I'm Anon, A Mouse, and I Approved This Message.

It's interesting how peaceful the world seems when you take time off during the holidays and just not look too hard at your various news and information feeds for a while. Cut off from all that, you look out your window and stare at a blanket of quiet white snow, and relax. It'll all work out, dudes, why stress?

And when you get back on the horse, the whole noisy rodeo sideshow is right there waiting. Oh well.

Having decided to catch up on what I'd been missing, I noted my own pseudonym pop up on Mad Thinker Scott's blog (the now abandoned one). Apparently, Tim Liebe, whoever the hell that is, said the following on someone else's blog:

Whether they agree or disagree with you, in the end it's your house, your rules - and if they really take issue with your viewpoint, anyone online can create their own blog. It's not about "Freedom of Speech" or any other such excuse trolls use - as RMM, MTS, Anon, A Mouse, James Meeley and others of their ilk would discover if I came on THEIR blogs and mocked them mercilessly on an endless basis. (I would, too - only unlike any of them, I have a life.... )

Now, in that and other posts, Scott seems to have handily dealt with that issue, except for one small bit of eloquence I would like to add:

Oh, fuck you, you unctuous twit.

Nice way to lump all of us and our motivations together, as if we were all the same person. There is no penile hivemind! There is no penile hivemind! And have I actually gone out of my way to mock people on their own message boards? Hell no, I do that here.

Now, there's more to this than just chastising someone who typed a bit too much before his brain cells kicked into gear. But first this message.

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We should never have gone to war with Iraq, post 9-11.

The primary reason I think this is because doing so diverted manpower and attention away from chasing down Osama Bin Laden, something we should have had done and over with years ago. But there are other reasons, which you may or may not find valid depending on your political viewpoints.

I believe the Bush Administration, if it did not outright lie to Congress and the people, exaggerated what little truth there was to lead us into a war that was not in any way necessary. I did not believe Saddam Hussein was an imminent, dangerous threat to us before the war, despite the claims of the Administration that he had WMDs. What he did have when we went in turned out to be bupkis. I'll make no secret of the fact that I think George W. Bush has been a miserable president whose lasting impression on US history will be getting us into a stupid war and eroding the freedom of the American people far more than any terrorist ever could. You may believe otherwise.

But if you paid attention, you should have seen the party line shift as it became more and more obvious that the WMDs weren't being found and were probably never going to be found. First, it was claimed that WMDs were there, that Hussein was intimately involved somehow with 9-11, and that if we didn't act, it would probably be nukes exploding in every major Western city. All the talking heads shut up about that when those things started being proved false, and then you started hearing things like "well, Hussein is a brutal dictator, and we have to liberate the Iraqi people. Imagine all the people he killed! We have to save the people who are still alive, thirsting for freedom!"

And that's wrong, by which I do not mean that it is incorrect, I mean it is a bad way to conduct your affairs. Yes, Hussein was a bad guy. He's dead now, and gone. GOOD! I'm not sorry for him in the slightest. But that's not the ostensible reason we went into Iraq in the first place. Those reasons were thin enough, and if they had tried to sell the war mainly on the basis of freeing the Iraqi people from the get-go, well, I'm sorry, but Hussein would still be running things and making nasty comments about us on Al-Jazeera. "Freeing Iraq" is, for one, a bait-and-switch motivation, and for another, it's justifying one horrible act by pointing out someone else's horrible act. Iraq is the first war I'm aware of that we (the USA) started, where we fired the first shot, we were the aggressors. And now, when someone complains about that, they get told, "Well, Hussein killed all those people!"

But that doesn't make what we (or rather, the Bush Administration) did any more right. What evils Hussein may have committed does not excuse evils committed by others. Like your parents should have told you long ago: two wrongs do not make a right.

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Believe it or not, this does kinda link up to comics feminism. And before some nitwit chirps up with "OMG UR SAYING FENIMISTS R SADDAM!! GODWINS LAW!", take a closer look. I have used a well-known worldwide incident to illustrate a principle: "two wrongs do not make a right". I am about to apply that principle to much smaller, less important events. This is not equating the two sets of incidents, and anyone who says it is, is a dumbass.

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So back to Tim Liebe, crowing about how my "ilk" would change its tune if HE came on MY message board to harass MY KIND. Leave aside the casual self-aggrandizement, as if he's such a clever, clever genius that I couldn't possibly match him in a direct debate on my own turf; no, what I'm curious about is: if he thinks what "we" do is so distasteful and reprehensible, why does he even casually talk about doing the same thing himself?

Or consider the Heroes for Hire "tentacle bondage" cover, and the Mary Jane "laundry" statue. Anyone remember parody images by other artists hitting the Internet soon after? Spider-Man in a thong, bent over... Luke Cage and Iron Fist bound up as tentacles approach? A cover featuring the Flash held by a tentacled beast subtly altered to give it a more erotic feel?

Maybe I don't surf the mouthbreather section of the Internet enough, but I don't recall an outcry against those images. Sure, they were parodies, but they still objectified their subjects, AND I distinctly remember a few passing comments along the lines of "yum" and "hawt", given in what I assumed to be all seriousness, by fangirls who I assume to be into the whole "slash" thing. Otherwise, did anyone get convinced by the parodies that the original objectifications were the blight on society that they were made out to be?

The tit-for-tat thing doesn't work all that well when the people you intend to shock into understanding have enough rational sense to understand that if it's right, it's right in both directions, and if it's wrong, it's wrong both ways.

Too often though, I see bad behavior justified with other people's bad behavior. "RMM (or whoever) was a jerk to me on my blog! I therefore have every right to be as big of a jerk to him or someone "of his ilk"!"

No, it doesn't work like that. You wind up with two wrongs, no rights. And that may be fair and balanced, but that isn't always what I'd call "good".

Coming soon: SEX AND DEATH.