Terrorists are not criminals in the sense that burglars, drunk drivers, perjurers, rapists and litterers are criminals. Terrorism may incidentally be a crime by its inclusion in the statutes that make it one, though pretty much any single action in the modern state is a crime by that standard.

The proper paradigm with which to approach an understanding of terrorism is not the criminal justice paradigm but the warfare paradigm. Terrorists are to be “prosecuted” on the battlefield (ie, wherever they are found) by soldiers, not prosecuted in the courtroom (ie, where they have to be brought and given “rights” as criminal defendants) by attorneys working for the state. That is to say, they are to be incapacitated and disarmed. If they fail to surrender, they are to be annihilated.

It may be proper to consider terrorists “war criminals.” But a war criminal is not essentially the same thing as a criminal. Adolf Eichmann is a good example of a “war criminal.” This guy was so ordinary and uninteresting that, thanks to Hannah Arendt, most educated people think of him immediately when they hear the word “banality.” Eichmann did not commit crimes outside the context of war and he was probably incapable of doing so. He did not have a criminal character and I can’t consider him a criminal. For this reason, I hate the expression “war criminal” and I consider it to be used primarily by people who think that war itself is a crime.

The question of how to treat terrorists, as enemy warriors who’ve engaged in atrocities or as criminal defendants with rights, goes deeper than just the question of warfare paradigm versus criminal justice paradigm. It comes all the way down to morality. If you have a Jewish morality, you hate evil and you want to see evildoers punished whenever and wherever they appear. If you have a Christian morality, you may hate evil, but you must love evildoers on some level, because their souls can always be saved.

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• If two groups of people are fighting, and both groups deny that it is a religious war, it is not a religious war.
• If two groups of people are fighting, and both groups agree that it is a religious war, it is a religious war.
• But if two groups of people are fighting, and one group denies that it is a religious war, while the other group insists that it is a religious war, it is prima facie a religious war.

Practical advice: how do you know if you’re in a religious war? Ask your enemy if his religion says that you must be killed.

By extension: you can be completely secular and a total hedonist and still be caught in a religious war. In fact, if there is one religious death cult that seeks to destroy you for not being a member of it, you will be locked in a religious war with its members until they are incapacitated, or until you are.

My understanding of the above, during a conversation with friends at Columbia University on Sunday 23 September 2001, was the first main reason that I stopped being a libertarian.

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Somewhere in the world, in a troubled region, there are riots on the streets and an organization called the Christian Brotherhood is poised to succeed in seizing power as that country’s military dictator eventually flees.

The Christian Brotherhood is a potentially frightening organization. Its members have been involved in a lot of political violence over the years, and several of its offshoots are in a constant state of crusade (the Christian term for a holy war) against Israel, where I live; the United States, where I grew up and where my family lives; and a lot of other relatively civilized countries. The Brotherhood itself isn’t directly involved in terrorism today, but that could change tomorrow and almost certainly will change if it ever gets control of a national government: imagine another Iran, except actually bordering Israel. Mainly it’s been organizing politically, even though it’s technically illegal, and building its social welfare network, a vast and deep well of support in an impoverished country. In fact, the Christian Brotherhood is by far the most popular force in this country.

Imagine how the Brookings Institution would describe the Christian Brotherhood if it existed and how dire and terrifying their warnings would be if the Christian Brotherhood were going to be the next government of any place in the world. Now ask yourself: is that how they presented the Muslim Brotherhood yesterday? No, it is not.

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The Men’s Rights movement has reached the Knesset. It’s a little weird to me that the Israel world and the MRA world are now overlapping, but I think Israel has been one of the countries with the most vocal Men’s activism in the world, at least in the form of זכויות הגבר במשפחה (Men’s Family Rights) graffiti that for years competed with נ…נח…נחמ nonsense in some public spaces. Gil Ronen was also the first person I ever heard (through common friends) putting “men” and “rights” together and asserting that men have rights as men (late 2005).

