[Tolik]

Long and good. Must read!

This ping list is not author-specific for articles I'd like to share. Some for the perfect moral clarity, some for provocative thoughts; or simply interesting articles I'd hate to miss myself. (I don't have to agree with the author all 100% to feel the need to share an article.)

I will try not to abuse the ping list and not to annoy you too much, but on some days there is more of the good stuff that is worthy of attention.

You are welcome to browse the list of truly exceptional articles I pinged to lately. Updated on April 1, 2009.  on  my page.
You are welcome in or out, just freepmail me (and note which PING list you are talking about).

Besides this one, I keep 2 separate PING lists for my favorite authors Victor Davis Hanson and Orson Scott Card.  

[GOPJ]

The higher you go in our social caste system, the less grasp you find of the military’s complexity and the greater the expectation that, when employed, our armed forces should be able to fix things promptly and politely.

The truth is that we COULD defeat any of our enemies. Rather than going into Iraq with a speedy force we could have just nuked them. And it would have been over. Next group - do the same. There wouldn't have been a problem with North Korea now - but it's not our way.

So we play at war - knowing we have the superior ultimate weapons - ones our enemies have been fighting to get their hands on for decades.

We quake at the idea Iran might get "a nuke" or "two" while we have thousands of nukes.

It's silly. We're playing upper class "gentleman soldier" while they're playing down and dirty for real.

So yeah, it looks silly. Like a grown man pretending to be afraid of a two year old with a squirt gun.

[Lando Lincoln]

Thanks for the post and to my very good friend Tolik for the ping. I will put this on tonite’s read list. All the best.

[GOPJ]

...we must dispose of one last mantra that has been too broadly and uncritically accepted: the nonsense that, if we win by fighting as fiercely as our enemies, we will “become just like them.” To convince Imperial Japan of its defeat, we not only had to fire-bomb Japanese cities, but drop two atomic bombs. Did we then become like the Japanese of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere? Did we subsequently invade other lands with the goal of permanent conquest, enslaving their populations? Did our destruction of German cities—also necessary for victory—turn us into Nazis? Of course, you can find a few campus leftists who think so, but they have yet to reveal the location of our death camps.

Powerful logic.

[metesky]

Great article with so many pull quotes. Loved the attack on the complicit media.

The phenomenon of Western and world journalists championing the “rights” and causes of blood-drenched butchers who, given the opportunity, would torture and slaughter them, disproves the notion—were any additional proof required—that human beings are rational creatures. Indeed, the passionate belief of so much of the intelligentsia that our civilization is evil and only the savage is noble looks rather like an anemic version of the self-delusions of the terrorists themselves.

Rousseauian "noble savage" bs that "journalists" swallow whole.

Thanks for the ping T.