I am writing like a real person. In fact I am a real person.

I’ll answer any question you like, except that I don’t feel like identifying myself. You, on the other hand, as several people have pointed out, can’t even answer Matthew’s question. You’re more interested in getting the juicy gossip about how to pull Douglas Wilson down.

You’re right that the site turned into a haven for the kinists. Oh well, such is the Internet. I stuck to my principles: everybody gets an equal voice, even the anonymous sinners.

One other thing: If you actually move on from Wilson (hasn’t happened in over four years) and start posting something worth saying, then I’ll come back and interact substantively. Cross my heart.

You continue to amuse. Your fright of Mr. Petersen’s question and your systemic dismantling of his ethos is stunning, and you’re spelling a lot better than you used to.

And your admiration of Hitchens is also rather scary.

Your language still drips with deceit, and in a way that I find very particular. I suspect my patience with your anonymity that remains in opposition to my discussion guidelines is therefore running a bit thin. It seems as if you cannot write an honest statement. Consider:

You say that you are “just curious,” which is rhetorical deceit. You say that I earned a reputation as a Internet Assassin, period. This is implicit deceit: See the “praise for Pooh’s Think” link to the right for a sampling – I include samples of criticism as well. The racist, anonymous kinists have likely used the phrase ‘internet assassin,’ but only by adopting the tools of Wilson, who attempted to rhetorically associate my accountable, non-anonymous writing with anonymous attack sites.

You say that I earned the title “Internet Assassin” because I attacked anyone who ever pastored me. This would seem to be a direct lie, since I do not know what slander you could have derived this from. I was in warm personal contact with my pastor just preceding Wilson when I launched Pooh’s Think and have never said anything negative about him. I in fact praised the pastor preceding that pastor, and I have never said anything negative about the other men who have played pastoral roles through the years. You say that I attacked anyone who slighted me. This is also deceit: How would you know this? And given the limited range of characters I have taken on, certainly this could not be the case. The fact is that I have called out and criticized probably 5 percent of those who mistreated me during the launch of Pooh’s Think, Part 1. I will be adding to this list in my book, while still attempting a judicial, ginger release of personal information.

Your bizarre line of questioning betrays a previous act of deceit or else a new one: You either have not read the content of this post, as you claimed, or you are pretending not to know what that content is.

You claim you alluded to some important piece of information in a comment I was not willing to publish. Well, here it is, March 7th: “You’re wandering, and given your past track record, this is not a healthy direction for you.”

Is it mystifying as to why I did not bother posting this ambiguous tripe? This was your comment to my first post on the Moral Argument. And we see here yet more deceit: you claim that you alluded to your fear of getting assassinated in this unpublished comment. I cannot imagine how it is you are referring to any such thing. Further, please point out my successful “assassinations” of the past when folks dare use their real name in addressing me. Given that you cannot write a single sentence without directly or implicitly lying, I will not hold my breath for a single truthful example.

You are, of course, still welcome to follow my discussion guidelines, and reveal your identity to me (which, under normal circumstances, I will keep private). I have always been apposed to anonymous activity on the internet, as has Pastor Wilson, and I have never been shy in elaborating on why. The manipulative and deceitful rhetoric you continue to employ, in order to follow through with your implication that everything the reader finds here in the Wood (this has at least been Wilson’s traditional use of this tactic) is simply the result of my psychological disease of father hunger, betrays why you would be motivated to conceal your identity. Anonymity is far more conducive to your preferred method. I have found that those who wish to ramble off claims that they know are not true like to do so behind a mask.

And now I am ‘just curious’: why would you take the time to implicitly defend Douglas Wilson by employing the very method he vehemently attacks?

From what I do know, which is not going to be as much as you know (partly because I was on the ground for the Moscow war at the time), this situation was complex (and grows more complex as new public opinion intermixes with the invasion’s now growing history). In such a situation, that “many” opposed the war does not unsettle me too much, although not to be, admittedly, downplayed at the start.

I was glad to see Wilson getting some exposure, but initially I was not too keen on Hitchens. I wrote an old professor of mine a few months ago and explained that I thought Hitchens was likely an immoral sophist because of his stance on the war in Iraq (that I had only heard faint rumors about) and whatever his relationship to his first wife allegedly was. But my interest in Hitchens has grown for a number of reasons, foremost because I had been a Christian apologist for 16 years before encountering his work and debates on religion, and I have never seen anything nearly like his approach.