I don’t believe in “men’s rights” because I don’t believe in any kind of rights as a concept or as an organizing principle, and I’m ambivalent about the advance of the men’s rights idea in Israel because it seems too easily established as a demon that the rest of polite society can oppose (“Rape is a serious problem in Israel; Men’s Rights Activists advocate rape; we must annihilate Men’s Rights”). Better to deconstruct the overall rights idea overtly and covertly, I think; but it’s still cool that things like this happen in the Knesset. Since presumably a majority of voters in every US congressional district are women, no one who ever advocated men’s rights could ever make it into Congress.

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What is reaction and what does it mean to be a reactionary? In the past five years or so that I’ve considered myself a reactionary, I’ve described myself that way a bunch of times to a bunch of different people, and the responses I’ve got have never been what I expected. Oddly, the progressives and radicals among them didn’t recoil in disgust. Because “reactionary” to them is just a slur, like “fascist,” “capitalist” or “imperialist,” they took my self-definition as a sarcastic way for me to call myself “right-wing,” which actually I don’t consider myself to be, sort of like how my grandmother says her politics are “slightly to the right of Attila the Hun’s.”

Foseti, Mangan, Aretae and probably others are discussing this now, so I think it’s a good idea to share my opinion that’s based on what I’ve learned from my few attempts to come out of the reactionary closet.

Reactionary is a relative term that only has meaning in contrast and comparison to other relative political terms like conservative, progressive and radical; a definition of any one of those terms begs definitions of all the others, which I offer now:

• Progressives want change and they prefer for it to happen gradually, so as to maintain institutional continuity. A progressive view or program in one generation might not be considered progressive in the next. For example, liberalism was once progressive, but it is now conservative, at least in America; the progressive program in our generation is universalism, Gaiaism, whatever. Progressives feel inferior to radicals and superior to conservatives, but they are not aware of the differences between conservatives and reactionaries.
• Conservatives resist change, but they generally accept it after it becomes a reality. Occasionally they’ll try to overturn something that has changed recently, such as by attempting to defund Obamacare. American conservatives mostly believe in liberalism. Conservatives feel inferior to progressives and superior to reactionaries, but they are not aware of the differences between progressives and radicals.
• Radicals want change and they prefer for it to happen immediately, because they believe that maintaining the existent power structures that nurture injustice will allow injustice to grow again in the future. It’s wrong to think that radicals and progressives basically want the same things – but often it’s unclear whether someone is a radical or a progressive. Radicals feel superior to progressives and their feelings toward conservatives are either repulsion or curiosity. They are not aware that reactionaries actually exist.
• Reactionaries are opposed to change and prefer to undo what’s been done in favor of restoring an earlier order or regime. In our generation, reactionaries are anti-democracy, whether it’s the way democracy has been practiced since 1945, since 1933, since 1861, since 1789 or whether they’re against it in principle. Formalism, paleo-conservatism, Austrian School libertarianism, throne and altar conservatism and strict construction Constitutionalism are some of the many forms of reaction that are active in our generation, largely on the internet. It’s wrong to think that reactionaries and conservatives basically want the same things – but often it’s unclear whether someone is a reactionary or a conservative. American reactionaries mostly oppose liberalism, though they are commonly former liberals/libertarians, so the opposition may be incomplete. Reactionaries feel superior to conservatives, progressives and radicals, but, like conservatives, they tend not to be aware of the differences between progressives and radicals.

I can’t stress enough that these four groups’ beliefs change over time, which is why an American in 1860 who supported immediate emancipation of the slaves with no compensation to their owners, and strict racial segregation, was a radical, but someone who similarly opposes slavery and supports segregation in 2010 is a reactionary.

