We Should Live - Ben Bateman

The exclamation mark has been hunted to near extinction. It was the grammar teachers who did it, but I blame the little girls.

Schoolchildren learned that exclamation marks are never necessary, and often wrong. So from a pure game-theory perspective, the schoolchild’s only logical course of action was to avoid them entirely. That habit persists into adulthood. It’s very, very rare to find a professional writer who uses them.

If you picture the situation from the grammar teacher’s perspective, it’s easy to see how the rule developed. The problem, as I said, is with little girls. Now please understand: I have nothing personally against little girls. In fact, I’m quite fond of them. Most of them spend most of their time brimming with hope, enthusiasm, and a love of life. And that’s very, very sweet. Unfortunately, at that age they have limited skill with the language, so they can’t effectively express the boundless sunshine within their souls. Yearning to express the sunshine in their souls, they cannot resist the exclamation mark.

For most little girls, everything is an exclamation: “Hi!!! How are you?!? I am great!!!” More exclamation marks mean more excitement, of course, but there’s a law of diminishing returns. At some point, it’s best to shift to replacing the dots on the exclamation marks with little hearts to express truly unbearable levels of enthusiam. And since enthusiasm generally equals attractiveness, even those little girls who don’t feel these high levels of enthusiasm feel compelled to fake it.

So we can hardly blame the grammar teachers for clamping down on exclamation marks. When someone’s job includes reading children’s essays for a living, I won’t begrudge them whatever they need to keep their sanity. But now that we’re all out of grade school, we can revive this long-neglected little character on our keyboards.

Here’s how I start: Some sentences are syntactically exclamatory. Contrary to what your grade-school teacher may have told you, sometimes it really is wrong not to end with an exclamation mark. These sentences generally start with “what” or “how”:

What a wonderful day!

How kind of him to share his unsolicited opinion with us!

I can cite no source for this rule beyond my own sense of the language. And if someone can present a counterexample I’ll be happy to consider it. But my position for now is: Sometimes you really have to use an exclamation mark. And don’t worry: Your grade-school teacher won’t mark you down for it.

William F. Buckley Jr. starts his most recent column with: “One can’t doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed.” He then complains that the Iraqis hate us, and that the Iraqi government isn’t strong enough to hold the country together. He says that we should concede defeat and start coping with failure. His short little column isn’t much for facts, but it’s long on despair.

I’m surely not the only conservative scratching my head over this. Perhaps his health is poor. Your guess is as good as mine. Probably better.

Reading it, I’m glad that we have a man like George Bush in the White House. Because while Bush is smart, he’s no intellectual. He’s a man of willpower, of action.

If you study wars, it’s important to keep in mind that the participants didn’t know who was going to win. It’s easy to look back and say that they should have known based on X, Y, and Z. (As, for example, many did with Michelle Malkin’s book about the Japanese internment.) It’s easy, but foolish. The fact is that people in the midst of conflict are always missing vital information. They don’t know what the enemy is up to. They don’t know how their own forces will perform. They don’t know where the enemy morale is, and they don’t know the extent to which their own low morale will cause problems.

There’s a whole genre of computer wargames devoted to extreme accuracy. One of the best is Combat Mission, from Battlefront. While it warps time scales a little to put infantry, tanks, and artillery all in the same battle, it gives a good sense of what fog of war is like. To most computer gamers, “fog of war” refers to the opaque black gunk that you have to push back in a Real-Time Strategy game. But the phrase originally referred to the sense of confusion that commanders experience in battle.

Commanders often have little information about how the battle is going. They see or hear about their own casualties, and the enemy’s guns never seem to stop firing. This emotionally stressful situation often tempts commanders to project their worst fears onto the lack of information. They often assume that the enemy knows more, has suffered fewer losses, and so forth. The resulting sense of despair often produces very poor command decisions.

I’ve learned this in my own small way through years of playing human-on-human computer games where you have limited information about the other guy’s units. It requires a conscious, deliberate act to remember that the other guy has problems, too. He may be running out of men, or low on ammo, or he may have a morale problem. The machine gun that’s terrorizing your men may be the only functioning unit that he has left. In WWII simulations like Combat Mission, where you’re often shooting at an enemy who is far away, it’s isn’t unheard-of for infantry on both sides to run away, because each side assumes that the other is bristling with fresh troops.

Those games will also show you how deadly those erroneous assumptions can be. The standard tactic against a squad of low-quality troops is to pour lots of fire into their position, until you get your first kill. You usually won’t have enough ammo on hand to kill the whole squad that way, but you don’t need to. After that first kill, the squad will break cover and run, which makes it easy to mow them down.

To my knowledge, William F. Buckley, Jr. is primarily a student of politics and government, not war. So I don’t grudge him his error. But it is an error. Most struggles look hopeless before they’re won, and they always look hopeless if you think only of your own side’s problems. The solution is to remind yourself of the other guy’s problems.

Imagine that you’re the president of Iran. What are your options, exactly? How do you win this game? You surely don’t win it militarily; the US Marines can easily cut apart anything you put on a battlefield. And it might be satisfying to nuke a US or Israeli city, but only during that window of time between 1) the mushroom cloud, and 2) the US air strike that cuts your communications network to pieces in preparation for invasion.

