“HE’S MORE MACHINE NOW THAN MAN:” Hillary Carter continues her feud with Richard “Darth” Bennett.

Bennett’s a smart guy, but scrolling down his page the other day and seeing attacks on lesbians, breastfeeders, libertarians, etc. it became pretty clear to me that Eric Olsen was right: the man’s trolling. And I fell for it. I’ll be smarter next time.

UPDATE: The Bear says much the same. So does Stephen Green.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Patrick Nielsen Hayden fact-checks the Bennett story and discovers some Usenet history: “Those perplexed to find themselves recipients of abuse from Bennett in his latter-day incarnation as a weblog pundit may be consoled to find that, evidently, this behavior is nothing new. Quite the contrary, it appears to be extensively rehearsed.”

BLOGGER N.Z. BEAR has a lengthy post on the latest Amnesty International report on human rights. Here’s a key observation:

But reading through their report, I’m struck not so much by the specific points they raise — some of which I agree with, some of which I do not — [as] by the tone of the document, particularly where it comes to criticism of the United States. . . .

Amnesty, I think, does themselves a severe disservice simply in the way they present their criticisms. I suspect people often react negatively to their complaints on items such as civilian casualties during our bombing of Afghanistan not because they think bombing civilians is a good thing, but because Amnesty takes such a combative and accusatory approach, with seemingly no recognition at all of the contributions the U.S. (or other Western democracies that they place in their sights) have made to the cause of human rights worldwide.

I guess what I’m saying is, it’s not the fact that they criticize U.S. policy that bothers me; it’s the fact that they’re just, well, such jerks about it.

Yeah, that’s about right. I’ve been a big Amnesty supporter over the years, but they’ve seemed extra-eager to find opportunities to criticize the United States, and much more muted about less savory countries. Sadly, I think that’s an indication that their direct-mail base is more interested in hearing criticism of the United States, and the West in general, than in human rights per se.

WOBBLY WATCH: John O’Sullivan says that the Blogosphere is overreacting. He’s strongly in favor of rope-a-dope.

I’ve been wobbly on wobbliness, as readers know. The problem is that a properly executed disinformation campaign prior to an invasion would look just like wobbliness. So the question of what’s going on depends in no small part on how good you think the Bush Administration and the Pentagon are at at staying on message and controlling leaks.

In defense of the Blogosphere, there’s no real reason to feel guilty if wobblyists turn out to be wrong. If Bush is going wobbly, then he needs to be pressured. If he’s not, and it’s all rope-a-dope, then the Blogosphere’s complaints will just help the disinformation campaign look credible.

UPDATE: Reader Howard Litwak thinks I’m reading too much into O’Sullivan’s piece. He says it’s not really an endorsement of rope-a-dope so much as an observation that Bush has done badly enough in domestic politics that he has no choice but to win the war.

There may be something to this, but I’m not sure it matters. If Bush is serious about winning the war, then a lot of what we’re hearing must be disinformation (hence rope-a-dope). If he’s not serious, then it’s wobbliness. Can he be both wobbly and serious about winning the war? Not for long, if at all.

ASK & YE SHALL RECEIVE: There’s a new logo, which hopefully addresses Dr. Weevil’s unfortunate associations with the old one. Archives are fixed so that links go where they’re supposed to. And I have answers to two popular questions sent in response to the autobiographical part of this post: “Why does Garry Wills hate you?” and “What’s this about your dad and the antiwar protests?”

The two are not connected as far as I know, except by the common factor of Garry Wills, but you can read about the antiwar protests (which also involved Billy Graham and Richard Nixon) here, including a mention of Wills’ article in Esquire, which I have never actually read.

Why does Wills hate me? Well, he doesn’t really hate me so much as he hates guns. But he wrote a rather nasty review in The New York Review of Books, reviewing a symposium issue of the Tennessee Law Review on the Second Amendment. Wills called me one of a cabal of nutty law professors who had dreamed up an unfounded interpretation of the Second Amendment, and offered his own (based on Latin etymology) in its place. Wills purported to demonstrate, using this Latin analysis, that James Madison had managed to hornswoggle everyone else into accepting a Second Amendment that did absolutely nothing at all.

Wills’ theory hasn’t caught on (as one colleague put it, “it would be more persuasive, if the Constitution were written in Latin”) but in an exchange of letters published in the New York Review about his piece he more or less accused me of fraud (he called my reliance “plain false”) for interpreting a letter from Tench Coxe to James Madison the way that pretty much every consitutional scholar (except Wills) interprets it, as indicating support for an individual right to arms. (The letters are not available online, but the discussion is accurately summarized here in the introduction and at fn. 15).

Wills has not been as quick to charge fraud where Michael Bellesiles is concerned, I note. In fact, as far as I know, he’s said nothing since his glowing review of September 10, 2000.

