Re-read this sentence and see for yourself if the US govt qualifies as a terrorist regime.
Why bother? I was referring to the distinctions between how Bush (and, say, 80+% of Americans) define the war and how others (perhaps wilfully) distort that definition when trying to attack it.
Having gone around with you before on this, I'm 0% interested in the "moral status" of the USA. As an American citizen, I am now, when it comes to my relationship to the US federal government, interested only in my personal safety, freedom, and that of my fellow citizens.
I know you hate America. We all know you hate America. I know you are doing everything you can to motivate those who actually do intend to murder innocent Americans (a phrase I concede you won't admit applies to anyone, even two-year-olds on airplanes) to carry out their schemes, murder even more, etc. We all know that now.
And I also suspect you do this primarily because you hold America 100% guilty for the defeat of global communism, a system that murdered tens of millions in the 20th century alone, and which the USA fought, in fits and starts, using all sorts of tactics, including supporting efforts involving the things you list -- Pinochet, Idi Amin, Vietnam, El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama (though I'm not sure about that last one).
So, I no longer take you seriously as a communicator of moral uprightness, but rather as a hopeful leader of mass-murder against myself, my family, and my fellow citizens.
Further, I recognize that the left-wing socialist/communist establishment fully embraces Arab-Muslim acts of mass murder as politically legitimate because it believes those acts can be connected to left-wing canards like "poverty", "injustice", "shame", the exact problems the left loves to trump up in order to extort funding, freedom, and military power from the West, especially the USA. (Personally, I agree with the sentiment that labels as "slander" statements that point to poverty as a root cause of terrorism or violence generally. I find poor people no more prone to violence than the wealthy, but the left disagrees when it finds such disagreement convenient.)
So it treats what amounts to right-wing fanatics as brothers-in-arms, mainly as a political ploy to convince the USA that if only it'd adopt the "enlightened" sort of leadership that involves less freedom, higher taxation, international redistribution of wealth, and further restrictions on business (if it's even allowed to exist at all), the problems of terrorism would evaporate -- which, of course, they would not, if history is any guide (since it's historically proven that such systems of government fail in the most crucial test: the ability to locate and promote qualified leaders of moral character).
That's why it's primarily left-wing publications that have trouble using the phrase "terrorist" today, instead equating it with "freedom fighter" -- suggesting that, deep down inside, they know that the so-called "freedom fighters" of the leftist revolutions of the past 100+ years were all, in fact, just terrorists. (Meanwhile, the right-wing publications with which I'm familiar have little trouble declaring people like Timothy McVeigh "terrorists", even though they were acting out in line with right-wing causes like opposing gun control.)
Meanwhile, last I was aware, the USA was no longer involved in any of those things you list. Heck, last I checked, neither were Germany nor Japan involved in murdering innocent civilians as they were in WWII -- and, surprise surprise, Bush is not targeting them, either. (I guess you really resent the US focusing exclusively on present threats rather than trying to bring about some sort of cosmic justice by annihilating itself and all its citizens?)
And until I see you invoke the reality of what the Soviet Union did, Cuba does, China does, on a regular basis in this forum and in these sorts of discussions, especially in the context of any unfortunate activity in which the US military gets involved, rather than constantly (as it seems to me) spewing hatred towards the USA -- as if the world needs more of that presently -- I won't change my opinion of you.
It's really sad, and at the same time kinda funny, that someone like you, pretending to be a moral compass for the US, conducts his campaign by spreading so much hatred and venom towards every single citizen, based on any act carried out in the name of, or even remotely funded or even not actively discouraged (e.g. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait) by, the US, even acts carried out decades before those, whom you hold as morally responsible for them, were born, as you did in this message.
So, since the USA can and will never, no matter what it does (except possibly by becoming a totalitarian communist dictatorship, run by the "enlightened idealists" who run, say, Cuba), meet your standard of morality and thus no longer be validly called a "terrorist regime", and since you're just one voice among many who will, similarly, never acknowledge the US's "moral superiority" in any matter, especially a matter involving actions it takes to defend itself against attack, I've completely given up my interest in the US carrying out our collective defense on the basis of any morality whatsoever.
Instead, all I care about is effectiveness. As long as there are those who declare themselves (by word or deed) enemies of the USA, the federal government had better deal with them, and do that effectively.
I'm not insisting that it do so. Oh, no -- I'm also a Christian, and therefore don't have a desire to commit violence, either directly or by proxy (e.g. by government) -- which is the main reason why I don't cotton to left-wing politics (since it's full of violence by proxy -- against the wealthy, against gun owners, against yet-to-be-born children, against white European males, and so on -- in the form of threat and the spreading of mass hatred and resentment, if not action), and why I have little interest in some strains of right-wing politics as well.
All I ask is, if the government won't do its primary duty and defend me and my fellow citizens, it dissolve itself entirely, leaving all of us free to defend ourselves, conduct our lives, earn and spend our money, plan for our retirement, teach our children, take care of our elderly, contribute to local charitities, and so on, as we each see fit.
In the meantime, people like you have convinced me to not even care, from the point of view of my duties of citizenship (e.g. voting), whether the US is intentionally bombing innocent civilians elsewhere in the world, except insofar as it is calculated as an effective means of defense. After all, people like you refuse to grant me or other Americans even the slightest whiff of good moral intentions, instead castigating us as equally evil to any modern-day terrorist planning to blow up a pediatrics ward. So there is no basis on which I can possibly encourage the US government to conduct itself "more morally". Why should I bother encouraging moral behavior on the premise that it'd earn more friends for the USA, when what the world seems to really respect is the aggressive use of force? After all, the most-respected international organization is the United Nations, and, in that body, the USA gets exactly as many votes as a mass-murdering, politically repressive nation like China gets. So much for international respect for any semblance of morality.
And, since there's plenty of evidence that attempts at morality led to 2001-09-11 (e.g. the restrictions on the sorts of local contacts the CIA may have, the refusal to engage in anything remotely like "racial profiling"), from the defense-of-my-country point of view, I see no practical reason to encourage the US government to behave morally. According to your claimed standards, the US can never become a more moral nation, and to the degree it tries, even I can see that it'll become far less able to defend itself against enemies that already exist and have already taken action against it.
So, thanks for your constant interjections in these and other discussions -- you've really clarified and simplified my outlook, and probably that of many others.
history has shown us that when the greenback meets technology, the idealists loose.
Yeah, let's dispense with corporations, capitalism, and the greed that goes along with the whole lot.
Then we can see how technology fares under the government that isn't beholden to corporate influence and the almighty dollar, leaving only the "idealists" to run things.
This is the same basic flaw of logic that burdens the US's war on terror. According to the definition we are using (all non-government supported organized violence) our own founding fathers were terrorists.
Could you please provide a quote or a link to one showing Bush (or whoever) saying something exactly like this, so we can determine for ourselves whether you're misinterpreting what has been actually said?
I haven't exactly paid close attention, but from what I've heard the US government saying post-09-11, they have not declared war on "all non-government-supported organized violence".
In fact, I was under the distinct impression they had declared war on all terrorism of global reach -- that is, all murdering of civilians, in order to terrorize a population into accommodating political goals, carried out across national borders -- and that they, in fact, will specifically target governments that fund, aid, or harbor terrorists of this sort.