It’s simple: The terrorists can only win if we let them win, and we will only let them win if we wallow in despair.

The complain against the Iraq War boils down to unmet expectations. It’s taking longer than we would like it to. We’ve had more casualties than we would have liked. The various factions in Iraq want to kill each other.

Well boo frickin’ hoo! In this war, have we suffered tens of thousands of casualties like they did in the Hurtgen Forest, on Okinawa, or on Iwo Jima? Have we lost 65 bombers and 600 aviators in a single day, like they did on Black Thursday? Does even the worst-case scenario with the terrorists threaten our survival as a nation?

It all comes back to the same old question: Is life worth it? In this case, is it worth it to do what we need to do to keep our country safe? Apparently there are some, even on the right, who say no. And it’s in the nature of a country that we have to love ‘em. We have to tolerate their whining and moaning and unmet expectations, even as brave men are fighting and dying on the other side of the world for us. Because—Who knows?—the fearful may yet find their courage, and any one of us might yet lose ours.

But perhaps we can say discreetly and with all respect to those on our side who are wavering: Shut up, Bill. There’s a war on.

Update: James S. Robbins has an NRO piece pointing to evidence that Osama and Al Quaeda are quite desperate.

Remember Halliburton? Back in the run-up to the second Gulf War, the libs couldn’t stop talking about how the impending hostilities were all about making Cheney’s business buddies rich.

The funny part was that few people understood what Halliburton did, or how it was going to make money in Iraq. Many assumed that it would just take the Iraqi oil somehow. Unless you have some kind of education or experience relating to the oil industry, the phrase “energy services” doesn’t mean much. What kind of services does an oil well need? You just kinda stick a straw in the ground and the oil bubbles out, like in The Beverly Hillbillies. Isn’t that how it works?

Well, no. Producing oil and natural gas is actually fantastically complicated—so complicated that it’s difficult just to give a novice a sense of how big it is. It’s full of scientific, engineering, and financial challenges that require expertise just to know how to ask the questions correctly, let alone how to answer them.

My point is that no one on the Left cared about that stuff. All they knew—all they wanted to know—was that Halliburton had something to do with oil, there’s lots of money in oil, Cheney was connected to Halliburton, and Iraq was full of oil. Therefore, obviously, the whole war was just a scam to make money for Halliburton.

It sounded silly, didn’t it? The response should have been: What the heck do YOU know about the energy services business? But nobody wanted to go there, because that conversation requires knowledge and experience far beyond the scope of ordinary political chatter. There’s a limit to the amount of detail that the public will absorb—and to the amount of research time that political commentators can devote to a single story.

Today much of the conservative blogosphere is in an uproar because a company somewhere in the Middle East has some kind of ownership rights involving some US ports. to my friends on the Right, I say: What the heck do YOU know about the international shipping trade, exactly? I know that I know nearly nothing about it, and that knowledge apparently puts me way ahead of most conservative bloggers and commentators.

According to this article, about nine million containers pass through our ports every year. (This article puts it closer to ten.) That’s a river of commerce upon which our current prosperity depends. Shall we hire an army of customs inspectors to paw through each container, which on average is about forty feet long and weighs about thirty-thousand pounds? Even if you wanted to pay the taxes to hire them all, the inspection time alone would cripple international trade, because so many big companies today rely on just-in-time inventory.

Beyond ignorance of international shipping, the uproar over the ports demonstrates the sort of simplicity of thought about contractual relationships that law schools beat out of every first-year student. The news stories say that the UAE company “owns” those ports, or that it’s “leasing” them, or that it “manages” them. What does that mean? What rights would Dubai Ports World really have? The only precise answer lies in many inches of dense legal documents, or you can get an approximate answer from someone with real experience in international shipping. But if you haven’t read the documents, and if you have experience with international shipping, then don’t assume that you know what it means to own, lease, or manage a US port.

Michelle Malkin is apparently the leading conservative blogger who is upset about this. Here’s what she’s worried about:

The issue is not whether day-to-day, on-the-ground conditions at the ports would change. They presumably wouldn’t. The issues are whether we should grant the demonstrably unreliable UAE access to sensitive information and management plans about our key U.S ports, which are plenty insecure enough without adding new risks, and whether the decision process was thorough and free from conflicts of interest.

She apparently assumes that our security measures and contingency plans for US ports are carefully kept secrets. I doubt that it works that way. The only way to secure international commerce is to work with our friends, not hide from them.

Those who are in hysterics over the ports seem to imagine that international container traffic is like the US mail, where anybody can pay the postage and stick their parcel into the stream, and our only defense is to pluck out the bad parcels at some later point. But the people who actually do this stuff for a living seem to agree that such a system could never be secure, because the modern streams move too fast. The only way to secure the system is to scrutinize containers as they enter the system. This is why the Container Security Initiative (“CSI”), for example, focuses on identifying and inspecting high-risk containers in foreign ports before they enter the stream of commerce, rather than trying to pluck them out afterwards at US ports. The US Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”) agency has a detailed multi-layer plan for securing US ports, which includes CSI, random inspections, large-scale radiation checks, and a partnership with the large international businesses for ensuring that cargo stays secure before it even enters the containers.

