Thursday, February 05, 2009

When I was a moron   posted by Razib @ 2/05/2009 09:55:00 PM
Share/Bookmark

My nemesis Ikram mentioned on another blog that I used to be a Warblogger. I mildly disputed this, but I went back and skimmed over all my posts from 2002 and many of them from 2003. People have a tendency to rewrite the past, but I've got archives here which go back almost 7 years now. Reading the stuff from the blogspot period (up to the end of 2002) I think I recant my objection, and will accept his characterization. I didn't blog much about Iraq in any direct way, I wasn't that interested, nor was I informed even on a superficial level (i.e., I didn't read much about the whole controversy). But, I made comments about how much I admired Victor Davis Hanson's writing at some point in the summer of 2002. Additionally, there was a pre-blogspot site I had in April-June 2002 whose archives are gone where I praised the historical fantasy writing of Michael Ledeen (I was too stupid to understand that it was speculative fiction at the time and thought it was awesome that he had all these incredible scoops). I remember well a post in April of 2003 where I said I was 55 out of 100 in favor of the war, +/- 10, with weak confidence. Luckily for me I didn't have strong opinions, so I kept most of the moronic ideas and analyses which I might have put into to the record to myself. But you could connect the dots and construct a good model of my moronic opinions if you did read what I wrote (just like my anti-Iraq War opinions probably are obvious to readers from summer of 2004 on, though I rarely blogged on the topic directly).*

My hopes for the human race back then were higher. In hindsight how did I expect Saudi Arabians to treat their women??? I remember all this well, that didn't surprise me. What did surprise me was how much I resembled Instapundit in style, and my obsession with HIV rates across the world. Also, I scored 61 on the Libertarian Purity Test in June of 2002. Just retook it now, and I scored a 31.

In any case, this painful rereading of my older posts (God I said a lot of moronic things!) was prompted by the fact that a lot of the pro-Stimulus Blogging reminds me of Warblogging. I think people tend to underestimate the downsides of action and the upsides of inaction. Hope cometh before the fall.

* I stopped thinking about the Iraq War after April of 2003, when Diana of Letters from Gotham started IMing me that she was turning against the whole thing. She knew a lot more about the topic than I did, so I took that as a bad sign for the enterprise. After reading Michael Totten's weblog in 2004 I shifted to a pretty strong anti-neocon stance.

Labels: