Maybe so many progressives think the Afghans beat the Soviet Union on their own because Juan keeps misidentifying former American-funded mujahedin as "old time warlords," thereby rendering invisible American complicity in the failure of Afghanistan to recover from that war, and contributing to the false impression that Afghanistan has always been one big terrorist training camp since the time of Alexander the Great.

However, in this article, he seems believable and right.

Tunc and Nunquam -- The Revolt of Aphrodite.

I read it when I was a teenager. I felt like I was Felix and Iolanthe at the same time.

The robot-Iolanthe was constructed according to the expectations of the people around her.

When she began to thwart those expectations, it felt like a crisis to the people who constructed her.

What if America and the Soviet Union had joined forces to keep the peace in Afghanistan, instead of competing to exacerbate the existing social tensions until they led to civil war?

Nerds can say a lot of things that sound clueless to normal people. Some of them are really smart things that fly over the heads of normal people but some of them are just genuinely clueless, coming from the combination of a habit of overly systematic thinking and a lack of ability to parse social interactions in real time.

Imagine a man who looks like what you expect a nerd to look like saying those things.

People just forgive him because he's obviously a nerd and he's just acting like what he is.

Now imagine an attractive woman with big boobs saying those same things.

She will be written off as a dumb bimbo. Her social cluelessness will be used as evidence against her overall intelligence.

I now suspect that a lot of attractive women written off as dumb bimbos are actually nerds in hiding.

I have Ph.D. in theoretical physics and you cannot even imagine the number of times my social cluelessness has been used as evidence of low IQ bimbosity -- just because of how I look.

It's pretty hard to fight. People really like to believe in the things that they project on other people.

So if you were born a nerd but also born to develop an athletic nature and good cheek bone structure and full lips and big boobs, people just won't accept that you have a brain.

It's like a knife stabbed into your nerd heart repeatedly, every day.

You're not allowed to be the person that you are.

Because people have issues and they need to project them on you just because you look a certain way.

I often wonder if Paris Hilton is really a nerd.

If you're pretty and you have the social skills of a nerd, then you're going to be called a snob and stuck up and all that, because people expect pretty people to be on 24 hour social duty and if you can't measure up to those demands, you are punished with bitter and hateful exclusion.

And you might end up fucking a lot of bad men, because they ignore all that shit and give the appearance of being your friends, while preying on your confusion and your need for unconditional acceptance.

So people really do project all the crap in their head on someone just because the person's face looks symmetrical and her chest is nicely swollen.

Yep -- it took me a long time to figure out that I was just screen for the projections of other people.

But wow -- here we are, watching the projections happen in real time.

You know, there are actual human feelings beneath those screens.

Not that you'd fucking care.

That's another part of the beauty lesson -- they want you to light up the room, and if you have any feelings of your own that aren't beautiful, then you should have them in private, because nobody is interested in the emotional issues of their projection screens.

have no right to criticize Brooks.

So if you belong to that category, he's at least smarter than you are.

If my posts end up with missing words, it's because of that stupid Expedia rollover ad that keeps covering up the input box.

This sentence:

He said it like it is in his column on Afghanistan -- people who know absolutely nothing about that country are having way too influence on the debate over the war.

should be:

He said it like it is in his column on Afghanistan -- people who know absolutely nothing about that country are having way too much influence on the debate over the war.

He said it like it is in his column on Afghanistan -- people who know absolutely nothing about that country are having way too influence on the debate over the war.

Like this idiot argument that the Soviets couldn't beat the Afghans -- which has been repeated ad nauseum at Salon, even by paid columnists with fancy degrees who REALLY ought to know better.

I salute him for cutting those people out of the debate.

I suppose there has to be a time where we fall out though. And I guess his moral corruption column is that time.