A mere hour’s research into the world of international container security should show that the professionals, who really know about this, say that you don’t keep containers safe with super-secret port security protocols. You keep the containers safe through openness, by establishing mutual-trust relationships with the major foreign ports and the major international shippers. If the review process on this deal seems cursory, maybe that’s because the Bush Administration wisely left the decisionmaking to the people who do this for a living and know how to handle it, rather than barge in like a bunch of arrogant amateurs who think that an afternoon’s Googling means that they know just as much—or more!—as those who have spent a lifetime in the industry.

Also, I’m astonished at how easily the conservative blogosphere has assumed that the UAE is run by a bunch of crazy rag-heads who can’t be trusted. The typical smear is that the 9/11 hijackers “had ties” to the UAE, or that they planned part of their operation in the UAE. If that’s the standard, then we can hardly trust US companies to operate our ports, because “we” (meaning someone in the country) taught them how to fly the planes! Can anyone seriously claim that the UAE government had anything to do with 9/11? I don’t think so.

In all this soon-to-be-forgotten hoopla about the ports, I smell one of the Right’s age-old vices: isolationism. The outside world is a source of constant change and stress that tempts us to pull up the drawbridge, lower the portcullis, and shut everyone else out.

Attention conservatives: Read your history! Isolationism Does. Not. Work! Unless we intend to kill all 1.4 billion Muslims, we need a serious plan on how to establish a peaceful Muslim world. The UAE seems like exactly the sort of country that we should embrace, but this ridiculous panic is driving us away from them, pushing us to welsh on a legitimate business deal, and making us appear unreliable in the international arena. Plus, it’s damaging the President and helping the Democrats, who get to pretend that they care about national security while helping their union buddies.

Finally, let’s assume, just for argument, that Michelle Malkin, et. al. are correct in that this deal might have measurably lowered security at certain US ports. Let’s assume that, had the port deal gone through, then there was a measurable chance that a future a terrorist plot might have succeeded, whereas now it will fail because the ports will stay in non-Muslim hands. What’s the chance? Five percent? Three percent? One percent?

But now look at the real damage that this stupid uproar has already caused. President Bush has been damaged politically, and will have trouble advancing his agenda for several months. Congressmen will waste time holding hearings and conducting investigation. The Democrats are ecstatic. Maybe they can use this to hammer Republicans in the 2006 elections that are only eight months away. Those are real 100%-certain costs that we’re suffering right now because some conservatives decided to throw themselves into a panic rather than thinking logically.

It must feel good to engage in dark conspiracy-mongering, where even those who appear to be our friends are secretly our enemies, and we can trust no one. It must feel good, but it’s childish. In the real world, we must manage real risks, and the political cost of this tantrum has already far outweighed whatever risk the deal might have represented. The point of politics is to accomplish goals, not just to feel good. So my fellow conservatives, I beg you: Can we please drop this self-damaging non-issue, and move on to something serious?

Edit: Tweaked the title a little for parallelism.

This article by Stanley Kurtz appeared only briefly at National Review Online. Mr. Kurtz is an expert on the modern issues surrounding marriage, with a special focus on Europe as a lesson for the United States. In this article, he reports on the politics of marriage in Sweden. I had always heard that Sweden is a very liberal country, but until reading this article I hadn’t realized just what that entails.

The article details the formation of a gender-oriented Feminist Initiative (“FI”) party, which broke away from Sweden’s Left party—to go further left. Kurtz says that the mainline feminists had been pushing an initiative to force the boards of publicly traded Swedish companies to be 25% female, but it seemed to be failing. So one of the farther left feminists, Gudrun Schyman, proposed something even more radical, which split the Left party and helped form FI:

A few months before Schyman bolted the Left party to form the Feminist Initiative, she had stirred up controversy by proposing a “man tax:” a tax leveled only on men, to help pay for the government’s extensive array of feminist-run shelters for battered women. Schyman’s “man tax” idea stirred outrage from more moderate commentators like Liza Marklund: “To declare that all men are guilty of all rapes, that all men are guilty of violence against women — that’s not just offensive and wrong; if the purpose is to get anywhere with this issue it’s just plain stupid.”

No doubt there are plenty of Women’s Studies professors in the US who would enthusiastically embrace such a proposal. Fortunately, they would be considered lunatics and pariahs. But not so in Sweden:

So long as the “man tax” and business-board quotas were the issue, Schyman’s promise to “break down the patriarchal order of power” through FI (the Feminist Initiative) enjoyed wide support. Early polling showed that five percent of the public would “definitely” vote for FI, and an amazing 20-25 percent said they would at least consider supporting FI. Numbers like that could easily have brought business-board quotas, a man-tax, and many other feminist proposals into law.

Predictably, the radicals wanted more. They wanted to change Sweden’s rape laws to produce more rape convictions. They wanted to force wage equality between jobs in which the workers are predominantly men or women. They wanted to force men to take paternity leave, on the assumption that this would make them do more household work—or push the children into state-run day care. They actually won an entitlement to lesbian couples for state-funded insemination, with the clear possibility that a child could have three parents. And the Miss Sweden pageant was canceled for the first time since 1952.