Assuming I've heard the "party line" correctly, how it gets twisted into a war on "all non-government-supported organized violence" is a mystery. So presumably you have actual quotes, rather than anecdotal mumblings, to back up your claims?
(No, I'm not trying to "support Bush". How Arafat and the PLO manage to escape his earlier declaration of war on terrorists with global reach has been left entirely unexplained, at least to me, for just one example. I really am interested in actual evidence that his widely-supported "war on terror" is a fraud, beyond just evidence of political posturing to try to preserve an internation coalition including Arab states.)
Pretty reminiscent of the never-ending wars fought in 1984
But different from the never-ending, vastly expensive, and internally divisive wars started by FDR, LBJ, and others against poverty, against unemployment, against racism, against drugs, against pr0n, and so on?
At least Bush admitted up-front it would be never-ending and expensive, unlike other Presidents when they launched, or relaunched, most or all of these other wars.
And I admit I'm not 100% up on which of my rights have been taken away as a direct result of the War on Terror. I'm still stunned that my 1st-amendment rights have been directly attacked by Congress and Bush as a direct result of the War on Supposedly Too Much Money In Politics, aka "The Incumbent Protection Act", aka "Campaign Finance Reform", so maybe I just haven't paid attention to the other.
But of all these wars, the only one I'm reasonably certain is better fought by the US federal government than by citizens employing their own intelligence, rights, and compassion, happens to be the War on Terror. And, so far, it's a lot less expensive for me, less intrusive on my rights than those other wars have been, as far as I can tell. (Note that I distinguish between rights I have and rights I actually exercise; even rights I never wish to exercise, I desire for myself and others, to be able to choose whether to exercise.)
I'd rather the US government fight the War on Terror than leave the general population to do as it sees fit with the Arab Muslims in its midst (not to mention those who just happen to look like Arab Muslims, like Arab Christians, Indian Sikhs, and so on).
But I'll admit that, at this point, I can't really tell that it's a War on Terror anymore, so much as a War on Politically Unpopular Terrorists. Oh well.
A great post, especially because it explains the basis for your reasoning, rather than just making assertions and portraying anyone who disagrees with them as idiots, etc. But this:
(Esther Dyson, we can at least vote against the government. How will we protect ourselves from companies..? Dollar votes have proven not to work, the companies research our behaviors too well. You have seen yourself that it does not work. Shall we just be screwed; Are we getting our just deserts for being human?)
There seems to be a leap across a chasm of irrationality here. Exactly how does voting against a government protect ourselves from it? From the perspective of an individual, it can't possibly.
From my point of view, for example, I protected myself fully from Yahoo's and TRUSTe's behavior by choosing to not use their products. To do that, I didn't even have to vote -- I simply chose to not purchase their products, sign up on their web sites, whatever.
On the other hand, I've actually voted in many elections (certainly all the federal ones for which I've been eligible), yet, despite my voting pattern, my 1st and 2nd Amendment rights (for example) have not been protected against assaults by all three branches of government.
So, while I feel I can pretty heartily endorse the thought-process you encourage others to adopt in your post, it doesn't make me any less concerned about the role of government.
After all, the role of government (in human hands, that is) remains pretty much the same as ever: to impose the will of some people on others. The role of a business (including a corporation) is quite different: to offer a service, product, or currency in exchange for something considered, generally, of equivalent value in the market. (Let me make it clear that the degree to which this "works" in a useful way depends strongly on the quality of the market, which is where government oversight is generally welcome, even by many who downplay the utility of government in other areas.)
Participation in the "rules" set by a given business is therefore quite voluntary on a case-by-case basis. Participation in the "rules" set by a given government almost never is voluntary.
As to "dollar votes have been proven not to work", I can point to Arthur Andersen as just one obvious counterexample. Unlike massive failures on the part of the US federal government, the failure of Arthur Andersen to properly carry out one of its "core functions" resulted in a rapid "routing around" of its existence in favor of other, presumably less corrupt, organizations. One could even argue the punishment has been excessively severe -- yet it was imposed almost entirely by the public (okay, the "market"), largely voluntarily, and not as the result of a large number of meetings of congressional oversight committees, judicial proceedings, etc. (Contrast with the Microsoft antitrust proceedings, for one, and with the federalization of baggage screeners following 2001-09-11, despite said screeners having almost literally zero culpability compared to the existing federal oversight at the time, for another.)
Yes, a corporation tends to seek its financial survival over and above ethical behavior. But, correspondingly, a government tends to seek the perpetuation of its power over other human beings over and above ethical behavior, which is why more-dispersed, multi-dimensional governmental structures, compared to monolithic ones (in the same sense that anarcho-capitalism might be compared to corporatism?), seem to display less focused tyranny over time -- because the number of "agents" acting to preserve their control, divided by the amount of control exerted over a given populace, is greater, so the overlap of disparate interests grabbing for the same "power pot" tends to reduce tyranny, all else being equal. (Agents include individuals holding office, the "abstraction" of political offices themselves, the organizations that are composed of, and run by, one or more officeholders, etc.)
Corporations that research our behaviors "too well" always run the risk that we may one day wake up and change our collective behavior, as we did when we stopped buying slide rules, stopped buying LPs (records), stopped buying pet rocks, etc.
The typical response of a corporation in such a situation is to try to survive by re-evaluating its offerings, repositioning itself, whatever it takes to meet our new needs and desires.
The typical response of a government in such a situation is to try to force us to go back to the old behavior, on which its (typically slower-moving) power structure has come to depend.
(Consider the different ways in which corporations vs. government have responded to the digital revolution vis-a-vis images, music, videos: a substantial percentage of corporations generally have changed, even sprung up, to enable the revolution, while a much-larger percentage, correspondingly, of governments have been at least studying, if not deploying, ways to stop it, or at least slow it down for the benefit of a few corporations -- which it interprets as the benefit of its own ability to preserve its grasp on power.)
In both cases, I suppose there's a similarity to evolutionary pressure -- specifically, both entities tend to evolve towards specialization vis-a-vis their target audience -- and it does seem as though the radiation-style adaptation displayed by corporations provides more overall stability and less imposition of wills on the populace than the more monolothic adaptation displayed by governments, which are less prone to respond to disfavorable conditions in the local area by simply relocating. (That is, a species that has generally evolved in a radiating fashion might suffer the extinction of some strains that specifically adapted to local conditions when those conditions changed, but the species overall won't necessarily die out, and in fact might be better disposed to evolve a more-adaptable form. Whereas, a species more dependent on monolithic adaptation over a similar ecosystem carries a somewhat higher risk of complete extinction as local conditions in its ecosystem change out from under it.)
Note that, aside from the somewhat-simplistic, black-and-white language I use above, it's clear to me that there's substantial overlap between corporations and governments, especially in specific instances where the entities are nearly indistinguishable.
But it therefore stands to reason that the future, which already clearly includes greater global mobility of corporate entities (due to a vastly more fluid market, thanks to improved communications technologies, among other things), will naturally include, though perhaps on a substantially delayed basis, greater global mobility of governments.
