fetched, and I'm probably giving ISIS more credit, but the guy in the video did sound educated. So I wouldn't be at all surprised if the "brain caste" of ISIS is looking to draw the US into a quagmire, knowing they'll get protests and meddling from Russia and China.

Perhaps they're delusional enough to think it would become more than a regional conflict.

[Max Power]

This guy actually speaks pretty well and seems non-crazy.

[Winston]

You Know Who Else...

[Max Power]

Does this gentleman have some sort of manifesto that I might purchase?

[Grand Moff Serious Man]

Boardwalk Empire season 5 better be good. I am looking forward to it more than any Fall show.

[GILMORE]

Kennedy, making sure to get in an extra interruption before the interview ends

[Otis B. Driftwood]

Something's fuckin' fishy about this beheading video. Camera goes out right as dude starts sawing on his neck, there's no blood, the other journalist seemed lethargic....I don't buy it. Perhaps I'll wake up tomorrow and find that they whole thing was legit, but the video I saw isn't convincing.

[GILMORE]

You were comparing it to your library of other "genuine" beheading videos, right?

You know what? Dont tell me about your further research.

[Winston]

I'm wondering if the video, wherever he saw it, might have been censored to not show the actual beheading?

Also I don't have enough knowledge of beheading to know how much blood would actually spill in such an event...

[Derpetologist]

Did someone say genuine beheading videos?

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b57_1372272008

Do not watch if you have nightmares easily.

Choppy-choppy starts around 6 minute mark.

[Otis B. Driftwood]

You remember when Nick Berg got his grape sawed off? Then, about 10 other unfortunate chaps were beheaded in the months following?

I was a Marine infantryman during this time and we watched these videos to numb our senses. After you watch another man die in such a violent way, the images aren't so easy to erase.

The implication that I took some pleasure in seeing another man beheaded is a cunty move.

[GILMORE]

I apologize.

I find the whole thing too disturbing to watch myself, although i saw one of the first ones you reference. It was either pearle or berg. i don't want to see them again.

[Otis B. Driftwood]

I mean this sincerely: the video of Nick Berg's beheading was more traumatic for me than actually seeing the corpses of dismembered or burned up children in Iraq. Both were traumatic, but for some reason that I cannot explain, the grainy Berg video was worse.

And yet, I watched the video of Foley tonight, knowing what these videos can do to an individual's psyche.

[Fist of Etiquette]

Don't mess with the Texas whatever institute.

[Fist of Etiquette]

We're getting cracked heads and dead dogs back.

[Fist of Etiquette]

AH! Lou Dobbs.

[GILMORE]

DAAABSSS!!!

[Fist of Etiquette]

Well, they're slamming Phish.

[Max Power]

Here's funny comment I read on an article about how Comcast sucks:
Al Sharpton is a good man. Msnbc is just a network. Fox is the terrorist. Comcast should cut ties with fox then they'd be heroes. But Comcast has no control of what msnbc broadcasts

[GILMORE]

Thank god they stopped talking about Phish. That was really going the wrong way.

[Fist of Etiquette]

Yeah, I was trying to figure out what it was Moynihan was famous for recently. It was the Dillon thing.

[GILMORE]

I've seen lou reed play twice and he sucked terribly.

I met him once at a bar and he was there to see my friends band.

That's right. Lou Reed. I wonder where he is now.

[GILMORE]

Jason Blair? does he have a career in journalism?

Steven Glass?

[GILMORE]

Moynihan on John Tesh writing the jingle to Entertainment Tonight =
"he's like a player coach"

thats a 5-star snark

[GILMORE]

Raekwon the Chef

if Kmele were mean he could pull it off.

[Fist of Etiquette]

He knows GWAR from Beavis and Butthead.

[Fist of Etiquette]

Someone hold Welch's hair back.

[GILMORE]

I snuck across a stage where Dave Matthews was playing because I was too young to get into the bar the regular way

[Fist of Etiquette]

And no mention of Nickelback.

[GILMORE]

No cut off! that's good luck

[Winston]

I think the TMNT theme song is the best thing Chuck Lorre ever did. Anyone wish to dispute?

[Winston]

So in a few months it will the 50th anniversary of the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show. Were people in 1964 making big deals about music from 1914?

[Max Power]

I'd be kinda tough if they didn't really have recordings of it.

