The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Yes, Ma’am, However …

Posted on | August 10, 2013 | 88 Comments

[Picture removed]

OK, my “SlutWalkDC” photos got zapped — blame Joan of Arc — but a guy named Ted got a photo of me taking a photo.

As for the girl’s poster, it should be the title of a TV series, or maybe a textbook, but it’s at least a  T-shirt slogan. However, thinking back to when I was that age, I would tell the young ladies that the boners control the boys more often than the other way around. Knowing this, the best advice for young ladies is BOYS HAVE COOTIES.

Just don’t have anything to do with boys. Keep as far away from them as possible. If it were up to me, we would abolish co-education, and the only time young ladies would be able to meet boys would be at heavily chaperoned dances and such.

But a lot of things would be different it it were up to me, and meanwhile we’re living in an imperfect world where journalists don’t get paid as much as NBA stars, where cameras occasionally malfunction, and young people don’t heed good advice.

Young guys may want to control their boners, but the boner is inherently totalitarian. It’s like Hitler — he says he only wants the Sudetenland, but if you give him Sudetenland, next thing you know, he’ll take the rest of Czechoslovakia, too, and Poland after that.

Young ladies should be less like Neville Chamberlain and more like Winston Churchill: “Never give in . . . in nothing, great or small, large or petty . . .  Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”

And trust me: Boys have cooties.

 

Category: Feminism, Sex

WRONG. WRONG. WRONG.

Posted on | August 10, 2013 | 101 Comments

OK, the story that was here is gone. Having heard from the girl in the photo, who made it clear that I misread her “SlutWalk DC” protest sign, I decided that a mere correction was insufficient.

Her sign said she “didn’t want to press charges,” and my concern was that the perpetrator (the 24-year-old who raped a drunk 14-year-old girl) had not been prosecuted for the crime.

The girl says that, while she had initially been unwilling to press charges, she changed her mind and the guy was prosecuted. So my concern was mistaken and, because of the inflammatory nature of my remarks — imagine that, me making inflammatory remarks! — it seemed to me that a mere correction was not enough.

Apologies for the error. — RSM

 

Category: Crime, Feminism

Blame Joan of Arc

Posted on | August 10, 2013 | 136 Comments

WASHINGTON, D.C.
My photos of “Slutwalk DC” got zapped — “It was a glitch! It was a technical malfunction!” to quote Gus Grissom — while I was trying to load them from the disc of my wife’s camera, which I was using because my faithful pink “Barbie cam” is broken.

So you won’t get to see the photos of Celine, the topless feminist with nice pink nipples, or Eliana, the long–legged George Washington University coed who made the march while wearing black lingerie and high heels. And like I said, I blame Joan of Arc for this.

The march began at the plaza around the African-American Civil War Memorial at the corner of Vermont and U Street. When I arrived, the strumpets and hussies and harlots were gathered around, brandishing their signs and, of course, their breasts. By my count — and trust me, I’m a professional journalist — four women made the march topless, but Celine’s were certainly the nicest pair.

Celine is a 25-year-old blonde from Baltimore, nerdy and pale, not particularly beautiful but not unattractive.

Did I mention she was topless? And she has nice pink nipples?

On her chest she had written, with red lipstick, “Still not asking for it.”

Celine was wearing geek glasses and struck me as trying to seem more at ease than she actually was. When I asked permission to take her picture, she said, “Thanks for asking my consent.” Honestly, I felt kind of bad for her, as I objectified her with my male gaze.

Well, a picture would be worth a thousand words, but as I say, the cursed camera failed me, and so words are all I have for you.

Guys who’ve dated around a lot (and, hey, I used to be a Democrat) know the pleasant surprise when you score the hook-up with a chick like this, the “nice girl” type who may not seem superficially sexy, but once she gets naked . . .

Well, I married one of those, and thus perhaps have a special appreciation for the type. If you met Celine, clothed, you probably wouldn’t be too impressed. But topless? Hey, nice pair.

Maybe not quite a full C-cup, but at least a generous B, and did I mention her nipples? Pretty sure I did.

Not that I said any such thing to her, and I didn’t even stare as I interviewed Celine for The American Spectator column I’ll write later.