Therefore, I don't find Dysonesque predictions (advocacies?) quite so off-the-wall when I think about similar predictions made in the past. The future might not have the precise, or even recognizable, forms talked about by Dyson, but future generations might recognize a corresponding degree of fluidity in the systems of their day, compared to what we have today, when the ability of a citizen to "protect himself" from his government by merely relocating (physically or virtually) has been growing at a much lower rate than his ability to choose with whom to do business -- a rate that might soon experience the same kind of acceleration that the business-choice rate did recently.
What's the point of even clicking the "remove" link?
What's the point of behaving like a civilised being when you're dealing with barbarians? Uh, because you're a civilised being, not a barbarian. I think that applies at any level of human interaction.
I'm confused. I've spent my entire life trying to commit myself to the highest ideals of moral, civilized behavior I can find.
Yet I have yet to come across any requirement that, if someone says I must do X to avoid something I'd prefer to avoid, I must therefore indeed do X.
As far as I can tell, as a moral, civilized being, I am entirely within my rights to assess, for myself, whether the action being suggested/offered (X; in this case, clicking on a "remove" link) will actually serve my interests as advertised.
If I determine that it won't, or at least is less likely to do so than it is to cause other things with which I am even less satisfied, I hold myself entirely guiltless by declining the invitation to do X.
In no way do I consider myself to be even remotely "lowering" myself to their "level" by refusing to click on a link.
I just think that anyone who claims to respect your wishes will respect them fully, not just far enough for you to take some action they outline for you to indicate whether you agree with them, trust them, etc.
Refusing to let others set your agenda for you is not inconsistent with highly moral behavior. And carrying out any agenda set for you by even those you consider to be your moral superiors -- much less known spammers -- offers no assurance that your actions, in carrying out that agenda, will be moral and/or civilized.
So, you might think that you're demonstrating your civility by clicking on the link they offer, but I don't see how you're doing that, and they likely take it as a demonstration of your naivete and/or gullibility.
(Having discovered, after warning explicitly against it, that my wife "responded" to some illegal SPAM faxes by calling the "remove me from the list" toll-free numbers listed on those very faxes -- which resulted in her getting spam-faxed more, of course -- this is a bit of a sore spot for me these days. It's difficult to avoid resenting those who would take advantage of her innocence, though, strictly speaking, it was her gullibility of which they took advantage.)
A very wise person once said something like "Be wise as serpents, and harmless as doves", which I find helpful. Innocence doesn't necessarily imply stupidity, naivete, or gullibility; it coexists quite happily with wisdom.
Alright, I tried encoding my DNA as music on my synthesizer, but can anyone tell me where the T key is on my keyboard? I can find only C, G, and A so far...is T one of the black keys or something?
Briefly, the environmental movement seeks to take away your freedoms[...]
Exactly. Ideally, the environmental movement should focus exclusively on studying the environment, learning about how it works, and educating the public, so individual citizens can decide, for themselves, how best to value it and fold that value into the way they conduct their daily activities, organize charities, governments, run corporations, and so on.
I realize the environmental movement does study, learn, and educate, but all three seem, to me, to have long been subordinated to the overall goal of taking away freedoms from individuals -- which are, in turn, themselves part of the environment, something environmentalists act as if were not the case.
If the movement would put aside its tyrannical and totalitarian aims, it would not only do a much better job of the crucial aspects of environmentalism (study, learn, and educate), it'd be much more well received by the general public, who would be less inclined to, upon hearing any pronouncement from an environmentalist, to reach for their wallet with one hand and their gun with another.
Your freedoms do not exist in a vacuum, and there are many very worthwhile causes that are not explicitly about freedom.
If many prominent members of the environmental movement had their way, my freedoms would not exist at all except by dint of government. (Consider the nearly-totalitarian agenda promoted by Ralph Nader, who was chosen as the "Green Party" candidate.)
But I agree, obviously, that my freedoms do not exist in a vacuum. Neither does the environment -- without mankind to defend it, it is as defenseless against external attack as mankind would be without a vigorous, healthy, diverse environment. They need each other, obviously.
But by "mankind" I don't mean some kind of world government dictating the kind of car I drive -- that kind of government interference has a solid record of destroying the environment.
Thanks for your response. Can't see anything worth disagreeing with in it, except that there seems to be an assumption that the environmental movement is generally seen as as self-interested as, say, the NRA.
My impression is, that's not the case, and we should be as careful when listening to environmentalists as we are when listening to the NRA when it comes to protecting our own freedoms.
That being said, I'm not aware of specific ways in which the NRA intends to take away my freedoms, so perhaps that's not as good an example as the ACLU or, for example, NOW.
(But my impression is that elitism in any form ultimates in tyranny, so perhaps it doesn't really matter, in the long run, that the NRA is presently campaigning for my freedoms as well as their own; if left unchallenged on the bases that I've been highlighting and you've underscored as well, I believe their agenda would mutate into a tyrannical one just as did the agenda of the '60s "flower power" generation.)
And, you're right: the language used by the environmentalists doesn't make them wrong, just as, for example, the OKC bombing didn't make Timothy McVeigh "wrong" about the issues he cared about.
But people who constantly entertain the viewpoint that they are best suited to run other peoples' lives are, I believe, inherently less capable of making full use of their own minds in a rational way, so I tend to trust such people less than I trust those who restrict their rhetoric, as well as their aims, to setting positive examples for others rather than imposing their views upon them.
Let's see every American who voted for Gore or Nader in 2000 commit, and fulfill, to not drive a vehicle getting less than 35mpg by 2003, then I'll begin to take their so-called "environmentalism" seriously. (And think what they'll do to reduce global warming even if I fail to pay attention!)
Until then, environmentalists who sincerely believe some kind of global government, directed by their concerns, is necessary to protect the environment, won't impress me, in terms of their ability to govern, until they successfully drive all left-wingers (Marxists, those who campaign for "social justice" from the seat of government, however they identify themselves) from their midsts, something that is necessary if their supposedly environment-centered views are to be taken seriously by those who reject the accompanying sociopolitical dogma.
If they can't do that, they can't govern the world. Period.
In the meantime, I'll certainly concede that CO2 emissions may be harmful in the long term. But given that CO2 emissions are inherent to humans breathing, thus making quite a distinction from the example you gave of putting lead in groundwater, what exactly do you prescribe to reduce CO2 emissions? And are there any prominent environmental groups that both a) raise the warnings and b) stress that the most harmonious solution is one in which every person is informed of the warning and left maximally free to decide for themselves how best to respond, for their own, their children, and their further descendants interests?
Put another way: if human activity is seen as central to the planet's problems, how exactly can human tyranny -- specifically, a form of governance that does not otherwise exist in nature, namely, global government -- be anything other than an unnatural solution?
Since you seem to have a grasp, at least, on these very issues, I'm wondering if you know of any environmental groups that focus on them as inherently part of the equation of addressing global environmental concerns. My somewhat-shallow acquaintance with the field reinforces my perception that it's pretty much "we run global weather models, they say the earth warms, therefore we must pass global legislation curtailing the West's economic engine", without any serious attempt to model the global impact of such legislation.
