Sullivan demolishes McArdle.
Sully quotes Megan's defense of war crimes:
...when you choose war, you choose war crimes--and that this is true regardless of why you are choosing the war. You may be going to war for reasons that even the staunchest of libertarians would support, like defending your territory from violent attack. Just the same, if the war grinds on for any length of time, you will get people violating the Geneva Conventions, doing obscene things to enemy soldiers (dead and alive), and launching attacks that would horrify the population if they were watching a third party do them. By the time you're a year or so into it, the public and the soldiers are reacting to the last attack and the mountain of dead, not to who started it. Dresden would have been unthinkable in 1939; by the time it happened, anything was justifiable if it saved Allied soldiers.[...]
The point is, these things are part of the cost of war, not of the cost of "wars started by the Bush administration" or "wars with bad motives" or "wars we don't like".
Sully responds:
I'm sorry but this is preposterous, uninformed, ahistorical. The United States has managed to go to war for two centuries without the president authorizing and monitoring the torture of prisoners. The Bush administration's legalization of torture and withdrawal from Geneva is unique in American history. Yes, wars will lead to individuals committing war crimes in the heat of battle. Yes, it carries a horrifying logic. But an advance, pre-meditated decision by the president to engage in war crimes is new and unprecedented. Bush really is uniquely awful as a president in this respect: an indefensible war criminal, who has permanently stained the country he represents and betrayed the soldiers who expect decency and lawfulness in their commander-in-chief.
Don't be sorry, Sully, you misogynist. Of course McArdle's argument is preposterous, uninformed, and ahistorical. That is the sin qua non of her writing. This has got to be pretty embarrassing for Megan. Sully really didn't pull any punches. Has he ever said anything good about his colleague? No, I don't think so. No wonder he's paid about five times her salary--its the only way Mr. Harvard Ph.D. could stomach being on the same roster as Megatron.
I feel, in some small way, that we are winning.
(Note: My typical writing style of constructing egregiously long sentences full of daisy-chained clauses has been replaced by a poor imitation of Andrew "staccato" Sullivan's prose. I assure you my next post will have more semicolons, dashes, and commas than this.)
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6 comments:
I'm sure Sullivan just misunderstood her point. Has she started the seven posts following to explain why yet?
Careful with the Nietzsche references, there. Even he came to regard BoT as bad writing.
"I'm sure Sullivan just misunderstood her point. Has she started the seven posts following to explain why yet?"
Congratulations, you nailed it. She now has two more posts up explaining herself, one of which directly contradicts what she said earlier and the other about how Sully misunderstood her.
She's nothing if not predictable.
Bloody hell. That "misunderstood me" shit is actually starting to make me angry. I am seriously baffled at why she gets paid for this crap.
I really like what you wrote over there, Margalis. "When nobody can figure out what the hell you are saying the problem might not be everyone else." I suspect her roundabout, overly-wordy babble is a smoke screen to hide the fact that she doesn't have the slightest clue what she is talking about most of the time.
Totally beside the point of Megan being Meganesque, Mr. Harvard PhD has his own blind spots most notably concerning race. He was an early promoter of The Bell Curve, and has remained unabashed in his advocacy for racialist notions of African American inferiority. Oddly he has retained this position even as he pulls for Obama.
I think it must be nearly impossible for someone who was not raised in America to understand the breadth and depth of racism and its corrosive effect on the African American community. Either that or Sully just likes having one group on the totem pole lower than homosexuals.
Now now, we disagree with sully here at FMM so there will be no calling him a "homosexual"
He's a fag.
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