Did you read Ace’s laceration of Amanda Marcotte the other day? Because I’m the patriarchal oppressor of Amanda’s dystopian nightmares: Yes, I see women — and their breasts — and am immediately filled with visions of them impregnated with my seed, bearing my offspring, bringing me sandwiches. But ultimately, there’s not enough of me to go around, and my wife insists on monopolizing my oppressive misogyny — for which other women should be grateful.

Anyway, there I was amid the assembled feminists on the plaza on Vermont Avenue. Trying not to be too conspicuous in my sexist objectification of them — besides Celine, there were about two dozen other reasonably attractive women among the hundreds who turned out for SlutWalk DC. Out of the whole crowd, there were only three or four you’d really call “hot,” and none of those were topless. (Fact: Public toplessness is legal in DC, but women don’t seem much interested in exercising that particular right.)

After about 15 or 20 minutes, the march began, three blocks east on U Street to 14th, where they turned north and uphill, and then went east into Meridian Hill Park. It was on that final leg of the march that I gathered the nerve to briefly interview Eliana, who was unquestionably the hottest woman in the march. She wore a sort of bustier and lace panties that left the lower portion of her buttocks exposed.

Eliana is a tanned brunette with slender legs — a “coltish” figure, you might say — and two dimples above her remarkably small but certainly quite round and shapely ass.

When I was a young fellow, I was very much an ass man who liked skinny girls like that, but for some reason, they don’t really impress me the way they did 30 or 35 years ago. This shift in aesthetic preference isn’t something I can explain, but which I note by way of saying that while I recognized mentally that Eliana was the best-looking participant in SlutWalk DC — a head-turning figure, dressed quite scantily — concupsicence was not a factor involved in my approaching her.

“Those heels must be killing you,” I said.

She laughed, and politely answered my questions: She’s a senior at George Washington University, majoring in psychology, minoring in women’s studies. “Oh, women’s studies,” I said.

The march arrived at Meridian Hill Park, where a temporary stage was set up at the south end, near the statue of a sword-wielding figure on horseback. Military monuments are a dime a dozen in D.C., where statues memorializing once-famous heroes are ignored by the residents. How many people, for example, ever think about “The Rock of Chickamauga” when driving through Thomas Circle?

So here we were, me and the self-proclaimed sluts, in the very shadow of this equestrian warrior, sword aloft, and out of curiosity I walked over to see whom this statue memorialized.

JEANNE D’ARC
LIBERATRICE
1412–1431
AUX FEMMES D’AMERIQUE
LES FEMMES DE FRANCE

Joan of Arc, patron saint of sluts? Surely the event organizers had intentionally chosen the location for the ironic purpose of having this fanatically Catholic 15th-century French peasant girl standing guard, as it were, over their convocation.

I hung around a bit longer,carefully studying the crowd to do a tally, counting exactly 14 pretty faces among about 400.

Perhaps I missed a few, or maybe I double-counted some, but certainly there weren’t more than two dozen lookers among them. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, of course, and maybe the AOSHQ “I’d hit it” standard is flexible enough that 10% would have made the grade without benefit of serious whiskey consumption.

My job was done, and I walked down 14th Street to this McDonald’s, intending to upload a few photos, including pink-nippled Celine, but something went wrong. My unfamiliarity with this camera is probably to blame. I’m sure I hit the wrong button while trying to download the photos. Perhaps it was a perfectly mundane technical accident, but when I checked the disk a second time — nothing.

Call it a glitch, call it a coincidence, but I don’t believe in coincidences. No, I blame it on that sword-wielding peasant girl. She didn’t want her feminist sisters objectified by the male gaze.

Ah, Joan! No wonder they burned you at the stake.

UPDATE: Thank goodness, some of the photos have been aggregated at Twitchy, including this one:

That’s Eliana, the George Washington University senior, click here to see a larger view of her dimpled ass — not that any of our readers would objectify her with the male gaze or anything like that.

UPDATE II: Joke time is over, this is serious:

At #SlutWalk, Statutory Rape Victim’s
Sign Explains, ‘I Didn’t Press Charges’

Rape is not a political grievance, it’s a crime. Stop parading around shouting slogans and start prosecuting criminals.