IMO, such an approach is akin to the cells of the body voting to have the brain "voluntarily" lower its consumption since, after all, the brain consumes resources at a much greater rate "per-capita" (per-cell). And if the brain fails to fulfill its reduction quotas, the hands promise to choke off its blood supply until the reduction is achieved.
Smart? Hardly, yet it's both democratic and roughly parallel to what today's prominent environmental groups suggest -- a logic that, if we aren't all equal, steps must be taken to impose equality, in the name of the environment (if not Marx, "social justice", or whatever).
And that agenda gets whispered into our ears through the association of guilt with groups, as in "as humans, we're much better at destroying than creating".
This has nothing to do with "human guilt" (although I must admit I am unsure what is meant by that phrase.)
I was referring to the use of the phrase "as humans", which is about as pertinent to our excess ability to destroy vs. create as the use of the phrase "as whites" is to humanity's history of slavery.
Look through the whole thread on/. and you'll see this pattern repeated quite often, generally in the following form:
"
We are responsible for destroying the earth's forests, raising the global temperature, therefore we must do something about it."
When examined closely, one discovers that the first "we" refers to all of humanity, while the second focuses its effects, mainly in the form of restrictions on human activity, on the West, especially the USA.
So when someone says "as humans" in this context, what they seem to be saying is "we're a failure as a species, but if you vote for a certain elite group of leaders, we can change humanity" -- exactly the sorts of promises made in the past, leading, generally, to the murder of millions of innocents.
Instead, I choose to combat such apparent attempts to denigrate the freedom of individual humans to conduct their lives as they see fit, a tactic I find is typically intended to make a case for, essentially, totalitarian rule by any elite (including "scientific environmentalists", or whatever you want to call them).
I offer, as alternative wording, phrases like "being inhabitants of this universe, it's far easier to destroy than create; but, being humans, we're uniquely suited to render judgement on what constitutes creation in our sphere, and, therefore, we should be very careful about threatening the destruction of individual humans' property, freedom, and lives in the name of any global mission".
In summary, I find much of the language of the environmentalists itself to be inherently anti-freedom, anti-individual, and quite elitist.
So, while phrases like "as humans" aren't directly harmful, they are uttered (perhaps unwittingly) as part of a pattern of language that ultimates in celebrating the unique abilities of some humans to govern others.
Yet I find little evidence in history or in pertinent theories of social organization supporting the existence of such abilities in humans, and no evidence whatsoever that such abilities can be identified a priori by other humans.
as humans, our destructive abilities far outmatch our constructive abilities.
Rather than bathe in "human guilt", perhaps you should consider what role the three laws of thermodynamics might play?
In particular, can you name any species that, examined at the equivalent level of activity, does not have greater destructive than constructive ability?
1. How am I going to store my video files in a simple text based format?
By using a coding system that provides incremental fractal-based refinement of images using ASCII strings of English-language names, such as "eye", "cat", "flesh tone", and "money shot".
1. ASCII is obsolete.
So is having two items numbered `1' in your list!
2. HTML is really really horrible for presentation.
You must be using Netscape or MSIE. Try lynx.
3. I believe Microsoft is well-aware of the Windows "Find" functionality
But suppose they weren't: how would they ever find out about it?
As for "upgrading" to get the latest bugs, I've found that Windows 2000 is far less buggy than Windows 98.
He said latest, not most. MS practices planned obsolescence in its products -- just as you finally get used to a particular bug, they go and fix it in the next product.
With INS, the law is just as incomprehensible, but the consequence for [screwing] up is that you get detained and beaten for a week (if you're lucky, if you're not lucky, for a lifetime, and that was before 9/11), and then you pack your bags and go home.
Detained and beaten for a week? I had no idea it was that bad.
I've heard horror stories about those who got on the wrong side of the IRS, but not involving beatings AFAIK.
But yeah, we also desperately need to get rid of the Internal Revenue Code. It's the canonical example of making the law so complex that nobody knows if they're in compliance or not, and therefore everybody spends more time and money paying lawyers and CPAs for at least some reassurance.
Indeed. I've come to the tentative conclusion that simplicity in laws challenges the rule of tyrants, who generally prefer laws to be sufficiently complex that they can more easily get away with selective enforcement targeting their enemies.
In that vein, while I picked on the IRS, it's difficult for me to think of an area of federal law that is not unnecessarily and excessively complicated, and tending further in that direction (DMCA and SSSCA being examples pertinent to/.)!
Ashcroft, if you or one of your goons is reading this (and we all know you are;-), please, during your term of office, eliminate the INS and start from scratch.
Bush, take the same advice, substituting "IRS" for "INS" and dropping the last part.
Importing goods produced by University slave labor
Transferring "last mile" distribution costs to customers, taxpayers, the environment, web-browser safety,...
This second item bears more explanation:
GNU/Linux takes from its customers. Customers "willingly" hack more to run GNU/Linux, but usually based on their hourly income ($40/hr) rather than the full amortized price of hacker uptime, which according to ACM is $135/hr.
GNU/Linux takes from taxpayers. GNU/Linux generates a lot of bandwidth but doesn't pay for the capacity to carry it. Oh, it may pay for an extra server and router in front of a website, but not for increased capacity in the several-hundred-thousand-node market area.
GNU/Linux takes from everyone in its market area. Bandwidth by its nature steals from the public good because servers on a connect-time/data basis don't pay for their negative side effects: spam, pr0n (including temperature rises due to impervious surface runoff), MP3s, increased danger to neophytes and AOL users.
GNU/Linux takes from the environment. Besides the environmental concerns due to increased bandwidth, there are two more. First, there is the runoff from its vast data farms and large IP address space (during a DDOS, this suddenly increases the data flow of intranets by several GB/s, which kills W98 boxes since they cannot tolerate dataflow changes the way Sun servers can). Second, GNU/Linux makes disposable releases.
GNU/Linux builds its large releases to last seven months, then leaves them as vacant blighted DVDs as they move to even bigger releases.
When it comes to GNU/Linux, "efficiency" means "theft" -- not the sort of efficiency that Wal-Mart should associate itself with.
Accoring to my spam statistics, the axis of evil consists of China, South Korea and USA. Somebody please explain it to GWB.
No, that's the access of evil.
The axis of evil started out as the States of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.
Last week, after meeting with the Canadian Prime Minister, Bush added French Skating Judges to the list.
Meanwhile, there's a figure skater from North Korea who threatens to win Gold Thursday night, because she's the only one who can perform the dreaded Quadruple Axel of Evil.
Which isn't to say that we
don't think our interests are good. Fighting communism,
preserving our solidarity, etc. I'll take it as given that we believe
we are "in the right". Because I have no doubt that Al Qaeda, from
its viewpoint, sees it's own goals as "in the right". In that way, we
are similar. It is what we are willing to do to achieve those goals
that I see the picture of similarity
completed.
Somewhere in there you completely skipped over the degree to which
either organization's goals are, actually, "in the right".
I.e. you went right from "I don't think US interests aren't good" to
"it's a given that the US believes it is right, and that Al
Queda believes it is right" [emphases changed], to jumping
directly to an abstract statement of what the respective
governments do to project their interests.