A somewhat modified version of Wills’ thesis, minus bogus charges of fraud, appears in Wills’ book A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government, which might have been dedicated, as was a book by Le Corbusier, “To Authority.”

So there you have it.

UPDATE: Reader Don McGregor writes: “A Necessary Evil was a deeply weird book. The Liberals have adopted pre-revolutionary Tory ideology: that the state has a claim to existence above and superior to the wishes and desires of the people it purportedly serves.” Yes. We’re seeing that in Europe with the EU, too. And for similar reasons.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s a piece on Garry Wills’ Second Amendment theories that’s more digestible and to the point than the rather long item relating to Tench Coxe that I link above.

JAMES LILEKS has some reflections on a peaceful Memorial Day.

TEEN SEX ON MARS: Nick Schulz challenges me to combine the weekend’s themes into one post on teenage sexual behavior on a newly terraformed Mars. But I don’t have to, because Kim Stanley Robinson’s Blue Mars, part of his excellent trilogy about a colonized and terraformed Mars, does just that.

THE SITE MOVE seems to have gone pretty well, and most issues have now been dealt with — mostly by Stacy Tabb, who rules (that’s her logo-button on the left, just below the Amazon tip jar.) Speaking of tip jars, I’m now paying for bandwidth on a slick new dedicated server that’s a lot more reliable than BlogSpot, but also more expensive, so your contributions are appreciated.

MICHAEL BARONE looks at gun control and affirmative action and finds a common thread.

ONE EMAIL CORRESPONDENT, in light of all the teen sex discussion over the weekend, asked if it were “Blogger Sweeps Week.” Hmm. No. If it were, I’d be linking to this article on the importance of sex by Will Leitch, from The Simon.

TWENTY YEARS AGO, Europeans were savaging Reagan for not being nice enough to the Russians, and for pursuing an arms buildup they were sure would lead to nuclear war. Now, with the Soviet Union gone and Russia joining NATO after a historic nuclear arms-reduction treaty, they’re bowled over by the brilliance of American diplomacy in achieving such a bloodless triumph, and embarrassed that they ever could have doubted us. Uh, aren’t they? Well, no. . . .

ROBERT SCHWARTZ has an item on Michael Moore’s new movie, which is built around a discredited bit of history (no, not Bellesiles’ — another bit of discredited history, namely that the Second Amendment was all about encouraging slavery, which originates with Carl Bogus).

ALEX RUBALCAVA has moved to this new URL. Adjust your bookmarks accordingly, and go there to read the story about all the proposed Internet regulations currently before Congress.

MICKEY KAUS ANALYZES Seymour Hersh’s intelligence-failure 9/11 story from the New Yorker and asks some questions that Hersh doesn’t.

Meanwhile Josh Marshall set out to debunk the hawks’ claims that we should be going to war against Iraq, only to decide that the hawks are right. But Bush fan Andrew Sullivan now says he’s worried that Bush isn’t merciless enough to do the job.

JOHN HILER has written the definitive article on the Blogosphere (again). It’s long, it’s thorough, and it’s thoughtful. I have a few quibbles, but that’s all they are. Bookmark this, and give the link to your journalist friends.

YOU DON’T HEAR MUCH about this sort of military action in Afghanistan. I wonder why? It’s important.

DADDY WARBLOGS celebrates Memorial Day with a righteous Fisking.

ANOTHER REASON TO LOVE AMERICA: Combination tanning salon / sushi bars!

MY POSTS ARE “ENTIRELY SNARKY” says Chatelaine. But my posts aren’t “entirely American.” I mean, Ugandan bands and Parisian rollerskaters? There’s no pleasing some people.

ERIC OLSEN reports on his all-American memorial day.

Memorial Day weekend was no great shakes at the InstaPundit household, but it was pleasant enough considering everything that happened. My daughter got over her stomach bug, and spent last night at my sister’s. This was supposed to allow my wife and me to have a lovely romantic dinner to celebrate her birthday (last week) but she came down with the stomach bug just in time to put paid to those plans. She recovered enough to meet with some guys today from the production company shooting her documentary, but then it was back to bed for her. I picked up my daughter, took her to the mall for a haircut (very cute), a trip to Build-a-Bear (cute, but a bit expensive — they make the money selling you tiny bits of cloth shaped like bear clothes at exorbitant prices, and it’s carefully calibrated to ensure you spend more than you plan to), and a stop by Godiva Chocolate (I buy her a couple of pieces of that stuff when we go to the mall, with the result that regular cheap-o chocolate tastes like crap to her and goes uneaten). Then home where we finished a book (having completed the Narnia series, we’re back on a second run-through of Harry Potter; just finished the first one). Not a bad day at all, considering.