 

Category: Feminism

Slut Walk: Dumbed-Down Feminism and the Politics of Mindless Protest Chic

Posted on | August 10, 2013 | 163 Comments

Today at 11 a.m., angry women — perhaps dozens of them — will gather in Washington for “SlutWalk DC,” a fundamentally pointless exercise in public stupidity that will accomplish nothing except to give the participants a chance to say they’ve done something.

Like many other such left-wing protests, SlutWalk DC is basically about political tribalism, signifying membership, parading around one’s inchoate grievances, venting one’s anger about personal or collective victimhood. Notice how the women above are demonstrating against a non-existent opposition, i.e., The Pro-Rape Movement.

Is anyone in favor of rape? Can we get a show of hands of those who think rape should be legalized? Anyone? No, of course not.

Personally, I think rape should be punishable by death in some cases, but I’m willing to bet that nearly all the SlutWalk DC marchers are liberals who are against the death penalty, even for murder.

Thus, the feminist rhetoric is basically a way for women to ju-jitsu the issue that lost Michael Dukakis the 1988 presidential election, promoting the (entirely false) idea that rape is somehow the fault of those sexist Republican right-wingers, rather than actually doing anything about arresting rapists and putting them in prison.

What is this poster about? Can anyone read this and derive from it a policy proposal, some sort of reform agenda? Anything?

No, of course not. What this poster is saying is, “I had a crappy childhood” (no would would disagree) “I hate my mother” (can’t say that we blame you) and “Don’t criticize whatever kind of sex I’m having now” (of course, we wouldn’t even think about your “sexuality,” if you weren’t advertising it on your protest poster).

Questioning the rhetoric of these left-wing protests, as if the protesters are intelligent adults who might be expected to make a coherent argument, is not allowed. You may recall the gibbering nonsensical rage emitted by the Occupy movement, which was never actually about anything except (a) rich people have a lot of money, and (b) smelly hippies camping out in a city park.

Seriously, that was their entire agenda: “Let’s go camping, yell about how much we hate rich people, try to make such nuisances of ourselves that the cops will be forced to arrest us, and also — while we’re at it — sexually assault any women stupid enough to join us.”

Why didn’t the “SlutWalk” organizers protest against the Occupy movement? Is it unfair to suspect that many of the rapes these women are so angry about actually occurred inside Occupy tents?

OK, that sarcasm probably crossed some kind of line, and even my sexist Republican readers might be offended. But perhaps you see my point. If we were to check the voter registration of convicted rapists, is there anyone — anyone — who doubts that Democrat men commit the majority of rapes in America? It’s not just elected Democrats like Bob Filner, but the kind of men who vote for Bob Filner, who are actually the Pro-Rape Movement. If liberal women seem especially angry about rape, isn’t it because liberal women hang around liberal men, and most liberal men are selfish amoral creeps?

Let’s face it: Republicans are the ones who want to lock up rapists. Democrats are the ones who see criminals as victims of an oppressive and unjust capitalist system. And instead of cracking down on actual rapists, the liberal Democrat women are instead angry because some people still use a simple word to describe the kind of degenerate promiscuity that liberal Democrat women consider normal.

Why is it — really, I want you to think hard about this — why is it that merely talking sarcastically about feminism seems to anger feminists more than rape itself? Speaking critically of wretched egalitarian radicalism is not a crime, you know, and if liberal women want to turn a word like “slut” into a political weapon, how can they say it’s unfair for their opponents to turn that weapon against them?

If you’re going to hold up a sign that says “PROUD SLUT,” you can’t object when I say, yeah, like all Democrat women.

Never mind my jokes, however, let’s talk about the real joke — the official manifesto of SlutWalk DC 2013:

SlutWalk DC Demands!