Then the mask slipped. Last summer saw the broadcast of a television documentary titled “The Gender War,” which showed just how bizarre the militant feminists really were. The most politically important segment featured Ireen von Wachenfeldt, chair of the government’s women’s shelters—the same shelters that FI had already proposed to fund with a special tax on men. Ms. von Wachenfeldt’s government agency had printed (and presumably distributed) excerpts from the SCUM Manifesto, which in its first sentence calls on “civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females . . . [to] destroy the male sex.” From Kurtz’s article:

SCUM goes on to say: “To call a man an animal is to flatter him: he’s a machine, a walking dildo.” Asked by the film-maker if she agreed, Von Wachenfeldt said, “Yes, man is an animal. Don’t you think so?”

This produced a fierce political backlash against the Feminist Initiative, but the radicals were slow to learn their lesson. After a bitter power struggle at its September 2005 convention, the group purged its “moderates” (by their standards) and went even further left: It elected as its leader a feminist professor known for calling women who sleep with men “traitors to their gender.” And the group emerged from its conference with a proposal to abolish marriage and replace it with domestic partnerships.

The group’s political influence collapsed shortly thereafter, mostly due to the documentary and some excesses at the group’s convention. (A line from one song performed at the convention was: “F***ing man, we’re going to chop you to bits.”) So the other liberal parties in Sweden will likely keep nibbling away at marriage, but its outright abolition isn’t on the political horizon—for now.

The small lesson here is that this is where the liberals in our country want to take us with their various assaults on marriage. And he’s right, of course. The slope really is slippery, and anyone who is paying attention can easily see where it leads.

The bigger lesson is that radicals of all stripes are never satisfied. Whether they’re radical on gender, the environment, animal rights, race, or Islam, the belief’s content matters less than its structure. They all want to destroy the world as it is to achieve whatever utopia they believe is just around the corner.

And there’s one bit of comfort: This story from Sweden is a reminder that the radicals do nearly as much damage to each other as they do to the rest of us. Of course, throwing people out of a political party is trivial compared Stalin’s purges, but the impulse and social dynamics are the same. The radicals always ultimately destroy themselves, but they cause an awful lot of misery in the meantime.

An Austrian court recently sentenced David Irving to three years in prison. His crime was violating a 1992 statute that applies to anyone who “denies, grossly plays down, approves or tries to excuse the National Socialist genocide or other National Socialist crimes against humanity in a print publication, in broadcast or other media.” State prosecutor Michael Klackl called Mr. Irving “a dangerous falsifier of history,” and his statements an “abuse of freedom of speech.”

This is a modern Rorschach test: You’ll see what you want to see.

To some there is no evil greater than the Holocaust, so no punishment is too severe for those who would minimize it. I suspect that the Simon Wiesenthal Center is somewhere near that view, as one would expect.

To some, David Irving deserves punishment because he has evil thoughts. This is the modern utopian syllogism that leads to hate-crime laws and campus speech codes: “People have evil thoughts. To make the world better, we need to stop them from having evil thoughts. So let’s punish all the people with evil thoughts, to discourage them from thinking that way, and thereby make the world a better place.”

Some who find this verdict upsetting have had a taste of liberal utopia, and don’t like it. Perhaps they’ve seen the reality of campus speech codes or hate-crime laws, and have realized that the quest to perfect mankind twists the souls of those who pursue it. Xrlq says it nicely: “It sure is nice to know that Austria, like its neighbor to the north, loves tolerance and democracy so much it throws people in prison for not appreciating them enough.”

Some wits might wonder about the kind of world that the authors of this Austrian statute hope to create: With what other historical events do they hope to criminalize inaccuracy? Note that Mr. Irving recanted his Holocaust denial at trial, claiming to have discovered new evidence and changed his mind after giving the speech for which he was convicted. With this crime, ignorance is apparently no defense. Perhaps this will motivate schoolchildren to study extra-hard for their history exams: Too low of a grade could produce a criminal investigation. And it raises some interesting questions about historical research: What’s the point of studying any area in which the government has established an official history? Either you confirm what people already think they know, or you risk going to prison.

What worries me is that the very idea of free speech is breaking apart in the West, as government officials talk freely of the “irresponsible” use of free speech, and as a European court brushes aside Mr. Irving’s “right to be wrong” defense. Hate-crime laws are common now in Europe, Canada, and Australia, and they are creeping into US law as well.

At the same time, US liberals loudly complain about how the War on Terror has supposedly brought our country to the brink of a Dark Night of Fascism. Consider this story about a seventh-grader who wrote an essay about “doing violence to President Bush and various corporate executives.” The school called the police, and the police called the Secret Service to confirm that this was nothing more than a childish flight of fancy. No one was arrested, no charges were filed, and the student was not sentenced to three years in prison. But the ACLU still criticized those involved for—wait for it—“criminalizing student thought.”

So that’s where we are today: If the police ask a seventh grader if he really intends to kill Pres. Bush, then that’s “criminalizing student thought,” even though no one is charged with a crime. If a crackpot historian claims that the Holocaust didn’t happen, but then recants, then that really is a crime, and he goes to prison for three years. Fortunately, it’s not (yet) a crime to have evil thoughts in the US—unless you commit another crime, in which case you can usually also effectively be charged with the extra thought-crime of hate.