And any day like that is a good day, considering that there are people out there who’d like to see everyone involved go up in a nuclear fireball. To which I say: screw ’em — and remember the guys who are doing their best to accomplish that very goal.

For a different kind of Memorial Day remembrance, go here.

A FEW PEOPLE HAVE EMAILED to wonder why comments aren’t visible on every post. A couple of Macintosh users have even hinted darkly at conspiracies.

I just don’t turn them on unless I think there’s likely to be a good discussion. Under my new (and much more expensive than Blogspot) setup, I’ve got more or less a dedicated server, but the site is still using a lot of bandwidth and I don’t want to add gratuitously to the server load. Also, I don’t think I could keep track of all the commentage if comments were enabled on everything.

ALEX BEAM, REVISITED: According to this report in the New York Times, another mainline news columnist has been taken in by a rather obvious satire.

Now, anyone can be taken in. But read the names involved in this story and see if it shouldn’t have set off some alarm bells somewhere.

Heck, I checked out this story about an outfit seeking adoptive parents for frozen embryos because it sounded like a parody. Apparently, though, it’s true — or at least they didn’t ‘fess up when I phoned ’em, which to me is the difference between parody and, well, fraud. Here’s a link to their website, and here’s the Deroy Murdock column on “microscopic-Americans” that made me wonder.

(Thanks to Arthur’s Computer Adventure, which my daughter is playing on the other computer in my study, blogging resumes earlier than expected).

BLOGGER GODLESS CAPITALIST says Bush is a moron for saying that Europe isn’t anti-American. (He/she is referencing the story involving David Gregory that I link to below).

On the other hand, reader Tony Seward suggests that Bush is right:

Every Friday night in Paris there is a group of rollerbladers that get

together and do a lap through the city along with Police escort. The attendance cycles throught the year depending on holidays and weather, but there are usually several thousand and have been as many as 25,000.

Le Monde said that there were three to four thousand protesters. If there were more skaters last Friday, one might [ask] why David Gregory didn’t ask Bush how he felt about more Parisians being interested in ‘blading rather than protesting.

Unfortunately, the Pari-Roller website doesn’t have statistics past May 10, so I can’t tell how many people were skating Friday. But overall, it looks like there have been more skaters than protesters pretty much every time since the warm weather began. Advantage: Seward.

I’VE BEEN MOSTLY FOLLOWING LILEKS’ ADVICE today. I’m glad he didn’t. Follow the links.

But where’s 101 Park?

BELLESILES UPDATE; What the Newberry Knew and When it Knew it, courtesy of the History News Network. Note the comments at the bottom of the page. (Via Melissa Seckora).

BEN DOMENECH has a thoughtful and polite response on teen sex now.

But Ben, I’m not an ex-hippie. My Dad is an ex-hippie, whose antiwar protests were sympathetically treated by Garry Wills (who hates me) in Esquire back in ’70 or ’71. I was in fourth grade at the time. And my youngest brother is 21, so I’m not as out of touch with the world of teens as you seem to think.

I got a fair amount of mail along the lines of Ben Domenech’s post, saying “listen to what the teens are saying about teen sex, and you’ll understand how bad it is.”

This seems self-contradictory to me. If teenagers think that teen sex is so bad, then how come we have a problem with so many of them, well, thinking it’s so good?

Really, of course, it can be either — as many other emailers wrote, teen sex was (or is) enjoyable for them, and did (or is doing) them no harm. Some said it was the only happy memory they had of their teen years.

My chief point in my initial post was that teen sex isn’t unnatural or aberrational, and that pretending that it’s some bizarre modern phenomenon born of Elvis or Abercrombie and Fitch misses the point. As I said in a later post, there’s a big difference between sex at 17 or 18 and sex at 13. (Newsmagazines tend to talk about 13-year-olds, while showing provocative photos of 18-year-olds, the better to boost newsstand sales). Personally, I think people are probably better off waiting until they’re post-high school for sex — but I know a lot of people who are damned happy they didn’t, and some who are sorry that they did.

Unlike some people, I don’t feel that I know best for everyone in this regard. If teenagers weren’t infantilized in so many other ways, they’d have a better base of judgment and self-respect, and could make better decisions about when they were ready to have sex. Unfortunately, many teenagers have so few outlets for feeling accomplished and respected that having a boyfriend or girlfriend assumes way too much importance in their lives, which probably causes them to start having sex sooner than they really want to.

I think that the extended infantilization of teens — and even twenty-somethings — in our culture is pernicious and breeds irresponsibility, and I think that sensational treatments of teen sex make that problem worse, not better.

Well, dang. I hadn’t planned to post any more until tonight, and now there’s not time to trim the hedges before I go pick up my daughter from my sister’s. Hmm. Well, as they say at Microsoft, “That’s not a bug — it’s a feature!”

UPDATE: Cal Ulmann thinks Ben’s way too worked up.