[GILMORE]

Thats sort of a silly question.

The 20th century saw a revolution in popular music. culture isn't 'linear'.

[Max Power]

Music became way more accessible to people in 20th century because of records. It is a silly question, but I think every comment Winston makes has some sort of agenda where he calls out the reason editors for being cosmotarians. So what is it here? The Beatles are overated and that cosmotarian Gillespie/Welch should stop referencing them?

[Heroic Mulatto]

every comment Winston makes has some sort of agenda where he calls out the reason editors for being cosmotarians.

So, basically, calling out the reason editors using an utterly meaningless term?

[Max Power]

yes.

[Christophe]

Well he doesn't use the term. He just implies it. Who knows what he calls it.

[Winston]

Well I don't like the term "cosmotarian" so I don't use it.

Wasn't it coined, or at least popularized, by the Rockwellians? Might have been Dilorenzo? I'm not interested in some Rockwellian/Reason factional bullshit so I instead critique both of them when I have problems with them.

[Irish]

In fairness to Winston, his complaints about Reason are accurate and substantive. They're the exact same complaints I have, although I'm not nearly as one-note as Winston is.

The issue here is that Reason sees no problem with advocating 'alliances' with the absolute worst leftists when they agree with us on one or two issues, but if a conservative agrees with us on 90% of all issues but doesn't like gay people or abortion, he's right out.

Furthermore, Reason doesn't seem to employ any cultural conservatives even though they make up a large portion of modern libertarians.

I'm a terrible hedonistic drunkard so I'm more in line with Reason's social beliefs then I would be with SoCons, but the point about Reason's innate biases is totally accurate.

I also think Reason is frequently anti-intellectual and doesn't publish enough intelligent and witty writers. If someone toes Reason's party line on an issue, they'll publish that no matter how bland it is rather than allowing much more interesting writers who swerve away from Reason's editorial position.

Shikha Dalmia is simply a bad writer and a doctrinaire one. You know where she stands on any article before you read it and you know it will be written poorly. They publish her instead of much better and more interesting writers because she meets their requirements in terms of her immigration beliefs.

[PapayaSF]

I agree up to point with most of that. Reason often seems a little defensive in the way they set themselves apart from conservatives ("No, babe, we're really not just 'Republicans who smoke dope!'"). Shikha is predictable and doctrinaire on immigration. I wouldn't say she's a bad writer, but she's not inspired or persuasive.

[Dances-with-Trolls]

Dalmia's big shortcoming to me is that she comes across as a moral scold, particularly on immigration. She's a more readable when she branches out to other topics, imo. When it comes to immigration if you disagree with her or believe that the situation is not quite so clear-cut the implication that you are a Bad Person is palpable in her posts.

[Heroic Mulatto]

She's a more readable when she branches out to other topics, imo.

Really? Her articles on India are terrible. She's like the world's only self-hating Hindu.

[Dances-with-Trolls]

Lol, HM, I was thinking more like the Detroit stadium thing from just recently. Her writing about India is to me like if one were an Indian and got their information about America solely from reading the Daily Kos. It might not, ya know, be quite a complete picture.

[Dave C]

They've lost a few long time regulars in the last couple of years (Cavanaugh, Monyihan, Balko), though even if you didn't always agree with them, at least they wrote fairly decently.

Some of the current batch of writer's leave much to be desired (Richmond: trade him back to LewRockwell.com).

[Irish]

I like ENB (even though she can be annoyingly leftist in some of her social arguments), like Welch, and like Sullum. I think Jesse Walker writes some good articles. Gillespie is not bad when he actually tries, but has been phoning it in for months.

Their rent-an-interns have no personality, but that might be because they aren't allowed a long leash. I think Reason should let their interns show more zest and verve instead of writing the same doctrinaire pap the last batch churned up.

The worst aspect of Reason at the moment is that it's taken the lead of the left in having very little intellectual disagreement on its pages. National Review (until they culled Mark Steyn for being too rambunctious) is actually more interesting at the moment than Reason because National Review publishes people with wildly divergent views. Charles C.W. Cooke, Jonah Goldberg, and Mark Steyn when he still wrote there have different styles, different concerns, and do not march in lockstep.

The key to a good magazine is chasing talent relentlessly, even if they don't align perfectly with your views, and then paying them to write articles that fit with your format. Reason has instead been chasing ideological conformity and the quality of the writing and argumentation has been hurt because of it.