  1. All victims of sexual assault deserve dignified treatment and access to medical care regardless of race, socioeconomic status, gender expression, sexual orientation, physical ability, mental illness, immigration status, incarceration status, physical appearance or involvement in sex work. We demand that all DC-area hospitals provide access to rape kits and train staff to administer rape kits to all victims of assault.
  2. All people have a right to control their own bodies and personal space. To have autonomy of our own bodies and sexual liberation, DC residents must have access to affordable reproductive health care services including abortions. Reproductive health care should be prioritized in the budget and we therefore oppose any and all budget cuts that restrict these services, such as the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act that bans the District from using its own money to fund abortions for low-income women.
  3. We oppose sexual assault in all work places.
  4. We oppose all efforts of public figures (including politicians, law enforcement and military officers) to belittle and joke about incidents of rape and sexual assault in order to generate and maintain a culture in which sexism is accepted rather than taken seriously.
  5. We call for an end to the deportation of undocumented people who report sexual assault, rape and domestic violence. All people must have the ability to report sexual violence and rape and to receive a medical care without fear of deportation.
  6. The police must be held accountable to the communities they serve to the fullest extent. We call for the immediate removal and arrest of any police officer that misuses their power and authority position to abuse and assault people. We demand that the victims of police assault receive justice. We demand full equality and inclusion for transgender people, including complete access to healthcare, education and employment.
  7. We demand an end to transphobia.  We demand an end to violence committed against members of the transgender, transsexual and gender non-conforming community.  We demand justice for Tyli’a Mack, LeShai McClean, and other victims of gender-motivated hate crimes.
  8. We also demand an end to the stereotyping of trans women as sex workers, especially low income trans women and trans women of color.  We call for an end to the constant police intimidation and harassment of trans women that follows this stereotype.

Do you see how they work into their agenda certain liberal issues — including abortion and amnesty for “undocumented” immigrants — that might seem debatable or controversial, if it didn’t come wrapped up in all this angry rhetoric about sexual assault, so that if you diagree with them, you’re accused of being pro-rape?

Explain to me again why I should speak respectfully about women who employs such dishonest propaganda tactics.

They’re not just sluts. They’re lying sluts.

Which is to say, they’re typical Democrat women.

 

Category: Feminism

Hunt for Missing Hanna Anderson Shifts to Idaho After Her Kidnapper’s Car Found

Posted on | August 9, 2013 | 25 Comments

Last night, I reported at Viral Read about this story:

A West Coast manhunt was under way Thursday for a California man suspected of having murdered a woman and her 8-year-old son and kidnapped the slain woman’s 16-year-old daughter. James DiMaggio, 40, could be fleeing north toward the Canadian border with Hannah Anderson, the girl whose mother and brother were believed to have been killed by her captor, a family friend she called “Uncle Jim.” DiMaggio was apparently obsessed with the blond teenager, and recently told Hannah that he would date her if they were the same age.

Now the story takes a new turn:

A car belonging to murder and kidnapping suspect James DiMaggio was found today covered in brush near Cascade, Idaho, San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore said this afternoon.
The blue Nissan Versa was found without license plates, but authorities were able to determine that the vehicle belonged to DiMaggio of Boulevard, Calif., through its identification number, Gore said
The discovery marks a significant break in the case as the manhunt for DiMaggio, 40, and missing teen Hannah Anderson, 16, entered a sixth day today.

Horseback riders encountered Hannah and DiMaggio hiking on a mountain trail, but didn’t immediately report the sighting because they hadn’t seen the news about the girl’s kidnapping:

Hannah appeared healthy and safe, leading San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore to conclude: ‘As far as we know, it didn’t appear she was being held against her will.’ . . .
The riders said they encountered a man and a young woman hiking in the wilderness on Wednesday. The pair had a tent and each was carrying a backpack.

Even if she voluntarily went with DiMaggio, Hannah probably doesn’t realize that “Uncle Jim” killed her mother and brother. But now that police know where to look, we have every reason to hope that Hannah will be found safe very soon.

 

Category: Crime

Losers on the Romantic Demand Side

Posted on | August 9, 2013 | 79 Comments

One of the worst things a guy can do — women can do the same thing, but in a different way and, trust me, there’s a reason I’m making this about guys — is to overestimate their own attractiveness, or to fixate on an “ideal” of beauty in a partner. This isn’t really an either/or, because the two mistakes tend to run in tandem.

