Because the question as to why you wouldn’t send your own kids, while directed at America’s aristocracy, has another target audience, normal people, watching you ask them the question, and thinking “well he wouldn’t send his kids because they might get killed, maybe he should be thinking a little harder about whether this cause justifies getting someone else’s kids killed”.

Well, you rightfully call them ‘America’s aristocracy’, so why would they be thinking about something like that? They are aristocracy, you’re cannon fodder; it’s all right, don’t be silly.

Exactly. Which is why it is important to point out that in this instance they don’t ‘go together’. No whites are not dying at higher rate.

M. Meilleur,

Those reasons for every able bodied man to join not just Jonathan Goldberg.

This points was in fact stated by Gen. Schoomaker just this week during his Senate testimony.

We know that America’s aristocracy is always going to use its power and influence to prevent harm coming to it kids. But then perhaps that is where the force of the question about whether you’d send your own kids comes from, it makes you think ‘well he wouldn’t send his kids because they might get killed, maybe he should be thinking a little harder about whether this cause justifies getting someone else’s kids killed’.

Ask yourself whether you would condemn Hilary Clinton as a hypocrite for voting for the war even though Chelsea hasn’t volunteered…

She is, has been and always will be…

But not anywhere near as big as Bush is, when are jenna and Not Jenna going to enlist? When are his nephews & nieces going to enlist?

After all, it’s his war!

The ethically sound reasons to ask why the Bush twins and the 101st Fighting Keyboarders aren’t enlisting are that (1) we don’t have enough troops to sustain our role (whatever that is, exactly) in Iraq without shortchanging whatever other national security goals we might have, and (2) the military is having difficulty sustaining its recruitment goals, and the problem is getting worse.

It may not be unethical to stay out of combat while supporting that combat, under the conditions that Hitchens described (there are people to take the place of the fallen). But if your position is that Iraq is the central front in the war on terror, and you know—or should know—that we don’t have the staffing in the military to keep up the fight as you think it should be fought, and that things in that department are getting thinner by the month, then it is hypocritical and cowardly to shirk combat by refusing to volunteer. And coming up with reasons like Jonah Goldberg’s—”I’m out of shape and I have a family”—is really shameful in those circumstances, since that applies as well to all to many who end up going to Iraq anyway.

For Hitchens to vent his ample spleen on the weakest version of the “Why aren’t you fighting?” argument is, sadly, typical of his writing since 11 September, and it gets worse the more untenable his position gets. Pity.

abb1 is right. It’s not hypocritical to advocate for war but try to keep your DNA out of it, iff there is no conscription. On the other hand, it is very hypocritical to criticise others (even implicitly) for not enlisting when one did not do so/encourage one’s kids to do so oneself.

(Also, there might be some conscription-like moral issues involved with people who signed up for the military before 9/11, assuming that in the modern age it would only get involved in wars of defence against active enemies, rather than straight-up invasion and occupation. Those people have a moral right to call bad faith on the part of the government, IMHO)

Perhaps. Ok sure. I was wrong.

But if we take the set of delicious chocolate treats and dog crap and state that people are disproportionately choose their deserts from our set I think it is at least useful to point out that not many are selecting dog crap.

Next week on Crooked Timber – Truth trees, multi-valued logic, and modal logic.
There will be a test.

(This awfully silly but WTF)

Chris’s statement was either wrong or his statement was wrong. It is just a matter of which statement was wrong.

It is emphatically not clear how he meant to use the word and. Not at all. I will freely admit he might not have meant to use it as a logical connective. But as I noted above he would still be wrong.

So no matter how Chris used the word and he was wrong. And my statement that he was wrong was correct. And Ray’s assumption that I thought both halves of Chris’s statement were incorrect or wanted to prove both halves incorrect was completely unwarranted.