At least we still have something kinda resembling free speech in this country. For now.

Edit: William F. Buckley, Jr. has an article on the David Irving case here.

The Muslims want to kill us. Maye it’s all of them, or maybe just a tiny minority. Or maybe it’s just a tiny minority, but they make sure that the silent majority stays silent. Maybe the murder of non-Muslims is a perversion of an otherwise peaceful religion, or maybe world conquest is built right into the Koran. I don’t know. It’s all too big and complicated for any non-expert to really understand.

But here’s a speech by a woman who thinks that she understands, and her credentials are excellent :

I was ten years old when my home exploded around me, burying me under the rubble and leaving me to drink my blood to survive, as the perpetrators shouted “Allah Akbar!” My only crime was that I was a Christian living in a Christian town. At 10 years old, I learned the meaning of the word “infidel.”

I had a crash course in survival. Not in the Girl Scouts, but in a bomb shelter where I lived for seven years in pitch darkness, freezing cold, drinking stale water and eating grass to live. At the age of 13 I dressed in my burial clothes going to bed at night, waiting to be slaughtered. By the age of 20, I had buried most of my friends–killed by Muslims. We were not Americans living in New York, or Britons in London. We were Arab Christians living in Lebanon.

Her prose crackles with passion that the most bellicose of conservative American bloggers and commentators can’t duplicate. Here’s the climax:

Even after 9/11 there are those who say that we must “engage” our terrorist enemies, that we must “address their grievances”. Their grievance is our freedom of religion. Their grievance is our freedom of speech. Their grievance is our democratic process where the rule of law comes from the voices of many not that of just one prophet.

Note that she isn’t affirming every doomsday scenario involving the terrorists. She’s right—and she knows that she’s right—because she’s talking about what she really knows, which is how the terrorists perceive us and our actions. Her point is simple: They will keep on trying to kill us until we defeat them. Attempts at tolerance or conciliation only encourage them. Eventually, America and perhaps Europe will stand up and fight. Her question, and mine, is: How many more deaths until that happens?

I don’t like this word. I’m not saying that it’s wrong in any grammatical sense, because, 1) lots of people use it, and 2) it’s tacky to declare words to be “wrong”. But it’s an awkward and graceless word. Here’s why:

Schoolchildren learn that adverbs end in -ly. You can create adverbs in English by tacking -ly onto various words, such as “slow” to “slowly” or “hopeless” to “hopelessly”.

It’s a very flexible system, but it does have its limits. One of those limits is that -ly creates an adverb only when attached to an adjective. If you attach it to a noun, then the -ly produces an adjective, as in “manly” and “womanly”.

And that’s the problem with “purposely”: It’s a noun plus -ly that pretends to be an adverb rather than an adjective. I can’t think of any other word like that in English.

Maybe “purposely” would be more palatable if we had no other way to describe an action as being full of purpose. But that’s not the case. We have the far more graceful word “purposefully”, which follows the rules: It starts with a noun (purpose), adds -ful to turn that noun into an adjective (purposeful), and then adds -ly to turn the adjective into an adverb (purposefully).

Others disagree. Bryan Garner, on whose usage guide I often rely, presents both words as acceptable, and even claims to see a difference between them, with “purposely” meaning “intentionally” and “purposefully” referring more to a specific goal.

I just don’t see it. If you want to say “intentionally”, then use that word. Intent and purpose are related, but they’re distinct ideas, especially for lawyers, e.g.: The defendant intended to strike the match, but in doing so it was not his purpose to cause the explosion. “Intent” refers to immediate actions, while “purpose” refers to consequences of our actions that occur farther in the future. It’s a shame that people use “purposely” to blur the distinction.

Commenting on this post, ucfengr doubts my assertion that martial arts such as Judo, Karate, etc. are mis-named in English, because they wouldn’t be especially useful on the battlefield. He argues that the US military spends a lot of time teaching unarmed combat to soldiers, so it must have some military value.

And he’s mostly right, but it’s complicated.

In some cases, US armed forces members learn martial arts for the same reason anyone else does: It’s fun, and it keeps you in shape. The US Army has a martial arts team just as it has a chess team and a football team. With as many people as the US armed forces employ, they’re bound to have all sorts of hobby organizations to keep up morale.

For those servicemen who are really going to do the fighting, this article about the Marine Corp Martial Arts Program probably reflects current thinking on why they put time and money into martial-arts training. The main purpose is apparently psychological:

Today, the MCMAP’s overarching purpose is to mold and strengthen the USMC collective identity, social structure, and culture.

This follows the article’s introduction about how morale dropped in all the branches after the Vietnam War. The USMC in particular is devoted to maintaining a warrior spirit, and martial arts training helps with that.

A second point is that the MCMAP is not about the unarmed martial arts that civilians generally pursue:

In content, MCMAP is predominantly a weapons-based system focusing on rifle and bayonet, edged weapons, weapons of opportunity, and unarmed combat across the entire spectrum of combat.

This makes perfect sense to me. It’s true that soldiers in war will often find themselves just a few feet from the enemy. But it would be exceedingly rare for a soldier to find himself in a close-quarters combat situation with absolutely nothing that he could use as a weapon. In terms of really trying to kill someone, a popsickle stick or bent coat hanger would be much more effective than a fist.

