Blogs For Victory

Showing support for Iran’s demonstrators makes you a tool of Kristol’s nefarious plot? I’ve re-read this, and I don’t think the gentleman is joking:

So folks on Twitter have been turning their avatars (little profile photos) green to show solidarity with the protesters in Iran. There are websites to help you do this. But why do this? How does it help? I want the Iranian people to live in freedom, just as I want all people to live in freedom. But the point of the gesture eludes me…

…When people feel pressure to signal, and it’s free, they’ll signal. But sending the signal creates a small emotional investment in the overt message of the signal — solidarity with opponents of the ruling Iranian regime. As every salesman knows, getting someone to make a big, costly commitment is best achieved by getting them to first make a tiny, costless commitment. The tiny, costless commitment of turning Twitter avatars green is thin edge of the persuasive edge for the neocons who would like to sell the public a war in Iran. Since I would rather not be Bill Kristol’s useful idiot, I will conspicuously leave my avatar as is, and continue hoping for the best.

And this doesn’t appear to be a kook leftist – he’s from Cato and is thus Libertarian, if not truly conservative. If he’s joking, I’d really like to hear that confirmed – to think like that is to have a whole sting of absurd ideas rattling ’round one’s brain with it all coming out as “I just want this to go away, so I can get back to issues which don’t require me to be a known as a man, or a coward”. There is a strong inclination to strenuously debate what are actually trivial issues, while leaving the central facts of our times alone, because a clear, moral decision is required. Much more safe to debate levels of taxation or health care (which is what Obama would very much prefer to talk about right now) than to discuss what one is supposed to do, as a man, when a young woman is gunned down by thugs…

And so – “I really hope the freedom fighters win”…hope, hope, hope and hope some more. With perhaps a bit of “change” thrown in, too? Where is the hope that when one is faced with the stark choice between good and evil, that one will choose good even if it appears that immediate death will result? What about the hope that the men and women of the United States Armed Forces are not the only representatives left of true, courageous humanity? We need, perhaps, a few less well-wishers and a few more doers. We certainly need far less of people who will abstain from their duty out of an alleged opposition to the supposedly nefarious machinations of, well, real men who see their duty.