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Aug

25

The Watcher’s Council Has Spoken

Posted By: 'Okie' | 9:04 am — 8/25/2007 | Comments Off See comments below:

Watcher's Council
Actually, it spoke yesterday, but with my being out of the office all day and having to cook for a crew last night I’m just getting to posting the results right this minute. I was really in sync with the Council this week, as I not only picked the 1st place Council and 1st & one of the three tying 2nd-place non-Council winners, I had nominated the winning-by-a-wide-margin 1st place NC entry.

The winning Watcher’s Council post was Is the United States an Imperialist Power and Does It Matter? by Right Wing Nut House where Rick Moran makes it clear that whether we are seen as imperialist or not, it will be better for the world if we keep on doing what we do so well.

Are we an imperialist power? The only people who seem to care are those who wish to call us “imperialists.” For the rest of the world, the US is a fact of life, a force of nature. And, I might add, a welcome sight when the boogyman is knocking at the door or Mother nature goes on a bender.

Can we do it while acting more humbly? Must we be so “arrogant?” Next tyrant we overthrow, we should be sure to apologize before having our military rip his regime a new one. Maybe that will satisfy those who see anything relevant at all in this stupid argument.

Coming in second on the Council side was St. Nietzsche by Done With Mirrors, which I did not vote for this week, but found interesting none the less. Stating discomfort with both “secular fundamentalism and evangelical atheism” the author nevertheless sees religion as some sort of necessity.

Religions are structures which draw destructive internal poisons and cure them, mostly, into constructive and calming rituals. Only a fool would think we can dispense with any such structure when Cambodia still reeks of corpses and we are only a few geological ticks out of the Ice Age.

Usually I don’t wind up voting for my non-Council picks, and we can’t vote for our own Council submissions, so I was surprised to find myself voting How The New Republic Got Suckered from Pajamas Media as the number one pick. The Council agreed at an almost 4-to-1 margin. This is a fine read about the Scott Thomas Beauchamp/TNR affair and how The New Republic seems to keep doubling down into another “Shattered Glass” moment.

Second place in non-Council voting was a three way tie between The Peace Racket by City Journal, (my personal choice), Israel and the Double Standard by Yourish.com and The Technology of Our Dissent by Beijing Wide Open — fine reads all! The rest of the voting results can be found here.

If you have a blog and wish to have a post considered by the Council next week, check out the Watcher’s offer of link whorage. See ya’ll next week for another round of great reads!

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