Finally, there’s a twist: Weaponless techniques are often important precisely because they’re so rarely lethal. Our soldiers often need to subdue people without killing them, just like domestic law-enforcement personnel. For example, the disastrous 1997 Mogadishu raid known as Black Hawk Down started as an attempt at abducting a local leader for interrogation, which obviously could have involved some unarmed submission techniques had they found him.

The program teaches lethal and nonlethal techniques as well as pain-inducing compliance techniques to provide maximum flexibility for adapting to any possible threat level. Marines are taught methodologies for rapidly selecting and using appropriate techniques to fit the situation. Applying the right technique with the least required force to prevent situations from escalating beyond control is especially important in military operations other than war. Selecting justifiable techniques is also important.

So are unarmed martial arts really martial? It depends on what you think war is. If the point were strictly to teach soldiers how to kill with their bare hands, then it would be a waste of time. But that’s simplistic. From a broad perspective, the quartermaster and cook contribute just as much to winning a war as the men on the front line. If unarmed martial-arts training helps maintain morale in non-combat personnel, if it helps maintain a warrior spirit in the Marines and special forces, and if it helps with submission techniques in situations where killing is not the goal, then it must be as martial (in modern terms) as flying an airplane, driving a tank, or shooting a rifle.

I’m not sure why this is so funny. But it is. Enjoy.

Via The Dawn Patrol

We have two talk-radio stations here in Amarillo. The one that carries Rush Limbaugh is KGNC 710. Like virtually all radio stations, KGNC has a little tagline that they give along with their FCC-mandated station identification one or twice every hour. KGNC’s tagline is: “Miss an hour, miss a lot.”

I chuckle every time I hear this. The radio station intends for me to expand it in my mind to: “If you miss an hour, then you will miss a lot.”

But I never hear it that way. Instead, I hear two imperative-tense sentences: “Miss an hour. Miss a lot.” And I sometimes shout back at my radio: “But I don’t want to miss an hour. I want to keep listening!”

They’ve had that tagline for at least two years now, and apparently no one else has noticed.

Pres Bush spoke in Tampa today. He addressed the topic of immigration, which is an area of dispute among conservatives. One of his arguments was that there are jobs that Americans just won’t do, so we must bring in immigrants to do them.

Bush is a good man. He has courage and a clear understanding of international politics. But he’s no economist. Americans will do any job if you pay them enough. All Bush really means is that Americans won’t do those jobs at current prices, and he wants us to assume that allowing prices for those jobs to rise would be a bad, bad thing.

I’m sure that it would be a bad, bad thing for the people who directly pay for those services. But it wouldn’t be so bad for those of us who don’t pay for those services, and who bear the indirect costs of keeping somebody else’s prices low.

There are solid, respectable arguments for allowing large amounts of legal immigration. But this isn’t one of them.

Walter Williams has a piece on JWR today about how our language has become corrupted. Though his article is more examples than conclusions, I think his obvious point is that we should think about the words we use and how others influence our language, as cumulative changes to our language change how we think and which ideas we can effectively communicate to each other. That why I’m posting what may seem nit-picky tips on usage and writing alongside bigger thoughts on politics and culture. Our goal should be not only to defeat the Left politically, but also to pick from our language the thousands of little barbs that they’ve planted there.

One of those barbs is the use of “male” and “female” as nouns, as in this sentence from this article about a proposal to build a draft-dodger memorial in Canada:

The proposal calls for a sculpture of two Americans, a male and a female, crossing an imaginary border where a Canadian figure is waiting to welcome them.

There’s no need to get upset about the proposed sculpture; it’s likely that no one will ever build it, at least with tax dollars. Instead ask: Why did they use “male” and “female” in that sentence, instead of “man” and “woman”?

The reason can’t be sexism, even though that’s the typical excuse given for intentionally awkward word choices where sex or gender are concerned. The traditional PC attack on that sentence would demand that it refer only to two people, as identifying the figures’ sexes would implicitly oppose the anti-sexual revolution in language.

We certainly can’t pretend that “male” and “female” are any more precise than “man” and “woman”. In fact, they’re less precise. A “man” is a male human being above 16 to 18 years of age, while a “male” could be any age, and could a member of any sexually reproducing species. A “male” could a baby boy, an adult cockroach, or a geriatric orangutan.

So why would anyone use “male” and “female” as nouns when they could use “man” and “woman” instead? The only theory that I can think of is a philosophical preference for dehumanization. It’s a preference for blurring lines. Using “man” and “woman” implies that species and age are important, and therefore should be noted when convenient. To the Far Left, that implication is speciesist and ageist, respectively.

In the culture war, we vote with our words. If you truly believe that speciesism and ageism are irrational prejudices that should be stamped out, then you should persistently use “male” and “female” in referring to adult humans, to make that fact known. Of course, that decision comes at a cost, as your readers must work a little harder to understand you. They must infer that you’re talking about adult humans, because you’ve refused to tell them on philosophical grounds. But to a true believer, this is a minor sacrifice.