There is something a bit grotesque in a libertarian magazine ending up stale and not innovative. That's the opposite of the anarchic, innovative zest that made me a libertarian in the first place.

[Irish]

Also, they need more reporting. Balko was great because he broke stories no one else was touching. Reason now is entirely people sitting at their desks and commenting on stories other people broke. This might be a budgetary issue in that they can't afford to finance journalism, but Weekly Standard, National Review, and Mother Jones are all magazines that are more alive than Reason because they chase stories to a larger degree.

National Review has basically been sending Kevin Williamson to a lot of left-wing cities to document their failures, Weekly Standard has been at the forefront of several plagiarism scandals (they broke the Doris Kearns Goodwin scandal), and Mother Jones has broken huge stories the last several election cycles, particularly the 47% comments by Romney in 2012.

Since Balko left and took his high end reporting chops with him, where is Reason's answer to that?

[Irish]

Note: I say this because I like several Reason writers, like their editors and want a serious libertarian magazine with serious ideas, serious arguments, and high end writing.

It isn't that I hate Reason (otherwise I wouldn't comment here) but that I think it could be vastly better and really be a high caliber magazine. It just annoys me that they take the easy road in far too many instances rather than fighting to be the most interesting magazine they can be.

[Dances-with-Trolls]

Recommend packaging your last few comments together in e-mail form and firing it off to them. Some good points, Irish.

[Sidd Finch v2.01]

Unlike other propaganda moneypits, Reason's current strategy appears to consist entirely of hiring reporters to quote other reporters and provide reporter-level snark. And the results are pathetic: Crazy Ed, ENB, JD, Shackford. Any of The Umlaut writers would be a vast upgrade, and they'd probably do it for free.

[Knarf Yenrab!]

In an era when CNN's articles are bullet-pointed on the front page of the site, is that supposed to be a bad thing? If JD and Gillespie can generate interest and attention with their colloquial commentary, isn't that good for us as a whole? Not every libertarian has to be Walter Block arguing about whether the nature of subjective value is ordinal or cardinal.

If you're interested in the epistemology of the different branches of libertarianism, there are plenty of sites out there for that. Reason is an effort to make centrist libertarian thought salient and accessible to a world full of people who don't know the difference between the 9th and 10th amendments.

I like the fact that Reason has some radicals lurking around and dedicates some space to people like Richman, but even if they didn't, they'd be an important element of the movement.

[Irish]

If you're interested in the epistemology of the different branches of libertarianism, there are plenty of sites out there for that. Reason is an effort to make centrist libertarian thought salient and accessible to a world full of people who don't know the difference between the 9th and 10th amendments.

That's not what I'm interested in. I've never read Walter Block.

Do you really think that Reason has any major impact in American society? What percentage of people know this magazine exists?

If you're interested in the epistemology of the different branches of libertarianism, there are plenty of sites out there for that. Reason is an effort to make centrist libertarian thought salient and accessible to a world full of people who don't know the difference between the 9th and 10th amendments.

That's not the issue. The issue is that they are overwhelmingly not interesting and their 'centrist libertarianism' seems more like moderate, spineless leftism than a movement of its own.

This country is moving left and is moving left fast. Making centrist, mildly left-wing libertarianism a small force that will simply be consumed by leftism in twenty years is not an option.

They need to be willing to fight for liberty. They aren't. We will all suffer in the end for the incapacity of libertarian magazines to express their ideas well and the mindless left-wing statism that emerges instead.

[Knarf Yenrab!]

That's not what I'm interested in. I've never read Walter Block.

Do you really think that Reason has any major impact in American society? What percentage of people know this magazine exists?

So you're a pragmatic who doesn't care about philosophy or Block. That'd be fine, but then you turn around and complain that Reason doesn't have a major impact on American culture--presumably like CNN or Fox--rather than recognizing that it has an increasingly greater influence with each passing month.

Movements don't develop overnight. Whether you personally have the patience for it or not, political libertarianism is Fabian libertarianism.

That's not the issue. The issue is that they are overwhelmingly not interesting and their 'centrist libertarianism' seems more like moderate, spineless leftism than a movement of its own.

The degree to which they're objectively interesting depends on the clicks their articles get and whether readers who don't breathe political philosophy can understand why libertarians might support gay marriage while opposing the CRA. There's a marked difference between how Reason has covered Ferguson and how moderate lefties might, the moderate left presumably being CNN and ABC.

