I can't really bring myself to read 600 repetitive posts to answer a question I'm pretty sure I know the answer to already.

But I'd like to be surer.

Did anyone answer Mona's question about male prostitutes?

Because I find ironic, just a week or so after the WaPo got blogswarmed (and rightly so) for publishing an opinion piece that women are just plain stupider than men, and need to just accept that, to discover that men are considered capable of making a decision to enter the sex industry, but women are not.

"... You can't really regulate human behaviors, that is the point, not without curtailing personal liberties. But you can regulate the market based interactions between humans that involve those behaviors."

Humans making exchanges thought the 'market' is human behavior, for god's sake.

As far as liberal vs. conservative

I have no idea what either of those terms means anymore, other than as names for two somewhat opposing and self-identifying groups. You could call them The Jets and The Sharks and it would be just as descriptive.

It scares me a bit when people are very proud to be Democrats or Republicans or liberals or conservatives or libertarians. In most walks of life we resist labels, why embrace them in politics? Why voluntarily be grouped with people you will invariably disagree with at some point?

-- Margalis

Wonderful stuff. I have not been able to detect any core philosophy in "liberals", "new liberals", "conservatives", or neo-cons in a long time. Who they will choose to dominate by force does differ at times, but it still follows little reason other than the rational of coercion. I use "libertarian" to mean the philosophy of freedom more than a political label and see a lot of hypocrisy in the official "Libertarian Party" which I would never join.

Many great minds have pointed out over the centuries that democracy will devolve into many vicious groups all trying to enrich themselves at the expense of the others in the society. How would America's history disprove that contention?

Democracy: Two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for supper.

You might also find Col. Patrick Lang's blog, Sic Semper Tyrannis to be of interest. There are many posters of quality to be found there; commentary tends to be enlightened and provocative.

http://www.turcopolier.typepad.com/

Yeah, interesting alright, but strip it of all the military oorahing and chest-bumping and it's hard to find an iota's difference between what he's saying and what most of us are saying; what many of us have been saying since this guy -- if he's still of active military age -- was in grade school.

It's nice to see that the hard guys are getting wise. Maybe he can shoot his way out of the mess his predecessors helped us get into. Ya think?

Sorry I've been spelling your name wrong all night long (I can't figure out how to "say" your name in my head)!

Anyway, I'll check out those blogs you mentioned. I've not had anything to do with the military (they ended the draft shortly before I turned 18, and reinitiated registration after I was to old for that). But, it might be quite interesting to read what's being said there. And Balloon Juice sounds interesting, thanks for the tip!

--Ron

But I've been reading intel-dump for a few years now and just went back and looked and found this..

There is a poster there called FDChief who is possibly the smartest, most knowledgeable and most abrasive poster I have ever read anywhere..

I just wanna share this.. Utterly fascinating..

http://www.intel-dump.com/posts/1205027039.shtml

FDChief:My issue with all of this is that the very powerful player that DoD has become in the 21st Century U.S. tends to turn all this air-castle COIN building into foreign policy reality.

IOW, when you build it (a U.S.-policy-centric COIN scheme) they (the people who think that U.S. diddling around in the internal conflicts of crappy post-colonial, pre-Westphalian tribes-with-flags states) will come, ot of the woodwork, looking for missions.

If we still had the tiny, isolated, almost religious-order-like preWW2 Army all this would fall under the "policy implementation/technocrat" umbrella. We don't. Just as the DoD has effectively taken the much of the intelligence wheel from the CIA it has taken much of the foreign policy wheel from State. Check the discusson we had a while back re: AFRICOM. There's no real need for it. All it will do is produce a flagpole over a couple of thousand headquarters drones looking for a purpose in missions in Africa.

My take on this is: the trac record for Euro-American COIN in the Third World has been pretty bleak. Even when "successful", the success usually takes the form of empowering whatever group of expatriate or Europeanized natives that we like because they're "most like us" read "not like 99% of the local population". This group, which usually devolves into (if it doesn't begin as) a corrupt, inbred kleptocracy capable of running the "country" we're "fighting to protect democracy in" only by main force, is by its very nature a time bomb. When they implode - or are detonated - they leave behind a fragmented mess: Nicaragua after Somoza, Cuba after Batista, Congo after Lumumba, Vietnam after the Francophone aristocrats, Iraq after Saddam, Iran after the Shah.

So IMO the notion that we - the Army - should be thinking about the political big picture isn't just "important". In a properly functioning U.S. government it'd be "important". Given the presently dysfunctional political process and U.S. government, it's not just important, it's going to be critical if we want to avoid the fate of Imperial Spain and Imperial Britain. To be pushing the notion that we need to be capable of "fight(ing) real wars in the Middle East and South Asia" is not many steps away from pushing the notion that we SHOULD be fighting real wars in the Middle East and South Asia.

And we'd need to do that...why???

And to answer my own question: the only real reason to be fighting Islamic jihadists in south-central Asia and the Middle East is to prevent them from becoming a regional power with the ability to present an existential threat to the U.S. mainland. This ignores the reality that:

1. The jihadists benefit more from the mobilizing force of U.S. warfare in Islamic lands that they suffer in direct casualties from engaging U.S. forces, and

2. The likelihood of a blowback-related black swan generated by the chaos unleashed by our knocking over the native institutions (see, Iraq, invasion of) grows with every underfunded, undermanned, undrplanned, poorly-informed conventional expedition into this part of the world.

Add to this that the OTHER justification for these expeditions is ensuring the supply of petroleum. IMO this is like fighting over the plains of central Asia to ensure adequate horsehair supplies for buggy whips. We are soon, if not already, in a post-peak oil environment. Every dollar we spend fighting over controlling petroleum is a dollar we're NOT spending on the post-petroleum Manhattan Project we'll need to survive and succeed in the Post-petroleum Era.

Bottom line: these post-Imperial advenures are very likely to cost more than they produce in benefits. Bin Laden himself talks about that - his entire concept of operations involves goading us into rushing about the Islamic crescent trying to put out the fires of takifiri jihadism with the gasoline of CBUs and our undermanned infantry and armored troops.

So - if we can do this using local proxies, well and good. If we plan on continuing to spend blood and treasure to "slay Afridis where they run" we will quickly find, as Kipling's British did, they "they are cheap and we are dear."

Too rich for my blood. We need to find a smarter paradigm for the 21st Century.