In that sense, you can't possibly have "completed" any "picture of
similarity". Billy and Marsha both believed they were "in the right",
and they both demonstrate they would achieve goals they decided were
critical by any means necessary; that hardly "completes the picture of
similarity", unless, by that, you mean "consists of all that is
similar, the rest being potentially quite different, morally
speaking". (Is that what you meant? Doesn't seem like it on the one
hand, where you seem to jump from "completes a picture of similarity"
to "therefore, they're morally equivalent"; on the other hand, you
seem logical enough to understand that a "picture of similarity", even
if complete, must be taken into account along with a correspondingly
complete "picture of dissimilarity", to which you seem to have paid
little attention in this thread, before any judgement on relative
morality can possibly be made.)
I claim that anyone who can't make a moral assessment between US
interests, as they are generally perceived (promoting individual
liberty, freedom of choice, freedom of religion, free trade, etc.),
and Al Queda interests (imposing Islam, destroying Israel, the USA,
etc.), is not fit to make precise moral judgements regarding the
willingness of the respective militaries to project force, the means
by which the respective governments operate, and so on.
(And, yes, obviously US interests include "defending the US government
and citizens by any means necessary", but that pretty much merely
cancels the equivalent interests in Al Queda, that is, to
defend its system of human organization and the humans that
make it up against external attack. Here, I've canceled out all
claims to morality, external goals for the respective organizations,
etc., focusing on the pure, unadulterated need for any body or system
to defend its content as well as its structure.)
What is clear is that Al Queda would consider failure to murder
noncombatants a failure of their overall mission, while the USA
has long considered that not to be an indication of the failure
of any mission. (Would WWII USA have mourned had it discovered, upon
dropping two nukes, that all noncombatants miraculously survived, even
though all military/industrial stuff was knocked down? Probably not.
But even Chinese journalists visiting the USA on 2001-09-11 cheered
when seeing the trade towers collapse, because, like Al Queda, they
knew failure to murder noncombatants would be failure to
hurt America, hence the choice of office hours to deliver the
jets, rather than using a red-eye getting into the area around 5am.
That is, I believe the Chinese journalists, and especially Al Queda,
were happier that it started at 9am, because more noncombatants would
be killed. That the US trades with China and tolerates Cuba, rather
than going all-out to destroy their US-hating governments, IMO
testifies to a moral sense that is superior to most nations, even
though, to me, it borders, at times, on the nearly-suicidal.)
That's a big reason why the US has been so keen on developing
precision-guided munitions that can take out military targets
without necessarily wiping out neighboring civilian
populations. The US could simply not bother, instead using
tactical nukes and thermonukes. So, it incurs substantial costs to
research, develop, produce, and deploy more-precise munitions,
missiles "famous" for being able to take out a reinforced military
target while not touching the occupied school or hospital 1/4 mile
away, as rough examples.
(Think of how easy it would be, even avoiding the nuke issue, to
simply drop daisy-cutter-type bombs anyplace where the US presently
might use a precision missile. The daisy cutters are used, of course;
in places where the military is sufficiently convinced they're
necessary to achieve an objective and there'll be low likelihood of
large loss of civilian life, though maybe some loss of friendly
combatants, as it -- sadly -- turns out.)
Whereas Al Queda, to achieve its much-less-moral objectives, looks to
murder maximum numbers of civilians, despite the fact that
doing so will clearly not give it any more security, safety, or
room for maneuvering than targeting solely military (and
related industry) targets.
In fact, I can recall a CNN (or Headlines News, same thing) report
that started out something like this, a couple of months back: "The
Bush Administration got bad news in the war effort today, where it has
been claimed that a bomb went astray and hit a hospital containing
Afghan civilians. It's been a similarly bad day for Al Queda, as it's
been confirmed that their #2 leader was killed."
"Similarly bad"?? That might not be an exact quote, but I believe
it's a faithful rendition of what the CNN commentator said.
Now, while I believe CNN is happy to downplay Bush(R) successes
vis-a-vis an enemy, this illustrates the fact that US citizens are in
fact perceived, by CNN, as considering our accidentally killing
noncombatants as about as bad for our Commander-in-Chief as our
killing our enemy's #2 man is for them.
I mean, how could killing a bunch of Afghan civilians be "bad news"
for Bush if it wasn't for the fact that we're not about winning
"by any means necessary" in the way you appear to mean -- with
nearly-complete disregard for the lives of noncombatants?
Let me tell you, if Al Queda managed to kill Dick Cheney, that
wouldn't run, as a story on Al Jazeera TV, on an equal basis to them
accidentally killing an American journalist: "Bad news for Al Queda,
they accidentally killed an American journalist; similarly bad news
for America, Al Queda killed their Vice President". That sort of
report would be inconceivable anywhere in all of Islam, China, and
many other corners of the world, I'm pretty sure.
(Still sticking to your moral equivalence claim?)
And, another of my original points stands: you are still alive,
despite our having this discussion. You would not be alive,
being in Al Queda (or Taliban) territory, having the same kind of
discussion. (So much for the Ashcroft Threat you've talked about,
eh?)
Not only does this upset your moral-equivalency apple cart, it
illustrates the fact that your preaching is
fundamentally about discouraging America from defending
herself, since it won't have anything but a positive effect on Al
Queda and its friends. (I don't care that you claim to ultimately
agree with the need to go to war -- your agreement with that decision
is, relative to your other talk, insignificant, so the weight of your
verbeage is, as far as I can see, to demonize America.)
In other words, you're little different from the townsfolk who trash
Marsha over the years to favor Tina's interests in enslaving the
population, ultimating in the needless murder of Marsha. That you
might say, in private, "oh, hey, I happen to agree Marsha needed to
act" does not get you off the hook for the effects your
voluminous preaching in the other direction has had.
This is, of course, a conclusion you will not
agree with, nor will you any time soon even if you decide to give it
due consideration. It took me a long time, myself, and I was a cynic
to begin with. But let me try to support it.
I started with the fact that there was a situation
in which we decided to use not one, but two nuclear weapons. Targeted
at civilians. No "accidental" death here. Justification is not
important to argue for or against, because that would only establish
the necessary modifier to my "any means". I personally
(meaning from my viewpoint) do not think that it was necessary, but I
can understand that from the viewpoint of the decision makers of the
time it may have seemed so.
Right, it might not have seemed necessary, but the devastation
of it was sufficient to convince Americans, believing in the
importance of morality, to not have to use nukes again, despite
plenty of opportunities to do so -- opportunities sufficiently
tempting that few people doubt they would have been used, had
the population been at the moral level of pre-WWII Germany or Japan,
or present-day Al Queda.
(Keep in mind, American inattention to the national stage is clearly
what typical prompts the more severe wars in which the US inflicts
significant casualties. While that may seem to draw attention to
Democratic presidents -- FDR, JFK, LBJ, and Clinton come to mind,
allowing for realities regarding genuine opportunity to do things
better -- it also happened to George H.W. Bush, whose ambassador to
Iraq, I think it was, managed to completely confuse the issue and
convince Iraq the US wouldn't mind much if it invaded Kuwait. The
issue is not so much Democratic Presidents, though I do believe we
have enough evidence that "character counts" to dispense with
continuing that argument any longer; it's with a population that
too-often decides to distract its government, asking for candy and
other handouts, when it should be encouraged to simply keep its eye on
the road and firm hand on the wheel, leaving the entertaining of
children to others. To wit: the US government should simply defend
our national interests, our "homeland", secure the rule of law within
it, and maybe ensure a reasonably stable national currency; we, the
citizens, can take care of the rest -- education, the handouts, the
environmental issues, preventing drug use, encouraging abstinence, and
so on. Heck, read Biden's speech on 2001-09-10 to get an idea of just
how chillingly inalert our Congressional leaders were to the
threat of exactly what happened within 24 hours -- a threat of which
we were not entirely unaware, when you take into account all
sort of credible sources and prior, published events, that simply
didn't get enough attention in an overly-busy, busybody
government.)
