Posted 8:34 AM by Robert Ronald Smith

Success and Suicides

has had a good couple of weeks... it's now been "out there" for a full 6 months and will probably reach 35,000 readers today. On Monday, Chris Basten's "Fearing Fear Itself" had the #1 spot in the Rational Review News Digest commentary section. Today, my "UPSIDE DOWN criminal justice (Part 1)" was at #4. The significance of being in the top 5 is that they become part of RRND's XML feed for that day, and that means they'll show up on some other websites and increase readership.

Unfortunately, there is plenty of downside to go along with those successes. Suicides among American troops in Iraq continue to rise. I don't think it's difficult to explain. Most of our troops are very young, and really believe that their service is patriotic and heroic... but that isn't the kind of position they've been placed in. They're "trying to help" people who clearly don't want to be helped... resented and hated by the very people they thought they were going to save. They're forced, by the situation, to attack and kill civilians, even children. They're trapped in a moral dilemma... not just kill or be killed, but kill people who aren't, in any reasonable sense, the enemy. It's a moral predicament that would drive anyone but a numbed robotic killing machine to look for any escape. The military has never allowed "dropping out" to be a legal option, so what options are left to the soldier of conscience?

Quite a few soldiers who made it home on short furloughs have disappeared. I would like to think that their reasons were not to just avoid a hot, difficult and dangerous assignment, but were rather to escape the moral dilemma... to avoid having to wreak more destruction on civilians. We may never know for sure.

I cannot help but believe that this insane war is going to have a terrible effect on many of our young military people. They know the reasons they're there were lies. They know the Iraqis don't buy the "liberation". I believe that most of us would be willing to put our lives in great jeapordy for a cause we believe in, but I don't see how any thinking soldier can believe in this cause. They're seeing and causing horrific damage on people who don't deserve it... that will play hell with the psyche of soldiers, as previous wars have done.

Posted 8:07 AM by Robert Ronald Smith

Bringin' it up to date

is now up to 126 posts in 171 days, 100,341 words, 32,290 cumulative readers. Chris Basten had provided quite a few good articles, and is gaining his own reputation. His article Marry, Marry, Quite Contrary was picked up by the iFeminists web site and has had 1338 readers to date... and Chris has 2 other articles over 1,000 readers. (the leader is my Welcome to the Latecomers that was picked up by a radio talk show website and has pulled 5,378 readers)

The Babelogue software keeps track of the top 50 articles in terms of cumulative readers, and all 50 of the NFNF posts have more than 400 readers. The significance of that is that the number of readers in a given day can be very misleading. It's amazing how many people discover an article long after it has been posted. Many of our hits on any day are from searches people make, and one of the NFNF articles pops up high in the search listing.

Posted 7:49 AM by Robert Ronald Smith

FINALLY BACK!
Had some trouble with the blogger software, and that, plus being very busy with other things... I've really flaked off here for a whole 2 months. Now that I'm thinking about this blog, I have to admit that this is actually more fun and more useful than is . Because this is a more typical blog while NFNF is comprised of full articles, this format allows me to post a much wider variety of subjects. It's also easier to just "blast away" here.