I agree with Aretae that there is something different about people like me, who are political reactionaries, and people like “The Amish, the Orthodox Jews, and many Christian Fundamentalists [who] are reactionary” in what perhaps might be a more thorough and deeper sense – even though I have curious and reactionary religious views, too. After all, I like technology and I make my living from the internet. So I think I’ll start describing myself first as a Formalist, and then clarify that Formalism is a type of reaction.

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I don’t have any strong feelings for or against Wikileaks at all, which feels very weird, because I definitely think I should. Seth Roberts endorsed a New Yorker commenter who argues that honest people support Wikileaks and dishonest people oppose it. This seems particularly disingenuous to me, and I’d add at least one more group to the for/against dichotomy: progressives who consider tactical and strategic leaking to be valuable weapons in their struggle to implement their agenda.

By tactical leaking, I mean leaked documents or information that directly harm a specific conservative politician, bureaucrat or policy. By strategic leaking, I mean contributing to a culture in which the crimes and evil deeds of conservatives always become known to the population, making conservatives seem more criminal and evil than progressives, whose crimes and evil deeds are less likely to become known.

That’s not to say that Wikileaks is so overtly and overwhelmingly progressive that none of its leaks will benefit conservatives. It’s not, and some of them will. Tactically, only a plurality – not a clear majority – of the latest leak cycle and of all the leaks I remember coming from Wikileaks were harmful to conservatives or helpful to progressives. But strategically, Wikileaks has struck a blow to conservatives and some of the policies they support, and is poised to unleash something on America’s financial sector comparable to what was unleashed on the State Department last week.

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From the New York Times, I’ve just learned that other people’s divorces are a sound and even profitable investment opportunity: “Balance Point Divorce Funding [is] a new Beverly Hills lender that offers to cover the cost of breaking up – paying a lawyer, searching for hidden assets, maintaining a lifestyle – in exchange for a share of the winnings.” Wow.

Unsurprisingly, Balance Point Divorce Funding’s “customers fall into a pattern. They are women. They generally do not have jobs. They often are raising small children. And their husbands run their own businesses, making it tough to obtain financial information.”

One part of me finds this appalling and nauseating – what kind of person would actually want to fund and to fuel another person’s emotional and financial pain in this crass way? It’s surely a sign of a decaying society that Americans have gone past indifference to divorce, and then gone past making divorce easy, and now are seeking out ways to get other people to divorce in the messiest and most combative, unpleasant ways possible. What a sick, sad world.

And on the other hand, some different part of me wants to invest in something like this. Investment opportunities exist for a good reason – it’s typically easiest to make money when some people’s views do not conform to reality (viz, beta husbands who don’t think their wives would ever divorce them and take all their money). Also, it makes perfect sense to wager on something the outcome of which I could influence in some way, which is obviously possible when negotiations between two parties are involved.

I also think divorce funding as an investment would be a wise hedge for a man getting married. I wonder if there would even be a way for him to bet against his own marriage. That could give him a comforting payout in the event that his ex-wife takes his life away, and all the more comforting if his payout comes out of hers!

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This post is in honor of World AIDS Day. According to Ynet, 382 people contracted HIV in Israel in 2009. On a side note, one of the eeriest things about moving from the United States to a tiny country with socialist medicine is that statistics like this can be announced with some authority and even accuracy.

Ynet would like us to believe that only 140 of the new HIV patients are homosexuals. That leaves heterosexual sex, contaminated blood transfusions, sharing contaminated needles, and any other methods of contracting HIV, to account for a full 242 new cases of HIV in Israel in 2009. This doesn’t sound logical to me. It’s long been known that the vast, vast majority of new HIV infections are caused by unprotected anal sex. As TJIC noted today, by avoiding that single activity, a person can be fairly confident that he will never contract HIV; by also not sharing unsterilized needles with heroin junkies, he can practically guarantee it.