The Barbie doll/Playboy centerfold dream-woman “ideal” is quite a rare commodity, and the potential demand is practically infinite, so any woman who remotely approximates that ideal can pretty much name her own price, so to speak, in the dating market. As a result, such beauties are seldom without companionship.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

From high school onward, a girl who rates as an “8” or above is nearly always going to have a boyfriend or a husband, and if you ever meet a really attractive woman over 21 who doesn’t have a boyfriend or husband, the explanation is one of two things:

  1. She very recently broke up with a guy;
    or
  2. She’s crazy.

Sometimes, of course, it’s both. If a girl is really good-looking, but crazy, she tends to leave a trail of ex-boyfriends in her wake, but the next guy she lures into her crazy-beautiful trap is going to be too impressed by her looks to notice the crazy. What you often find is that the crazy-beautiful types — the only 8+ type women you ever meet “single” out on the scene — are helplessly attracted to Bad Boys. Despite their good looks, crazy-beautiful women have some kind of damaged ego issue, so that if a guy treats her nice, she loses interest:

“Gosh, he really likes me — there must be something
wrong with him, because I deserve to be treated like crap.”

Some guys never quite figure this out, because they have never really evaluated themselves or women objectively. These guys psychologically separate women into two categories:

  1. Super-attractive women they really want to hump;
    and
  2. Normal women they might actually have a chance with.

Unrealistic expectations — and particularly the Barbie-doll fixation — inevitably produce disappointment, and guys who fall into that pattern tend to end up pathetically alone.

Before proceeding to our example of this phenomenon, let me explain something basic: By the time you are 25 or so, you have probably already dated the best-looking person you’ll ever date. True, there are late bloomers, people who were high-school losers who get their act together by the time they graduate college and suddenly discover that they are more attractive than they were as teenagers, but this late-bloomer effect is very unlikely to occur after age 25. So by the time a guy is in his mid-20s, if he has never dated an 8+, he’s a damned fool to keep dreaming that Cinderella/Barbie/Playboy model will stumble into his life.

Ain’t gonna happen, Jack. Get over it. Life is not fair.

OK, so social media consultant Marc Ensign went to a networking event and exchanged business cards with a guy who didn’t make much of an impression. Afterwards, this guy spammed out an e-mail to everyone he met at the event:

my situation is somewhat unusual in that i am the #1 surgeon of my type in the northeastern US by volume, and have performed nearly 20,000 procedures over the last 15 years, so i really don’t need additional income (which is the unusual part). i’m actually so successful that most of the reason i attend networking events these days is for personal networking, not business networking — i’m trying to meet the right woman to fall in love with, marry, and start a family with (i’m single, never married, and really want kids before i’m old!)
i’ve hired some professional matchmakers over the years, with OK results (eg i’ve dated 2 of the matches for 6 months each, which is pretty good). the services vary enormously in quality and price (with an imperfect correlation). . . .

(Here’s your first clue, see: The guy has been a top surgeon for 15 years, which means he is in his 40s. Why would such a highly paid professional still be single at that age?)

These are my Hard (Objective) Dating Parameters which are NOT Flexible:
(this means I am only willing to pay for introductions if ALL these criteria are met)
(if you want to set me up w someone missing 1 of these criteria, I may accept, but will not pay for that)

  1. Age 27-35 (ideally 28-34)
  2. No kids, wants kids in the next 1-2 years
  3. College graduate, doesn’t have to be a great school, but needs to have finished the degree
  4. Skinny (i.e. dress size 0-2, if you don’t know what that means (many men don’t) it means very skinny)
  5. Caucasian (not black, not Hispanic, not Asian)
  6. Healthy lifestyle (defined as no smoking, no drugs, good diet, no hard drinking,

(OK, this isn’t too much, is it? Skinny non-smoking, healthy college graduate, white ages 28-34. Probably several hundred thousand single women in the U.S. could fit this description and might be interested in marrying a successful surgeon. But . . .)

