I am no longer a warblogger. The term has changed its meaning, and the change has left me on the outside. I realized this some weeks ago, and my decision was further vindicated by more evidence that Tom Coates is a reasonable guy:

The weird thing about this whole thing is the assumption that I'm against war in general - or even this particular war in specific. In general, of course I'm not - in certain circumstances, when the other options have been exhausted and when the need to conduct war is obvious - well then it should be undertaken. In specific, I'm actually very unsure about the whole thing - I don't like Iraq's leadership, but I don't entirely trust the Bush administration's reasons for trying to get rid of them... I've always thought that questioning and challenging one's leaders was a good way to stop them doing things you vehemently disagree with... When I made my comments about the "most hawkish and blood thirsty warbloggers" I meant just that - the people who seem to revel in the desire for war whatever - the people who seem to group individuals together into huge homogonous groups and demonise them in order to identify them as an enemy and attack them. There are many people in the world who don't share my politics, but I have no issue with them. I'll argue with them, but I won't find them terrifying. It's the people who don't seem interested in finding out whether conducting a war on Islam or Iraq is even SLIGHTLY a grey area... They're the people who terrify me, because where might they turn their gaze next? The rest of the warbloggers - people who are interested in the events that are unfolding around them, and have their own opinions of it that they're prepared to question and challenge occasionally - I have no problem with them at all... And in the meantime, I can't quite stand the sight of people scrabbling (even in jest) for the title of the weblog that most craves war and wants to see people - real people - die...

Coates, if you did not know, is the guy whose offhand remark started the "most bloodthirsty warblog" contest, which I've commented on before here and here. It seems to me that Coates is the reasonable guy in this little fracas - and I'm nothing if not a partisan of the "reasonable guy" position. In fact, this whole contest issue has pushed me to a decision I was edging towards anyway: the repudiation of the "warblogger" title. I used to half embrace this term as denoting "someone who blogged about war and was not a pacifist", but now the term has been hijacked by extremists to mean "those who support an all-out war on Islam and/or the Middle East". I've always believed that it's the duty of those who consider themselves centrists to criticize extremists on the merits of their position - or else risk being associated with them. I'm not talking about the "rhetorical distancing" tactic (ably described by Sailer) in which one excoriates an ideological kinsman as "extreme" while subscribing to a position with nary an epsilon of difference from the "extremist's" own views. Rather, I refer to a detailed point-by-point listing of what's wrong with extreme warblogging and why it's not the hard-nosed, pragmatic, and realistic philosophy that its advocates believe it to be. So in the next few days (or weeks, or whenever I get around to it), I'm going to post a more in-depth analysis of what the warblogger movement was and what it has become. A few quick points as prequel: 1) It's easy to score points and look smart when your opponents are the caliber of WarbloggerWatch. Those who opposed action in Afghanistan because "war is bad for children and living things" are sitting ducks, and need only be pushed a little bit to collapse under the weight of their inconsistency. [1] Many of the self-proclaimed centrists (yes, I consider myself a centrist - perhaps a radical centrist) were unaware of the extreme positions of some bloggers because many of their heavily linked posts were devoted to refuting similarly extreme opponents on the other side of the ideological spectrum. 2) It's when presenting your own ideas that your ideological positions are subject to scrutiny. This burden has been impossible to bear for the pacifist left. [2] What has been missed is that it's equally unbearable for the bloodthirsty right, because those calling for an all-out war on Islam and/or the Middle East are looking to create problems rather than solutions. They fail to make the most elementary distinctions between combatants and non-combatants, and are often guilty of romanticizing World War 3 - if not advocating it outright! To be perfectly clear: there is an ocean of difference between contemplating the stupidity of those Islamists who wish for Ragnarok, and being stupid enough to wish for it yourself. [1] Example: So all war is bad? So was WW2 bad? Wasn't it against the only real bad guys, those racist white men? Huh? [2] See footnote 1 directly above.