[Knarf Yenrab!]

This country is moving left and is moving left fast. Making centrist, mildly left-wing libertarianism a small force that will simply be consumed by leftism in twenty years is not an option.

They need to be willing to fight for liberty. They aren't. We will all suffer in the end for the incapacity of libertarian magazines to express their ideas well and the mindless left-wing statism that emerges instead.

Not all of the US is moving left. The area I live in has moved toward the libertarian right in gun laws and in enthusiasm for more wars. There's a reason why the Pauls are attracting significant attention, and there's a reason why Slate is attacking libertarianism every other month. The idea is a threat, whether it's coming from CATO or from an obscure deontologist.

Shackford's primer on gay marriage and the freedom of association is exactly what Reason should be doing: providing a portal where some 19-year-old who has a vague notion of wanting to live his life in respectful peace can be introduced to ideas that he's never heard before. And if that's all he ever gets, then it's still better than it was before.

[Dave C]

Have you seen some of the comments on the Jacket's articles at cnn/time/dailybeast?

Peak Retard.

He isn't convincing anyone at those places. Gillespie might try something at WSJ or something less insane. Though WSJ is peak retard on drugs and foreign policy 🙂

[Dave C]

Yeah, I agree with that. May be a money problem, and they can't retain their best writers.

Fuck, most of the Jacket's articles appear first on dailybeast.com or time.com. He's supposed to be the second in command of this place!

Koch Brothers may have to pony up some more bucks.

Or us commentators 🙂

[Sevo]

Irish|8.19.14 @ 11:41PM|#
"Since Balko left and took his high end reporting chops with him, where is Reason's answer to that?"

I have some issues about this also.
We get the polls, but little else that isn't aggregating.
We get cruises and some local meet and greets (which don't come cheap).
I'm looking forward to a reason financial.

[Winston]

I always found it pretty funny that Reason's idea of youth outreach is Kennedy. I mean I never heard of her until she started writing articles here. Or some old guy who makes old pop culture references and complains about the youths not acting like he did when he was their age.

[Winston]

There is something a bit grotesque in a libertarian magazine ending up stale and not innovative.

Yeah, when I keep reading about the "libertarian moment" in Reason and I don't seem them really making an effort to reinvent themselves into something bigger and more influential. I mean if we are in the libertarian moment Reason should be becoming a Slate or Salon (Oh you know what I mean by that) of the libertarian element.

[Irish]

I mean if we are in the libertarian moment Reason should be becoming a Slate or Salon (Oh you know what I mean by that) of the libertarian element.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Reason is not wrong that there are more libertarians now than there historically have been, they are simply wrong that they're large enough to enact major legislative change.

However, they are certainly large enough that tremendously well written articles about libertarian ideas should get vastly more traffic and have more likes on Facebook than Reason has.

Reason should be publishing conservatives on issues that relate to libertarianism. If they got Mark Steyn to send some articles over here about police brutality, every article would have 10,000 likes on Facebook.

Now Mark Steyn might be too big a writer so he's too busy writing bestselling books to send articles to Reason, but the point stands.* There are plenty of high caliber conservative writers who could write articles about libertarian topics and get massive play. Reason simply does not seem interested because they sway from the libertarian party line.

*Note: Mark Steyn is such a fighter when it comes to his arguments, that you might actually be able to get him to do this just because of what a nutcase he is. Steyn doesn't behave like most writers of his caliber because he actually is a very strange man who always wants to fight.

[Winston]

Reason is not wrong that there are more libertarians now than there historically have been, they are simply wrong that they're large enough to enact major legislative change.

Okay I don't disagree that the libertarians are in position to make major breakthroughs but my issue is that they seem to not understand how fringe libertarian attitudes still are and that even minor libertarian reforms will have serious problems being passed. Libertarians will have to get elected in large numbers over several election cycles for such things to happen. Will they survive the media onslaught? Will they survive being a minor party not getting things done for some time and the vagaries of practical politics?

There will also have to be a major change in attitudes toward the government for such a thing can happen. Perhaps economic collapse will lead to it but it could just as easily lead to some dictatorship. Are libertarians in position to take advantage of an economic collapse? Since they have little media influence, little in the universities and no thugs then it is not likely. Libertarians aren't really in a position of strength over any of their allies and are ripe to be cast aside once their purpose has been served.

It's gone from being overly optimistic to delusional. I mean how can we go from "we are on the cusp of libertarian moment" to "libertarian era"?

[Irish]

Libertarians will have to get elected in large numbers over several election cycles for such things to happen. Will they survive the media onslaught? Will they survive being a minor party not getting things done for some time and the vagaries of practical politics?

And this is why we need a serious libertarian journal fighting in the trenches against intellectuals from other parties. They cannot abide this wishy washy leftism if they wish to have any influence when the debt comes due and the United States is no longer able to service its deficits.

This day will come, it will be catastrophic, and we need serious intellectuals who want to maintain liberty in order to counteract the serious possibility of fascism or actively racist government reemerging.

I am terrified for the future of the western world, and it seems to me that the people with whom I am aligned would rather engage in petty disputes about pot legalization than seriously engage with American culture.

[GILMORE]

"Their rent-an-interns have no personality"

Somewhere, Zenon and Rico Suave are sharing a bottle of Jamesons and going, "so do they have internships at Gawker? cause at least we'd get more pussy there..."

[PapayaSF]

I've been liking Kevin Williamson at NR.

[GILMORE]

"(Richmond: trade him back to LewRockwell.com)."

Richman?

I say trade. We'll take any of their cute interns. plus some pens, and a comfy chair.

[Winston]

The issue here is that Reason sees no problem with advocating 'alliances' with the absolute worst leftists when they agree with us on one or two issues, but if a conservative agrees with us on 90% of all issues but doesn't like gay people or abortion, he's right out.

I will say that one of my biggest beefs with Reason is that most of them seems to think that if they convince them that they are not Socons then the Progs will agree with them and stop calling them names. This of course overlooks the fact that the issues the Progs have with libertarians are quite a bit deeper than social issues.

I will add that I think the Rockwellians are guilty of many of the same things despite all of the factional wrangling. The Rockwellians too have a tendency to agree with the worst leftists as long as they oppose War, just like Reason. Rockwellians love Vidal, Zinn, Cockburn and McGovern just as must as Reason does.

[Calidissident]

"but if a conservative agrees with us on 90% of all issues but doesn't like gay people or abortion, he's right out."

I think that's a bit too harsh. They've been praiseful of Rand Paul, as well as guys like Justin Amash, who are culturally conservative. Ron Paul too, although I know they did criticize him over the newsletters, but even as someone who voted for Paul in 2012, that wasn't all that unfair.

I do agree that it would be nice to see more variety of opinion among the writers here, and some of the writers are pretty bland. I feel like Richman writes the same 3 articles over and over again. Dalmia too. And I don't know why Chapman's articles get posted here.

[Winston]

Ah, it's comment threads like this, and the fact that it came out of a post I made about the Beatles with no intention of criticizing Reason, that makes me want to comment here despite my criticisms of the staff. Sometimes I feel that the commenters, even ones that disagree with me like Calidissident ;), write much more interesting and funny things than many of the posts.

[GILMORE]

" I feel like Richman writes the same 3 articles over and over again"

3?

hmm. I must have missed the other 2.

FWIW, reading over a lot of the comments above...

I agree in broad strokes. They could do with more 'premier' talent doing more feature-level work, less 'polling millenial' regurgitations, etc.

I also agree with Irish about some of the squishyness. but not all. They do need a little more "Focus". they seem to churn out a lot of content, but it seems pretty thin compared to past years.

Maybe "Editor" Matt's been busy... i don't know... does he have a job on the side or something?

[Winston]

I'm referring more to irony of people praising the Beatles for rebellious youth music when today it the music of old fogeys and is older now than most of the music it was supposedly rebelling against at the time.

[Heroic Mulatto]

Fair enough.

[PapayaSF]

It's true. It's like some "punks" of today who dress like it's 1977: if you're rebellious just like Grandpa was, you're not really rebellious.

[Winston]

How about the notion that the yutes must rebel against Mom and Dad because that's what Mom and Dad did when they were young?

[Sevo]

Winston|8.19.14 @ 11:41PM|#
"How about the notion that the yutes must rebel against Mom and Dad because that's what Mom and Dad did when they were young?

Serious question: Do you think the fact that M&D 'rebelled' causes kids to do the same?
I pushed off from M&D at age 18 because I wanted to make my own life.