And, of course, the American public had little general awareness, or
input into, nuking Japan at that time. It had put into place a
military that was generally morally superior (compare treatment of
POWs in USA vs. Japan as just one example), if not militarily
superior, but wasn't permitted, for obvious reasons, fine-grained
control over things like the Manhattan project.
Having survived WWII, Americans had, and took, the opportunity
to learn and practice an improved (if only slightly) morality.
Having been defeated in WWII, the surviving Japanese were,
basically, forced to better approximate Western-style morality,
ultimately competing quite strongly with the US on economic terms
(remember the "Japan is taking over the US" scares of the '80s, which
we solved by fine-tuning our economy, not dropping more nukes
on them?). For example, the Japanese are much better at following
international rule of law than they were back in the '30s, I'd
guess.
The upshot: the winner being morally superior in the first place,
and helping rebuild the loser according to an improved moral code,
the world because a substantially safer and more moral place.
That might have happened had the nukes not been dropped, but we'll
never know, and if Japan had won, or the situation stalemated, the
opportunities for moral progress might have been severely depleted or
lost.
Now, do you know of any Al Queda people who are advocating a sort of
Marshall Plan for the NYC Trade Towers, the way so many people in the
West, immediately after 09-11, started talking about the importance of
"rebuilding Afghanistan after the war", as we did Japan and Germany,
even though no attacks on Afghanistan had yet even been made
in response to 09-11?
"Moral equivalence", you say?
Now I fast-forward to post-Vietnam, not because of
a lack of interesting data points, but because I wish to keep this
short and get to the important part to show that my hypothesis applies
recently, not just half a century ago.
You said that you thought that we had learned our
lesson from Vietnam. And indeed we have. We have learned that it's
better to use a proxy to fight our wars for us. The public reaction
is less severe when it comes to the death of some other
country's soldiers. It is easier to conceal the actions of a proxy,
and thus prevent public reaction. It makes it possible to maneuver
around political realities that would prevent us from dircetly
intervening. And atrocities of the kind committed by our own soldiers
in Vietnam achieve all of the above benefits as well. With a proxy,
while your "means" are limited greatly by not being able to use your
own forces, they are in other ways greatly
liberated.
You don't mention the other important point: we leave it to the
proxy to decide how, and whether, to fight. We left it up
to Iraqis to decide whether and how to topple Hussein; they failed
to do so, yet we haven't nuked Baghdad.
The wonderful thing about this kind of "proxy battle" is that it
allows us to tolerate failures to achieve our missions,
because, by using proxies, we've already basically agreed it isn't
important enough for a "DIY" approach.
Of course, most other substantial nations and belief-systems use
proxies as well, so I hardly see it as a count against American
morality anyway.
In a sense, the USA has allowed itself to be used as a proxy
for international organizations such as the UN and NATO. I don't
consider this to be prima fascia evidence of immorality on the
part of those organizations. It isn't clear to me why you do.
I do see reasons to avoid the use of proxies. As examples,
doing so implies lower visibility regarding the viability of the
conflict, less control of the moral quality of the conflict, and so
on, some of which you seem to care highly about.
But it isn't the job of the US to ensure that any enemy that an enemy
of ours faces will meet our own moral code. We can
try to help that happen, and we can (and sometimes do) help
bring people up on charges who violate it afterwards.
Ultimately, though, war is hell, and the existence of the US military
as well as our ability to form coalitions, use proxies, and so on,
without being willing, certainly without being able, to guarantee a
certain moral quality to "our" side, probably contributes more to a
moral world than an immoral one.
And there are serious problems with not using proxies --
especially local, self-interested combatants -- in certain situations.
Certain cultures do not appreciate being helped out very much (most of
Islam fits this description, apparently), especially after their
desires are fulfilled. Giving them a strong role in bringing about
victory is important, as is ensuring they really want victory,
and set reasonable conditions for it, by having them fight for
it, meaning they, not some alien force (the US military), must
bear the brunt of fulfilling their desires.
So while I accept that there are moral considerations to be made when
it comes to the use of proxies, I do not see that it is
immoral, or moral, by using them per se.
(Clearly, if we undertook as many military campaigns without proxies
as we presently do both with and without them, we'd have to be a
significantly stronger occupying nation, literally expansionist,
throughout the world. So arguing for disuse of proxies amounts to
arguing to not going to war in certain circumstances, without regard
to issues of national security -- e.g. survivability.)
Central America in the 80's is a perfect example.
Rather than dispose of unfavorable governments ourself, we paid for
and directed rebellions against them. Nicaragua was such a case.
They had overthrown a fascist regime that was created and supported by
our own government, and proceded to do very well for themselves
without our help, and without giving in to our business interests.
They were starting to show communist tendencies, and the opposing
groups that inevitably appeared were the tools by which we exercised
our interests.
Just as we were the tools by which they exercised
theirs.
(And, of course, Congressional Democrats, Soviet Communists, and
Central American Communists happily used each other as tools, proxies,
and so on. You say "they were starting to show communist tendencies",
a half-truth very typical of leftists; that was hardly
spontaneous.)
You see, Regan was trying to free hostages, which
is surely a noble cause by itself, even if the method did make us war
profiteers by selling weapons to both sides of a war at the same time.
But that wasn't the extent of it. The profits of this war
profiteering went to fund the Contras, since Congress had dropped
support. Thus what had at first seemed like merely breaking the law
and our stated policy on terrorism to save hostages ended up being
just the means for us to further our interests in Central
America.
Indeed, that's behavior of highly questionable morality (I'd say it
was, on its own, somewhat immoral, since it went against the rule of
law, such as it was, in the pertinent branches of US government).
But, it was done in counterpoint to similarly questionable behavior
(again, frankly, immoral) on the part of Communists and Congressional
Democrats at the time. The things Congressional Democrats wrote to
each other, to newspapers, to Ortega, and so on, are hilarious, yet
frightening in context, to read. Kinda like reading what Lenin, who
is generally (and incorrectly) not regarded as a willing
mass-murderer, said and wrote -- when you consider the impact on
the ground of what is being written, promoted, and projected, it's
quite chilling.
Remember, these are many of the same people who later called the
bursting-in of INS agents, who pointed assault weapons at innocent,
poor, right-wing Christians, including little Elian Gonzalez, and
removed him from his family's house at 5am, without any court order
having been made forcing the executive branch to do that, a "rescue".
Right, a "rescue". From what? Hmm, whatever required him to be
"rescued" like that didn't end up in any charges against his family
that I'm aware of, so why the gunplay?