These are things that I would ideally prefer, but don’t require (i.e. I am flexible about these criteria)

  1. Christian (any denomination is fine, I’m Catholic but not very religious, prefer any religion over none, must be religiously tolerant, will not be compatible with someone who thinks everyone else is damned)
  2. Graduate degree or very good undergraduate school (more compatible since I went to 3 Ivy League schools i.e. Dartmouth, Columbia & Harvard, as well as Emory and my MBA from NYU)
  3. Spent significant time in another country other than the US (either born somewhere else or lived out of the US for a total of a 6 months or more, not on a vacation, doing something like school or work)
  4. Spent significant time (>1 yr) living in a city of 1 million or more (so can live in NYC if moves here)
  5. Likes animals and pets, particularly dogs (because I plan to have a dog for the rest of my life)

These are the Soft (Objective) Criteria I require, but are difficult to match (because they’re qualitative)

  1. Attractive (like an 8 out of the 1-10 scale, 9-10 is actually bad as it comes with a lot of downside)
  2. Nice, normal, sweet, kind, altruistic, selfless, not entitled, bitchy, materialistic, selfish, self-centered
  3. Stylish, fashionable, polished, confident but not vain, superficial, overly concerned about looks
  4. Hard-working, real career, full-time job (unless in graduate school), achievement-oriented
  5. Highly functional Type B (not a Type A because too similar, not a Type B who can’t get stuff done)
  6. Easy-going, sense of humor, doesn’t take life or things too seriously, gets along well with everyone
  7. Good person, follows the Golden Rule, nice and kind to others, never does bad things because of values
  8. Good family, good role models, ideally good nuclear family so can emulate good patterns of behavior

You see the basic problem here? Whatever his accomplishments as a surgeon, this guy can’t be very good-looking — and his social skills are probably minimal to non-existent — or else he wouldn’t still be single. He’s a perfectionist and a control freak, and is apparently embittered by his past relationships (or lack thereof).

When a man seems to be demanding an 8+ woman, but pejoratively remarks about women who are “vain, superficial, overly concerned about looks,” it’s like a red flag. This guy has serious personality problems. Likewise, when a guy boasts about his multiple Ivy League degrees and his career success, and then disparages women who are “materialistic, selfish, self-centered” (note the redundancy), you know he’s got painful broken relationships in his past.  He’s been burned before, see, and he’s not going to get burned again.

In a phrase, this guy is damaged goods. Maybe if he had married one of his college classmates, or some woman he dated in his late 20s or early 30s, whatever his underlying personality flaws, he would have been all right. Instead, his relationships didn’t work out for some reason, and when I say “for some reason” of course I mean, because this guy is a desperately neurotic basket case.

Mama’s Precious Little Boy, eh?

Hate to go all Freudian on this guy, but c’mon — that e-mail is practically a Valentine to his mother: “Nice, normal, sweet, kind, altruistic, selfless . . . gets along well with everyone . . . nice and kind to others.” In other words, he wants complete acceptance, no criticism or disagreement — a mother’s idealized love, in a college-educated non-smoking size-zero package of 8+ Barbie-doll beauty.

This guy is doomed and hopeless, and if he somehow did manage to find and marry a woman who met his criteria, that wouldn’t actually solve his problem, because he is the problem.

Guys: Don’t be this guy. Accept who you are and don’t imagine that your romantic problems can be blamed on women being too “superficial” to appreciate how wonderful you are. If you were really so wonderful, you’d already be married to a wonderful woman.

The fact that you’re still out there looking means you ain’t all that, no matter how precious your mother thinks you are.

UPDATE: It appears that the author of the detailed “demand” e-mail is Manhattan eye surgeon Dr. William Chen, whose rants about a dilapidated property in his Greenwich Village neighborhood went viral in 2010. The question of why Dr. Chen is insistent on having a wife who is “Caucasian (not black, not Hispanic, not Asian)” immediately comes to mind. Is this some kind of “trophy” thing? Or just another aspect of his generally bizarre personality?

 

Category: Marriage

On This Day In 1945…

Posted on | August 9, 2013 | 57 Comments

— Wombat-socho


…the United States Army Air Force dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, and six days after that the Japanese agreed to an unconditional surrender. Ever since then, all manner of intellectualloids have been moaning about the inhumanity of it all, how it didn’t need to happen, and 31 other flavors of morally superior nonsense. Ace has a really excellent post which he admits is nothing more than an extended tease to get people reading Paul Fussell’s Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays, which he generously excerpts in the post.


