The Adventures of Chester: Followup to Going Native

My article at TCSDaily, "Go Native" has received a little bit of commentary. I posted a link over at Windsofchange.net, and it received about 20 comments, with a generally supportive take. Several folks here have given positive comments too. Belmont Club just started a thread on it, and I'm sure the Belmont crowd will have a lot to say, as they always do. At TCS itself, there are over 140 comments to the article, many more than any other work I've done.

Some of them have been critical. TCS draws a crowd from far and wide. I think that's good. None of the critical comments have gotten under my skin. I wouldn't be a very good blogger if they did. But one in particular I thought deserved a note. One commenter writes this:

You won't risk your own life to "win the war" will you Josh? No, and I'll bet you anything you have no children over there dead and dieing do you? No, of course not, armchair racists don't join the military do they Josh? No, and don't give me that crap about being "too old"; you could get a job feeding the troops or driving a truck for Haliburton, but you're too afraid to even do that, aren't you? C'mon Mr. Brave NeoCon (NOT!!)admit the truth, you like this racist war just like the NeoCons of the day liked the racist war they sent me and few other dumb and naive racist Americans to fight in Vietnam. This is a war of liberation from occupiers that the local Iraqi's are fighting. We will lose, we've already lost. And all you coward NeoCons clamoring for the blood of 655,000 innocent Iraqi people are just full of sickness and dis-ease. That's what racism is, and you all are racists.

I'm not sure how my article implies that I'm a racist. For that I'll have to have some more instruction from this commenter.

But I'd like to say once and for all that I think it's a very poor point to argue that only those who serve are allowed to voice an opinion on the war. Are doctors the only ones allowed an opinion on healthcare? Or to take another tack, are those with military service always correct? Were the US generals correct in the Cuban missile crisis in arguing for an attack, or was Kennedy? Perhaps all political issues should only be discussed by politicians. The problem then becomes where to draw the line at what is political and what is not. Most regimes that choose such a path usually end up deciding that everything is political. I think we can all come up with examples of such regimes.

It's an interesting argument that the Left likes to make: on the one hand, only those too stupid to get good jobs join the service. On the other, when it comes to military affairs, we should only listen to those who have served, whose pronouncements are received gospel, second only to their mothers, whose opinions have "absolute moral authority."

How strange.

Posted by Chester on November 29, 2006 7:05 PM to The Adventures of Chester