by Matt Barr

Watcher's Council results, April 14

Of the posts nominated April 12, these won in the results posted Friday.

Dr. Sanity's No Relation To Reality, Indeed won best Council post.

What seems most characteristic about the type of Islam practiced in the Middle East today (and being exported around the world) is that its attitude toward women most certainly has no relationship to reality. Reality is indeed a "mistake" in their eyes, and they fully intend to rectify it--no matter how many deaths and lives are sacrificed to their perverted religious ideology.

The Glittering Eye's The Death of 1,000 Cuts was runner up.

In the Watcher's Open, aka Non-Council category, an April 2006 Message From Dan Simmons won. What are we really warring against?

"Let's imagine," said the Time Traveler, "that on December eighth, Nineteen forty-one, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke before a joint session of Congress and asked them to declare war on aviation."

"That's absurd," I said.

"Is it?" asked the Time Traveler. "The American battleships, cruisers, harbor installations, Army barracks, and airfields at Pearl Harbor and elsewhere in Hawaii were all struck by Japanese aircraft. Imagine if the next day Roosevelt had declared war on aviation . . . threatening to wipe it out wherever we found it. Committing all the resources of the United States of America to defeating aviation, so help us God."

"That's just stupid," I said. If I'd ever been afraid of this Time Traveler, I wasn't now. He was obviously a mental defective."The planes, the Japanese planes," I said, "were just a method of attack . . . a means . . . it wasn't aviation that attacked us at Pearl Harbor, but the Empire of Japan. We declared war on Japan and a few days later its ally, Germany, lived up to its treaty with the Japanese and declared war on us. If we'd declared war on aviation, on goddamned airplanes rather than the empire and ideology that launched them, we'd never have . . ."

I stopped. What had he called it? Category Error. Making the problem unsolvable through your inability -- or fear -- of defining it correctly.

The Time Traveler was smiling at me from the shadows. It was a small, thin, cold smile -- holding no humor in it, I was sure -- but still a smile of sorts. It seemed more sad than gloating as my sudden silence stretched on.

Read the whole thing (while you can, I'm not sure how permanent a link that is). Captain's Quarters placed.

Full results linked above, at Watcher's site, and also on my left sidebar.

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