I've learned to read between the lines. When the media uses a word
like "rescue", it often means "this is something we like", and when it
says "assault", it often means "this is something we don't like", even
though the thing itself could be fundamentally the same.
You've used this tactic occasionally yourself in this thread ("near
Billy" vs. "Marsha burst in"), so you know what I mean.
So, when you read letters of support to Daniel Ortega, and find out
just what he was doing that they were supporting, and what that meant
to people striving to preserve their individual rights and freedom,
you'll understand why I don't exactly see Reagan (and the
Executive Branch under his "command") as the "bad guy" compared to all
that was going on at the time.
(That doesn't let the USA off the hook, since there was some
seriously bad stuff going on at the behest, even applause, of many
elected to Congress.)
Why you choose to stop your research and/or "testimony" here exactly
at that point that you're able to indict the USA, especially
Republican leaders, as sharing responsibility to evils committed by
others, rather than explore further to understand who and what
might, in a similar fashion, share responsibility for those
evils, is something you might wish to address.
Not that this was the only problem with the
Contras. Outside of money from arms sales to Iran, the Contras were
also funded by drug money, with the coordination and cooperation of
the CIA. Massive amounts of cocaine entered this country, starting
the boom of that and derivative drugs in the US. It is conspicuous in
the detail that the CIA doesn't deny this, but merely asserts that an
investigation of their financial records showed no evidence. That
documents in the public record would contradict the former statement
might explain why.
Yep, more immorality, of the sort hidden from the public compared to
the fairly open, yet immoral, behavior of the other side of the aisle
-- which, by the way, was, at the time, generally more favorable
to widespread use of drugs to "have a good time", in that an
inner-city youth born into a Republican family and embracing
Republican policies would perhaps have been less likely to take up
smoking crack than his friends.
(Just like the complaints a few years back that "crack cocaine use
gets higher penalties than regular cocaine, which means the law is
racist", which turned out to really be a case of inner-city
legislators getting the stiff sentences and low tolerance they had
asked for in the first place, when the crack epidemic started
spiraling out of control. Why didn't they insist on similar treatment
of regular cocaine? Because, apparently, it wasn't in their
local interest at the time, which is quite understandable.)
The Contras themselves engaged in actions that
could be called terroristic. They didn't restrict themselves to
military targets, by any means. And this wasn't just the unfortunate
action of our tool -- they received training in many of these
activities by us. Our field training manuals on interrogation were
somewhat disturbing in that they argued against -direct- physical
torture simply because it is ineffective -- recommending instead
indirect physical pain, and mental pain. Torture, assassination,
hired death squads. Is this the action of a morally superior
government, or of one that is willing to do whatever it takes to
achieve its goals?
Morally superior to what, since we've both been talking about
equations, rather than some kind of ideal standard? The
Soviet Communist government?
Where would you rather have been a "political prisoner"
during the '60s, '70s, or '80s -- the USA, or the USSR?
Look at the clearest examples of free vs. Communist splits that we had
at the time, in terms of treatment of political prisoners, economic
progress, and so on: East vs. West Germany; North vs. South Korea;
China vs. Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Is it any wonder why some might decide it's worth breaking a few eggs
to make an omelette, given that the enemy has a policy of eradicating
chickens once they're in power?
Clearly we weren't doing whatever it takes back then, since we
could have done so much more, if we didn't give jack squat
about civilians, noncombatants, etc.
And, clearly, a fair number (probably not enough) have been left with
a bad taste in their mouth over that whole shady episode to reign in
the CIA since then. That's moral improvement in action.
(Some might say it was reigned in "too much", leading to 2001-09-11. I sure
don't know. I prefer morality to reign, of course, but am not so
swift to condemn those who sacrifice their own morality to preserve my
freedom and/or life down the road.)
And of course all of this comes along with rampant
concealment and manipulation of information. Clearly, public reaction
can be manipulated both in extend and even existence, and thus
increase those means which are available for achieving
ends.
Yup, it was pretty bad all around, though at least it had the "moral
excuse" of protecting US interests, not just in the narrow sense of
protecting national security, but in the larger sense of projecting
forcibly the idea that individuals should have the freedom to choose
their own jobs, set their own wages, trade with whomever they choose,
and so on.
All sorts of similar rampant concealment and manipulation of
information was hardly a thing of the past by 1993, though: public
reaction was clearly manipulated in response to the Clinton/Lewinsky
scandal, an episode that didn't involve the protection of any credible
national or moral interest, despite all sorts of claims (e.g. of
Executive Privilege) to the contrary -- a torturing of the law that
would have been better deployed in the taking, rather than refusing,
of various reported opportunities to "get" Usama bin Laden before
09-11.
So, while I might not react as strongly as you to the Iran/Contra
affair, I agree with the general thrust that a government
organization, even the USA's, cannot be trusted to have a general
"sense of goodness".
When Iraq invaded Kuwait, there was no proxy to
fight for us. But that was fine, because political reality was such
that we could engage them ourselves, with lots of help even. Whatever
humanitarian reasons might have been given as motivations -- much like
the saving of starving Afghans -- was so much crap, as we ignored
Iraq's actions against the Kurds even as we supplied them with more
weapons for their war with Iran.
Again, another moral failing of our government, and our nation's
people clearly have lurched hither and yon in response to that sort of
thing (Somalia being basically a media-inspired debacle, for
example).
But we could have done much worse, but didn't, because
humanitarian reasons were not "so much crap", they were just
weighted, sometimes too lightly, in the scale with other things we
considered important at the time. (You talk about arming Iraq against
Iran as if that situation existed in a vacuum. It didn't. Who was
USSR's proxy in the Middle East at the time? Yet you focus on
our connection with Iraq. I can't think offhand of a
mess the US has gotten into recently that doesn't have earlier roots
in Communist oppression, though I'm sure there must be a few. If you
haven't read "The Black Book of Communism", you probably should; from
what I've read about it, it brings to light many important realities
of 20th Century politics, and it wasn't written by a bunch of
right-wing wackos, either.)
We try to do the right thing, but as a superpower of 250
million people still not fully interconnected, and a mass media that
was (especially then) pretty much committed to one particular
political ideology, it's understandable, to me anyway, why "the right
thing" wasn't done in every single instance.
On the whole, though, of the few nations that have proven willing and
able to project power to defend internationally moral concepts, I
can't think of one offhand that is more moral, throughout comparable
history, than the USA.
And "projecting power" is an important component to me. Given a
hypothetical situation where I'm in a world with 100 other people,
and I can conduct myself such that I'll either have 97 friends and
3 enemies, or 97 enemies and 3 friends, I'd choose the former,
all else being equal.
But, often, all else is not equal. If, in that scenario, I
know that the 97 friends I might have are unwilling to take risks to
defend me against my 3 enemies, who are very vigorous in projecting
their power, then I'd be a fool to choose that option, since
I'd surely end up dead.
Instead, I'd choose to make those 3 friends, knowing they'd be much
better at defending me against 97 "morally lazy" enemies, who'll do
little more than resent me and talk about me behind my back. My odds
of surviving are simply higher in that scenario.
So popular (or "democratic") politics isn't my bag, practical
politics being much more interesting to me.