[Winston]

Well "juvenile rebellion" and moving out are not necessarily the same thing. I mean complaining about Mom and Dad wanting you to move out and get a job is an act of rebellion after all.

If anything I would think that this was the attitude of the Boomers which is one reason why many Millenials still live at home and why there is no Generation Gap.

[Irish]

AHAHAHAHAHAHAAHA! Gawker runs the dumbest article ever. Woman gets robbed by a 13 year old who steals her phone, catches him, and Gawker has a sad that she called him 'pudgy' in a newspaper.

"He was so pudgy and was slowing down, so that's why I caught up to him," Vondrich said, adding she felt sorry for the kid.

This kid has enough problems?he was booked on charges of grand larceny, his Mom is probably really mad at him, kids at school will definitely make fun of him endlessly for being caught from behind by a white lady wearing zany sunglasses. The last thing he needs is to be called fat in the newspaper. Have a heart, Clara Vondrich.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAA! Yeah, your white privilege just doesn't let you realize what it's like to be a 13 year old criminal.

As for the mom being mad at him:

"He's a very good boy," the mother added. "He's just been hanging out with the wrong crowd. I told him he has to stop hanging out with those boys."

They then actually get angry that she had the kid arrested. Yeah, clearly people who steal when they're teenagers should be coddled and forgiven so that they learn there are no consequences to theft.

If you are nonviolently mugged by a child, continue to let him run along with his friends. The world will be a better place.

And scene.

[Derpetologist]

Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.

[Andrew S.]

You know things are bad when even the Gawker commentariat thinks the article was bullshit.

[GILMORE]

You have to check the "Unapproved comments"

the ratio is 50-1 telling the guy what a fucktard he is.

and the unapproved comments are all rated higher than the article itself. Its a riot.

[Irish]

Nope, sorry, I don't care if he's five or fifteen, your take something of mine, I will chase your ass down and take it back. Why shouldn't the boy be arrested for stealing her phone?

So white ladies iPhones are up for grabs, so that kids don't have to go thru the justice system? How about DON'T STEAL??!!

This comment has 1300 upvotes. What are the odds this guy is against wealth redistribution?

I don't understand progressives. Even they seem to react violently to theft when it's committed by an individual criminal, but when committed by a state they deem it completely acceptable.

[Winston]

when committed by a state they deem it completely acceptable.

The State is (or should be) filled with TOP MEN who are acting in the greater good.

[Christophe]

That's a massive blind spot almost all non-libertarians have.

Start being a moral scold around people who think the state should legislate morality, and they'll get pissed at you.

Or anyone who thinks soda should be taxed. Start charging them everytime they're drinking one.

[GILMORE]

". Even they seem to react violently to theft when it's committed by an individual criminal, but when committed by a state they deem it completely acceptable."

this is going to sound terrible... but they're beta males.

They hate the idea of being individually picked on, but when a mob all agrees about something, they're first to grab their pitchforks and chime in.

Mob mentality. they want to be part of a herd. It is a powerful thing, desire for group approval.

[ant1sthenes]

Statism is a religion, with the state as a god. It slots in pretty well (judging, executing, giveth-ing and taketh-ing away, smoting evil foreigners from the heavens with inhuman winged servants, being anthropomorphized as a old bearded white guy).

Get a theist to call God a bastard after the next big natural disaster, and then we can talk about the progs' blind spot.

[Sevo]

'He wuz turnin' his life 'round!'

[Knarf Yenrab!]

He just had to pause halfway through to catch his breath.

[Cytotoxic]

If you are nonviolently mugged by a child, continue to let him run along with his friends. The world will be a better place.

If I am ever in this situation, I will make a point of having the kid arrested just to spite Gawkertards.

[Winston]

The last thing he needs is to be called fat in the newspaper. Have a heart, Clara Vondrich.

This better be sarcasm, right?

If you are nonviolently mugged by a child, continue to let him run along with his friends. The world will be a better place.

Where would Gawker be without the calls for redistribution of wealth?

[PapayaSF]

Let's hire a gang of kids to "non-violently mug" Nick Denton. Maybe just a quick snatch-and-grab visit to the Gawker offices.

[userve32]

Boy that really makes me mad. Seriously.

http://www.Anon-Surf.tk

[Sevo]

Well, jsut roll with it!