On the other hand, if you don’t see the evil in speciesism and ageism—or if you simply want your reader to easily understand you—then stick with “man” and “woman”, or “boy” and “girl”. You can even do this with non-human species: stallion and mare, tomcat and tabby, etc. The more precise word hits harder, conveys more meaning in fewer letters, and its use strikes a tiny blow towards preserving our language.

All my life I was told that morality is a matter of opinion. No one could coherently tell me otherwise. I knew that this was an evil idea, but I couldn’t think of a proper response. Until recently.

This blog’s title is my response to moral relativism. To one who claims that there are no moral truths, ask: Should we live?

If they say “yes,” then they’ve declared a moral truth, and violated their moral relativism.

If they say “no,” then then fun begins.

Some will think that they should live, but they don’t agree that you should. Many believe that today, even if they won’t admit it. It’s the fuel that’s pushing the world towards tribalism, and pulling our country apart. If we don’t agree, as a deep moral premise, that we are bound together as fellow citizen of a country, then we won’t have a country for long. In any case, those who believe this still have a morality, even if they deny it. It just doesn’t include you.

Some will ask what you mean by “live”, and that’s a very complicated subject. So rather than get bogged down in it, tell them that they can define life however they want. It’s the same answer if they want to know who counts within “we”: Pick whatever group you want. Or be a group of one if you want. It doesn’t matter. Any version of “we” or “live” will still produce a statement of moral truth that they must admit or deny.

If he really sticks to his logic (which is very rare) and doesn’t manage to change the subject, then the moral relativist will end up admitting that his own life has no moral significance. He must deny the statement: I should live.

And then things just get crazy. Ask him if he would have any moral objections to someone killing him. (Don’t actually threaten to kill him just to prove the point, though. Please.) Ask him why he bothers to get out of bed in the morning. Ask him why he goes to work. If he has children, ask him why he bothered to raise and support them.

His likely answer will be: pleasure. That has been the standard answer for centuries. In the long run, it’s more pleasant to get out of bed than not to, or to go to work than not to. And children? Well, they just kinda happen, and you’re stuck with them.

Respond to the relativist: If you truly believe that your life has no moral foundation beyond a search for pleasure, then pharmacology has some amazing advances that you should learn about. With modern drugs, you can flood your brain with dopamine, the chemical that produces the pleasure that we feel during orgasm. But this isn’t just for a moment. Modern drugs can put your brain in the most intense ecstasy it has ever experienced, and hold it there for weeks or months at a time. That’s what meth is all about.

But perhaps the relativist doesn’t trust serious drugs. The high diminishes over time. The brain’s dopamine receptors stop working, and the addict becomes profoundly miserable, so the pain after the high outweighs the pleasure.

You can assure the relativist that pain is not a problem, because euthanasia is legal now, even in one of the United States. So if you truly believe that your life is all about pleasure maximization and pain avoidance, then the strategy should be obvious: First, enjoy the whatever you can. Then, when life is no longer fun, blast your mind with all the dopamine it can handle. And before the addiction backlash hits, pull the plug.

Perhaps they’ll quibble over the chemistry, or the timing. If so, then they should be ready to commit to the blaze-of-ecstasy strategy once the right drug comes along, or once they’re old enough that the future holds less joy for them than a serious meth habit. For the committed hedonist, there logically must come some point at which a life free from hard drugs is no longer worth it.

Twist and turn as he may, the true relativist can’t escape. He must have some moral imperative for living, or he would be dead already—or at least ready to die once once life becomes too painful.

But this isn’t about attacking relativists. For the true believers, their religion already tortures them plenty. The point is to protect the rest of us. The point is to give the rest of us something solid to stand on, some starting point from which to argue for the idea of moral truth even against the coldest light of logic, or the most acidic cynicism.

It’s only a starting point. To someone who hasn’t absorbed any of our culture’s hostility to morality, saying “we should live” would seem obvious and banal. Discover a stone-age tribesman, ask him if we should live, and he’ll think you mad. Of course we should live! How could anyone be foolish enough to think otherwise?

And yet they do. Our culture is full of them. They don’t believe that they should live, and they want to bring the rest of us down with them.

We must resist them. We must rediscover moral truth, bring back what was lost and apply old principles to new problems.

Some say that there are lives not worth living, that we should despise our history and traditions, and that we should surrender to those who want to kill us. I say that we should live. I hope you’ll join me.

This may be our language’s only one-word oxymoron. When I hear someone use it, my inner smart-ass wants to say, “But that can’t be indescribable, because you just described it—as indescribable.”

Political parties are like sports teams: The fans focus on the details, but the fundamentals are far more important.

Ask a sports fan why his team won or lost, and you’ll probably hear about the dramatic plays: This guy missed a catch, that guy didn’t throw right. The specifics depend on the sport, but the perspective is pretty consistent: The winners won and the losers lost because of transient mental factors like enthusiasm or concentration. If only certain players had tried a little harder or concentrated a little more, then the game might have gone the other way. This connects to the idea that the fans, by cheering for their team, will influence those subtle emotional characteristics and produce a victory. It’s silly from any objective standpoint, but it’s also obviously a lot of harmless fun for the fans.

