The Council has spoken

The Watchers Council was once again able to meet in the open this week due to the fact that our intelligence operatives have determined that Hillary Clinton's agents are too busy trying to scrounge money to pay off her campaign debt to worry about taking vengeance upon the Council for its part in her defeat.

This weeks winning Council post was South Africa's Neville Chamberlain by The Razor. Here is a sample:

Thabo Mbeki has sat silently while his country is flooded with refugees fleeing the economic and social collapse of South Africa’s northern neighbor Zimbabwe. Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s liberator turned oppressor lost the parliamentary elections held in March, then scrambled his thugs to action to make sure that his loss wouldn’t be repeated in the run-off to be held Friday. While international pressure against Mugabe mounted, Mbeki resisted joining the chorus of condemnation and use the leverage his nation has over Zimbabwe to get Comrade Bob to relinquish power. Instead Mbeki pursued a “soft-softly” conciliatory approach, telling the rest of the world, in particular the US and the UK, to but out of what he considered to be an “internal matter.”

The winning non-Council post was Why You Should Apologize -- Ineffectively and Dishonestly -- For What You Didn't Do by Classical Values. Here is a sample:

I understand why people are emotional about slavery, especially if they read the chilling details of what their ancestors actually did. But -- notwithstanding the incessant demands of the guilt machine -- I see a major problem with any of them apologizing, for the simple reason that they can't apologize.

An apology is personal in nature. I cannot apologize for the actions of someone else -- not even my father or my mother. If they were to have hurt people, sure, I could acknowledge what they did and feel compassion for their victims, but I cannot apologize. This is further compounded when there are no living malfeasors, and no living victims. Suppose my great-great grandfather had murdered someone. I can't think of anything more absurd than hunting down the murder victim's descendants and telling them that I "apologize" for the crime of my great-great grandfather. Moreover, they'd be in no position to accept my meaningless apology. Any such apology by me would thus be an idle act, and a phony, disingenuous one, with a goal of alleviating nonexistent guilt.

Apologizing for what was not done by the apologist is thus an extreme form of dishonesty, because it is an admission of guilt that is not there, by people who did not do it, to people who are not their victims.

It makes about as much sense as demanding that "the Jews" apologize for killing Christ.

Such apologies are logically impossible and cannot erase guilt -- neither the original guilt attributable to the guilty parties, nor the phony guilt their descendants do not share. But because they don't work, a single apology would be one too many, while a million apologies would never be enough.

Once started, these apologies might become self-perpetuating, though.

Perhaps that's the whole idea.

In both cases go and read the rest.