DISAGREEMENT, INC. ANNOUNCEMENT!

Disagreement, Inc. expands! Now joining our ranks is Laurence Simon, of Amish Tech Support. There may be another addition soon, though we will start to run the risk of a rightward slant, which I'd like to avoid. If anyone knows any Democrats or Greens from Texas (or even better, Houston) that are interested in trying out the group blog thing, please sent them out way and drop me an email.

"IN THE END? NOTHING ENDS, ADRIAN. NOTHING EVER ENDS..." -Dr. Manhatten

I am going on a brief hiatus from political blogging. I will return at a later date.

I JUST THOUGHT I'D SAY...

Vigilante justice never looked so sweet.



UPDATE: Lest I be accused of hypocrisy, I'm not trying to rationalize or justify the war with this post. This isn't a "boy are we doing the right thing" argument. It's not a celebration of the morality of the war, but rather of its prospects. For more, see the accompanying post on Reductio ad Absurdum.

ANOTHER PRO-WAR ALEX IS TIRED OF THE DEBATE

Heretical Idealist Alex Knapp has a post that should look familiar to those of you who read my work here and elsewhere.

'Bush is a moron!"
"Kerry's a traitor!"

"Our anti-war rally had 1,000 people!"
"Oh yeah? Our pro-war rally had 2,000 people!"

"Neocons want to rule the world!"
"Liberals want to replace elementary schools with maddrasses!"

'Hey, this website is funny--it shows that all conservatives are racists!"
"Hey, this website is funny--it shows that liberals don't care about the rights of women in the Muslim world!"

and on and on it goes...

Obviously, I'm not against debating aspects of the war. I believe that the time for debating whether or not we should be engaging in it has past. There will be time again when Iraq is free or, six months later, we still haven't succeeded. Right now we're two weeks into the war and some want to prove that we should just pack it in while others still want to justify what's barely begun and continue a fight that they've won.

Enough, already.

THOSE THAT FIGHT SO WE DON'T HAVE TO

Over on Joshua Claybourn's blog is a powerful letter from a reader about the Red Americans that disproportionately serve in our military:

No, the people of Alabama didn’t ask ‘why did this happen?’ on 9/11; it never crossed their mind. They knew that they had to kick some ass, damn it, not because they wanted – in that predictable, lazy stereotype that, when Ted Rall connects ink to paper to memorialize it in caricature, must seem like a moment of sheer f***ing ingenuity – to scalp an Arab’s head and ‘avenge’ the deaths of a few thousand fellow Americans (a lot of them, it should be noted, from the Upper West Side), but to prevent the murder of countless thousands, maybe millions, in the future, many of them Arabs.

When I heard the story of Private Lynch, prior to her heroic rescue, it tore my heart out. Yes, she enlisted for the education, but also because of the 15 percent unemployment rate in her West Virginia hometown. My father has been employed for a quarter-century now; can anyone who has shared that lifestyle possibly attest that he really ‘feels’ recessions, or high unemployment figures? Only, perhaps, in the narrow sense that someone can ‘feel’ the suffering of Somalians who would probably die from the shock of eating just what the average, flabby American considers not a meal, but a ‘snack.’ But I think I feel it now. And I think others do too.

Read it.