The same is true for us political news junkies: We follow the twists and turns of politics as if our participation is likely to affect the outcome, when that’s obviously silly. Our nose-to-the-ground perspective also leads us to imagine that the day-to-day political events that we focus on play a major role in the outcome of elections. Like sports fans, it’s easy for us to believe that our team could have won if only our people had said just the right thing at just the right time, or if some accident or blunder hadn’t occurred.

But I suspect that the professionals in both fields view things entirely differently. They know that the blunders and accidents are unavoidable for both sides, so there’s no sense worrying about them. It’s just random noise.

In the long view, what really decides most sports competitions is the players’ underlying skill. And what really decides most political contests is the distance between each side’s potential voters. Each party or candidate presents a platform and personality, and the number of votes he receives will depend fundamentally on how closely those match what a majority of the voters want. A truly skillful politician, such as Bill Clinton or FDR, can craft his platform and personality to meet the voters’ demands, but the effect there is relatively small. What matters more is the distance between the voters themselves. If one half of the party hates the other half of the party, then no platform crafted with any degree of skill will bridge the gap.

This is why the Democrats are having such problems. Imagine the American electorate in three big clumps: left, center, and right. In a close election, the center is the same distance from the left and the right, so each party must stretch its platform to take in as much of the middle as it can without losing too many votes from its base.

But today the center is really nowhere near the center; it’s much closer to the right than to the left. How it got there is anybody’s guess, but on the short term it doesn’t matter. Ideologically, the voters simply are where they are, and the forces that move them act slowly and aren’t subject to anyone’s direct control.

So pity the Democratic officeholders, because their situation is impossible. Daily they’re ridiculed from left and right for their supposed tactical failings. The left says that they didn’t attack hard enough on the US Sup Ct nominees, and they should start impeachment proceedings. The right gleefully observes that every speech by Howard Dean or Al Gore drives away more moderate voters. Both sides act as if the Democratic leadership could turn things around, if only they gave better speeches, blockaded the Congress more effectively, or produced a more effective battle plan. And that’s just cruel. The chasm that currently splits the Democratic voters simply can’t be bridged.

If you want evidence, consider this article about US Rep. Henry Cuellar from a district in South Texas. He’s a moderate Democrat who votes his district before his party—in a district where 53% voted for Bush. With elections coming every two years in the US House, you might imagine that the Democrats would be content to have a Democrat representing a district that might otherwise go Republican, just as the Republicans tolerate Olympia Snowe and Lincoln Chafee. But Rep. Cuellar faces a primary challenge from Ciro Rodriguez, who is much farther left, and who enjoys the support of establishment Democrats. As the district has no Republican candidate, a primary victory for Mr. Rodriguez this year puts another hard-core leftie into the US House—but only for two years. After that, one would expect the district’s voters to reject the far-left Democrat in favor of a Republican who more closely matches the voters’ views.

It’s an obviously self-defeating and short-term political strategy. But these days, that’s all the Democrats have. They may pull out a tactical victory here and there, but the fundamentals are against them.

Victor Davis Hanson had a good piece on NRO about the tendency of prosperous and comfortable people to assume that progress is perpetual. He points out that civilization can and often does regress, and in many ways is doing so right now:

Who would have thought, after the Enlightenment and the advance of humanism, that a 20th-century Holocaust would redefine the 500-year-old Inquisition as minor in comparison?

Did we envision that, little more than 60 years after Dachau, a head-of-state would boast openly about wiping out the remaining Jews? Or did we ever believe in the time of the United Nations and religious tolerance that radical Muslims would still be seriously promising to undo the Reconquista of the 15th century?

He points to various recent events that suggest that we’re standing on the brink of civilizational decline—if we’re not already in the midst of one. He’s not overly pessimistic, but as a professional historian he can’t avoid the uncomfortable fact that countries and civilizations die. Mighty empires have risen and fallen many times over the three or four millennia of recorded history, and there’s no reason to believe that our country and civilization will be any exception. The question is not if, but when.

Resist the temptation to think of our problems with Islamofascism like a fantasy novel, where good and evil clash in a great battle. This isn’t World War II, when we faced countries with navies and armies that could seriously challenge us. Nor is this the Cold War, with mutually assured destruction. Our enemy today can hurt us, but can’t destroy us militarily. Our armies are far stronger than anything they can deploy, and they lack the industrial capacity to build a Cold-War sized nuclear arsenal. We might lose another thousand people, or a couple hundred thousand. That depends on luck, and on how seriously we try to avoid it. But under no military scenario will our country simply cease to exist, which was not true in the Cold War or WWII. Militarily we face injury, but not death.

This military security is normal when great countries die. Small countries can perish in invasions, but large and powerful ones die from within. So what’s most upsetting about the current situation with Islamofascism is not the innocents they might kill or the buildings they might destroy. It’s what they have shown us about ourselves: Decades of self-hatred and cultural destruction have sapped our will to live. Among many, the thought is: Sure, we can win the fight. But why fight? What’s the point of working and suffering, when in the end death finds us all?

If the Islamofascists were smart and coordinated, they would stay quiet. Before 9/11, we were doing far more damage to ourselves than they ever could. They thought that their violence and bluster would make us cower in fear. Instead it has been like a bucket of cold water in our faces: It was unpleasant, but it also woke us up and sharpened our thoughts.