I’m not going to rehash Fussell’s arguments, especially since I’ve seen them before in George MacDonald Fraser’s Quartered Safe Out Here; the TL;DR version is that some sorry whiners think Japanese lives were more important than the lives of American men in uniform*. Strange but true. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for that argument, and think that anyone holding that opinion ought to consider getting a brain implant. One look at how the landings would have gone is in Alfred Coppel’s The Burning Mountain; if you enjoy reading about bloodbaths and slaughterhouses, this will be right up your alley. Sweet dreams. I for one am grateful we had the bomb, because the alternative would have been a lot worse for all concerned.

*Also Australian, British, Chinese, Dutch, Filipino, French and Indian soldiers, sailors, and airmen, to say nothing of civilians in the war zones.


Category: Ace of Spades, History, Intellectuals

21 Books – Conclusion

Posted on | August 9, 2013 | 8 Comments

— Wombat-socho


Von Ryan’s Express, David Westheimer
” …if only one man gets out, it’s a victory.”
I have to admit, I like the movie version of this book a lot better, even though the book does a better job of explaining why Ryan is such a martinet and also has a sequel, which the movie can’t. Still, the book is excellent, quite the period piece and an interesting counterpoint to Hogan’s Heroes. Sorry, no deep meanings here, just a book that spawned an excellent movie…and made me aware of Westheimer’s Lighter than a Feather, one of the two novels spawned by the stillborn Operation Downfall.


Ranma 1/2, Rumiko Takahashi
“I’m Ranma Saotome. Sorry about the mess.”
I started reading this while I was getting into anime and manga and the associated fandom, and despite the failure to wrap the series up with a happy ending I still think this is some of Takahashi’s best work. Martial arts death machines tied up in love triangles, rhombuses and polygons, complicated by the title character’s involuntary gender switching and his utter retard of a father…it’s the soap opera to end all soap operas, and has spawned a million fanfics.


American Caesar, William Manchester
Love him or hate him, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur was one of America’s great generals, perhaps its greatest, and Manchester gives this incredibly complicated man his due justice in a wonderful biography. American Caesar delves into MacArthur’s ancestry and family ties, studies his suicidal bravery, and carefully unravels the complicated, incendiary issue of his relief by President Truman during the Korean War. There is no better book on the subject, period.


The Coming Fury , Bruce Catton
The first volume of Catton’s Centennial History Of The Civil War, and it’s good to see that it’s back in print. Catton was a magnificent writer who made the Civil War his life’s work, and it shows in this account of how well-meaning politicians stumbled their way into the bloodiest war ever fought by these United States. There are many books about the Civil War, but this one is mine, and it should be yours, too.


Hell In A Very Small Place, Bernard Fall
The definitive account of Dien Bien Phu, the disastrous battle that cost France her empire in Indochina, and eventually (as Jean Larteguy’s The Centurions showed) Algeria as well. Goes well with Street Without Joy, Fall’s account of the battles that led up to the debacle at Dien Bien Phu. Both are really necessary if you want to understand the mistakes that we made in Vietnam a little more than a decade after the final bunkers fell in that miserable Laotian valley.


To Lose a Battle, Alistair Horne
The final volume in Horne’s superb trilogy covering the Franco-Prussian Wars from 1870 to 1940. I don’t think it’s possible to overstate what a shock the French campaign was to the world; certainly nobody expected the German Wehrmacht to rip through the largest army in Europe like a chainsaw through rotten cheese, drive England from the Continent, and bring France to its knees in a mere sixty days – but it happened, and Horne goes back to the Victory Parade in 1919 to expose all the reasons why.


The 13th Valley, John Del Vecchio
More than just another novel about Vietnam; it’s a close study of the men who fought that war that avoids the facile cliches that so much Vietnam War fiction suffers from. I think this may be a better book than James Webb’s Fields of Fire; at any rate, it deals with the Army’s airmobile infantry instead of the Marines and the highlands of the II Corps zone instead of the wretched lowlands of the I Corps area.


Category: Books
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