I would bet a month’s salary that (1) more than half of Israel’s new HIV infections in 2009 were caused by homosexual sex alone, whether or not the new HIV patients are self-described as homosexuals. But I also strongly suspect that (2) at least 75% of them are caused by unprotected anal sex between two men and that (3) fewer than 5% are caused by exclusively heterosexual sex (ie, activity between a man and a woman in which the man has not also had sex with men).

I don’t know how to begin to estimate whether HIV is disproportionately prevalent in certain sectors of the population. We can be reasonably sure, for example, that Haredim and national religious Jews basically do not get HIV since, to the extent that they’re engaging in homosexual sex and shooting junk, they’re not Haredi or national religious. What about Russian-speaking immigrants? I don’t know. What about immigrants from Ethiopia? I don’t know. What about Arabs? I suspect that Arab homosexuals would be more likely to contract HIV because their culture and their families would be less accepting of them and they’d consequently be more likely to have random sex with strange men and not bother with condoms. I don’t know if I’m right in this estimation, but what would happen if someone would come on the news in Israel and say that AIDS is not only a homosexual disease, but an Arab homosexual disease?

When I was a child in a suburban elementary school in America, the fear of AIDS was so prevalent that my father told me explicitly that I was never, ever to touch anyone else’s blood, under any circumstances. Obviously I was instructed to reject all invitations to become someone’s “blood brother” by cutting our hands and rubbing the blood together, but he also made it clear that if someone fell and started bleeding during a pickup basketball or football game, I should stay back and not touch him until the blood was cleared away.

In my fifth grade “sex ed” class, and in health classes through middle school and the beginning of high school, I learned that AIDS was not only a ten-year death sentence but that it was extremely contagious. If you have sex with someone who has HIV, I was told, you will get HIV and you will die within ten years. Period.

That isn’t true. It never has been, and it’s far less true today than it once was. I can’t find a source for this, but almost three years ago I read that if you contracted HIV more than six months ago and you’re taking your antiretroviral pills faithfully, you essentially are no longer contagious.

The time of AIDS as a phenomenon that forced itself upon heterosexual, middle class people in western or western-oriented countries has passed. I always use a condom when I have sex, but AIDS is not really a concern to me – mainly I’m thinking about accidentally impregnating a girl who wouldn’t mind being accidentally impregnated by me. Also there are these other venereal diseases, though no one has really mentioned them in the past 30 years or so. I know it probably seems like AIDS advocacy and AIDS activism is growing in influence and even dominance today, but I don’t think the children of today are going to grow up in the kind of AIDS-dominated culture of fear that I experienced as a child and teenager in America. At the end of the day, there’s PC and everyone has to pay lip service to that, but AIDS will be a niche concern in another generation or so.

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I’ve been doing this for a little while, so when I have sex with a new girl for the first time, even though it’s a spectacular feeling, it’s still a spectacular feeling that I’ve had a bunch of times before.

Over time I’ve had a couple overlapping relationships that meant I was sometimes having sex with two girls on the same day, and I have also had several one-night stands during relationships, though I can’t think of any time specifically when I slept with a girl I’d just met on the same day I ever slept with a girlfriend. Also, I had a couple threesomes in college, but it was mainly because I was in the right place at the right time, and both times I’d been with one of the girls before.

So I am particularly impressed with myself that I recently managed to seduce two girls in one night, totally independent of one another, with about six hours passing from the beginning of the first to the end of the second. Also: neither knew anything about the other’s existence; neither was in a club or a bar where public sex happens often; one was in my apartment and the other was in the her apartment; neither involved drinking any alcohol; neither cost me any money; one I met online and one I met in a train station; both wanted to do it without a condom (get real!).

I don’t particularly expect to repeat this one-night-two-notch achievement any time soon. Nor do I think I’d exactly want to, since I’d prefer to have another threesome, or to have sex with two different girls on two consecutive nights than two on the same night and none the next. But yeah, I feel really accomplished right now.

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Aretae put together a list of posts from blogs he reads about voting in the US elections. It’s thorough, interesting and awesome. Check it out.

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