Horizon

I'm not sure I know which point you mean.

Puts me in mind of a terrible party I attended at a coworker's house. I was relying on someone for a ride home, so I couldn't just make my excuses and leave.

First thing I noticed was that the women sat at the dining room table and kept to themselves. Meanwhile, it was testosterone-o-rama in the livingroom, complete with weird mean-spirited jokes and general raunchiness. Now, I'm not ashamed of being male or of having a passing interest in beer, video games and cars, nothing like that. But this was a little much for me.

So, being stuck there, what did I do? I went and joined the women. I found that by acting gay I could make myself a token man. Worked great.

Dunno, I really enjoyed the honorary-male/token-female connection.

Whether or not she has a point here, a little browsing suggests that she's clueless in lots of other respects. I mean, for goodness' sake, what a perverse analogy. The sin of 2003 was not that the 'wrong house' was broken into, as if some appalling miscarriage of justice was committed against the householder. The sin was that there was an honest, but more politically difficult, case to be made for invasion, and a canard was substituted in its place. That was an offence against democracy at home, IMHO an unforgiveable one. But no wrongdoing was committed against Saddam himself.

Although in fairness I should say that her commentators are far more demented.

I vote that Martha continue posting links from Echidne. They seem to solicit anecdotes from Alan Hogue, and half-praise from me, but best of all they give Alan Allport something to rant about.

I vote that Martha continue posting links from Echidne. They seem to solicit anecdotes from Alan Hogue, and half-praise from me, but best of all they give Alan Allport something to rant about.

Well, if those are the criteria (and why not?), then we should start posting links to these folks.

By the way, am I right in thinking that a 'false canard' is tautological?

She's also an admitted "precalculated, cold-blooded murderer."

Not a family blog, it seems.

A.H., you're stretching pretty hard to criticize the woman there. What she's saying is that an official execution is a murder committed by all of us. You and me too, not just herself.

Funny how Echidne's comments always stir up a special flavor of snarling contempt around here.

Hey, at least snarling comtempt counts as posting. Outside of you and me, I've only heard crickets around these parts lately.

Actually, I do find her posts mostly contemptible, sorry. Perhaps I read some of that blog differently from all of you, but I find the posts often snarling and sometimes offensive, hence I suppose I don't feel terribly bad about snarling a little myself.

But that's going to be a conversation killer, I suppose, so I'll try to be extra civil when this blog is brought up in the future.

I don't think I'm stretching things much, I think the OP is stretching things. That was my implied point. What I'm saying is that there is a difference between an official execution and being a cold blooded murderer, and that this difference matters as does the rhetoric we use to make our points. I am completely against the death penalty, but this strident moralizing is just embarrassing (as was the lionization* of the executed which some segment of the left apparently thought would further their cause rather than convincing most of the rest of the country that they were nuts). I like to take every chance I can find to distance myself from this kind of behavior.

* Eg, nominating him for the Nobel Peace AND Literary prizes.

A pet peeve of mine is the inability of anyone in this country to differentiate between murder and killing. Whether it's abortion, capital punishment, casualties of war, or a juicy rib-eye, it's always "murder". Drives me nuts.

Good lord -- something Martha's further right of me on.