The new waive of atheistic works are all a bit unsettling. Harris startles and dazzles on the moral issues in a very efficient style (although lacks a careful philosophical underpinning). Dennett is too powerful a philosopher for any mere popular writer to dare touch unless they wish to embarrass themselves before the intellectuals. I am not sure yet what I think of Dawkins – Plantinga was willing to challenge the ‘logic’ of his argument and I am not too impressed with ‘the writing’ on the little I have read so far. But Hitchens thunders with sermonic and literary understatement, latent with careful philosophy, that seems to grab everyone’s attention (not counting the boobies and whoopers for our Dear Leaders – although, I guess their attention is at least ‘grabbed,’ much like the peasants before Shakespeare’s plays). This is not a new anti-theist ‘argument’ getting tested. This is western civilization itself finally spitting up Wilson’s cardboard classical reformation or else the thin analytic philosophy of the evangelicals.

Hitchens’ focus on totalitarianism mirrors wonderfully just what it was that was necessary to launch my journey out of fundamentalism, and is precisely where I think his ‘worldview’ is grounded – although I do not like this word all that much. My intuition on how I might seek to offer a reply to your concerns was supported by what I have just read in his Vanity Fair essay from the October 2003 edition. This is a moving piece of journalism following his productive, second visit to Iraq. As for torture, Hitchens had dinner with a judge who had been

flung into Abu Ghraib prison, a horror jail in the desert outside Baghdad. He didn’t make too much of his experiences, but a few days later I visited Abu Ghraib for myself. I badly wanted to leave after ten minutes: the mind refuses to imagine what it would be like to be there indefinitely. Sinking little cells into which prisoners were packed like vermin in the stifling heat, with a steady and brutish execution rate to keep the numbers under control.

Second to last paragraph, Hitchens writes:

I don’t doubt that, with more excavation and more analysis of captured blueprints, it will emerge that Saddam always intended to reconstitute his WMD program. He never complied with pressing UN resolutions, even at the last, and it seems distinctly improbable that he expelled the UN inspectors in 1998 in order to embark on a crash program of unilateral disarmament. I have no patience with those who grant this madman the presumption of innocence, or with those who granted it earlier. The Ba’ath regime was often under-estimated, in its dangerous capacity for aggression, by Western intelligence. (The CIA refused to believe that Saddam was going to invade Kuwait in 1990, and nobody came near to guessing how close he then was to the acquisition of a nuclear bomb.) Still, the fact remains that the Bush and Blair administration decided that it was easier to scare the voters than to try and persuade them, and simpler to stress the language of “threat” than the discourse of human rights of the complexities of the Genocide Convention. Greatly to their shame, neither Bush nor Blair ever readied a bill of indictment, for war crimes and crimes against humanity, that could have been used as a warrant for intervention. They did not want to re-open the wretched file on their countries’ past collaboration with Saddam. This deceitful condescension has tainted a noble cause, I hope not irretrievably.

Earlier in the article, expressing his horror of what Iraq was like under Saddam, Hitchens says: “I insist that I saw all this with my own two eyes, and I would never have known of it if I had relied on the grudging and defeatist mainstream press.”

Personally, I am inclined to trust – as a provisional first approximation – the words of a self-employed, on the ground, veteran anthropologist more than an armchair newsperson working for the boss.

As for the social and political revolution that was possible after the invasion: “I haven’t seen anything like it since the Portuguese army overthrew the fascist dictoatorship in Lisbon in April 1974.” The army tried to “dislodge the torpor and backwardness of decades.”

Veteran soldiers and families of soldiers who spilled their blood in those deserts of oppressive barbarism, who at least carved a way for a new civilization of justice, peace, and education, are inspired by Hitchens’ article to hold in balance their humility before history’s adjudication against the entire human race – as well as unconstitutional action and embarrassing secrecy and propaganda – with a sense of justified pride and dignity. So it seems to me anyway.

It was the radical libertarian’s duty to oppose the war at the beginning and the politician’s self-serving interest to oppose it now. Hitchens did not seem to dance to the climate of opinion’s piper before or after, which makes him, if not right, at least a consistent contrarian.

No?

(As to your point about Wilson, I think you point to evidence supporting the opposite of your view. Wilson does not fumigate over political issues as a public intellectual, but as a spin-scum cleric always on the prowl for the next emotional hot button he can find to whip up a larger, adoring conservative crowd.)

Advocating war when it’s not necessary reflects poorly on a pubic intellectual’s a) judgment, and b) worldview.

I think Hitchens compounded his error by endorsing Bush in 2004 and then supporting Giuliani – after we had learned about Justice Dept memos regarding torture, Abu Ghraib, and the Patriot Act. This is not to say Hitchens endorses torture, but torture is frequently an accompanying part of war.

Of course, supporting the war even more severely discredited countless evangelical leaders. To their credit, the Pope and, yes, Doug Wilson, called it right.