Which is why, on a practical level, I don't care a whole lot whether
the USA is morally perfect, since I know it'll do a much better job
protecting me than Al Queda, while imposing so much less on me than Al
Queda or even, say, the European Union or China might.
And speaking of ignoring, despite our vow of
"Never Again", our response to genocide has demonstrated that our
intent is anything other than humanitarian. If there is one
thing anyone in this century can agree on morally, it is that genocide
represents one of the greatest evils imagineable. Yet when it happens
in countries that are not of national interest, it is ignored by our
Vietnam-wisened government. A pathetic bombing cannot compare to what
happened in Rwanda, or in Bosnia. We never intervened in Rwanda, and
what little action we took in Bosnia may have actually made it worse.
In this case, our interest was to not get involved, and this
was done by whatever method made this politically feasible. You blame
Clinton for lying about getting his winky wet? What about lying about
genocide and ethnic cleansing? Claiming ignorance so that we wouldn't
have to get involved?
What about it indeed? I agree with you almost wholeheartedly.
First of all, though, "never again" is, to my knowledge, not a
statement taken by our government, much less our
military, regarding genocide. Maybe I'm missing something?
(Okay, maybe Clinton, panderer that he was and is, joined that call as
President? But if he did, who really took him seriously --
given that he wasn't exactly advocating beefing up the US military
sufficiently to take on any threat of genocide occurring
anywhere in the world anytime in the future? Remember,
Clinton got elected, in 1992, on a platform that included, as a
fundamental component, the idea that "it's the economy, stupid" and
that George H. W. Bush had attended too much to international
matters.)
My recollection of "never again", as a phrase, is that it pertains
more to the notion that moral people, especially of the
Judeo-Christian tradition, should never again remain
silent in the face of genocide, as happened in WWII.
I'm unaware of any significant commitment to act, militarily, in its
face. Seems to be something the UN, not the US, would commit to,
anyway, but I wouldn't bet my life on the UN even if it did so
commit.
Second, I find the "never again" philosophy to be one of the things
that favors my argument for moral superiority of the USA over Al Queda
(or most any other predominantly Muslim nation), because it courses
through our culture far more than it does through Islam, which seems
to have, on its side, "destroy Israel" and "America is Satan" to
roughly the same degree of combination of breadth (in population) and
depth (of effect on government policies).
In short: AMERICA and THE WEST: "NEVER AGAIN"; AL QUEDA and ISLAMIC
ARABIA: "ANYTIME NOW". An exaggeration in both cases, of course.
But the events in Rwanda and Bosnia weren't exactly
precipitated by us -- certainly not to the degree you seem to
imply by interpreting our "intent" in those situations. Why hold the
US to a standard that, basically, no other nations chose to meet at
that time -- nations that could just as easily, or even more easily
(due to being closer), could have met?
Meanwhile, the US has good reason to focus on doing the Big Things
that it, and only it, can do, as it did in resisting the expansionist,
evil empire called the USSR. Becoming a busybody and interfering in
every backwater where "bad things are happening", something we've
tried here and there, seems to sew little but resentment, and rarely
actually improves things substantially enough to have made the
exercise worthwhile. (Which is part of why I think Bush, rather than
Gore, was elected; many people assumed Gore would continue the kind of
big-picture-avoiding, photo-op-preferring "military actions" that
characterized the Clinton era, with little in the way of real,
long-term victories to point to.)
"By any means necessary" was a phrase Malcom X
could have easily borrowed from the CIA handbook. We have done things
that we would like people to believe only countries like China would
do. We do these things, and we conceal them, lie about them, and
justify them because of "national security". Our
interests.
Exactly what things do we, the USA, do, comparable to torturing
people for being Christians, as has recently been done not only in
China, but in Cuba?
But, really, I agree "by any means necessary" is a phrase that could
be borrowed -- except, for my part, from the handbook of those willing
to overlook any human-rights violation when its committed by
regimes considered "commie-friendly", like Castro's.
Really, when I look at the numbers of innocents murdered, I don't get
nearly as concerned about right-wing despots (numbers typically reach
no higher than the thousands) as left-wing ones (where we're talking
millions of murdered). The latter get a pass in the mass media, and
get little in the way of the cold, hard looks about how they actually
conduct themselves compared to the former.
In fact, the Left has shown itself to be highly skilled at pursuing a
strategy of focusing public and press attention on the gnats of
right-wing tyranny precisely so it can distract people from the
camels of left-wing tyranny. Not a surprising choice for an amoral
orthodoxy, since one of the alternatives would be to commit to a
course of truly and thoroughly apologizing for having served as
apologists for left-wing despots throughout the 20th Century,
apology they seem to have generally chosen to continue, to the extent
they speak of those sins at all.
Ensuring that any connection between a major evil and a right-wing
idea or person is stressed, while the connection to a left-wing
idea is ignored (e.g. how many times, when the media talks
about the internment of American Japanese during WWII, do they mention
FDR?); and actively seeking to shut down, or at least disrupt, the
ability of right-wing media outlets to continue their work, while
claiming about "free speech" to protect whatever they might say
through theirs; these also are well-documented tactics of the Left.
(That might explain why, apparently, right-wing US political
organizations were audited by the Clinton-era IRS at a much higher
rate than left-wing ones. "By any means necessary" indeed. But the
media didn't generally pick up on it, it seems.)
But, my semi-depression at how gullible America seemed, or how willing
it seemed to tolerate open, plain evil as the Clinton era unfolded,
has given away to the realization that America is showing signs it has
learned from that debacle, is willing to continue
learning, and is willing to act on that knowledge.
(E.g. consider the change in attitude towards individual
responsibility for one's own security: we've gone from a
pro-gun-control culture so strong we basically applauded the
Waco tragedy, to passengers on airlines personally risking
themselves to subdue suspected terrorists, rather than just
passively waiting for Big Daddy Government to do all the nasty stuff
for them.)
And as much as you seem to think your concerns about Iran-Contra and
other right-wing debacles is so unique, I promise you there are
lots of people -- left-wing and right -- who have also
been deeply concerned, who have made individual accountability and
willingness to take responsibility higher priorities in assessing the
character of potential leaders, etc.
So I believe both those ends of the issues illustrate moral
progress on the part of the populace.
(You never seem to acknowledge the importance of allowing for some
reasonable rate of moral growth on the part of a person, or at
least a nation. Is that assessment correct? If so, do you really
believe a person or nation, having committed any evil, must
therefore be destroyed, that forgiveness is not a factor in a valid
system of morality? By whom is this judgement to be delivered,
without them, in turn, becoming evil and thus requiring
destruction, may I ask? What is your judicial philosophy regarding
these issues?)
But, just as we learn how to deal with the past, new challenges come
up (like 09-11), testing our ability to more rapidly respond in more
practical, yet also more moral, ways.
(It's hardly a straight, or even consistently upward, line, but the
trend has been, over the last 15 years or so, generally upward,
in the areas I believe I can assess reasonably well. I consider some
well-known conservative authors, writing about moral decay in our
society, to be somewhat behind the curve, though still helpful in
alerting us to potential moral dangers.)
Willing to achieve its goals by any means
necessary, limited only by political reality, capability, and public
reaction. Am I talking about the US or Al Qaeda? I'm talking about
both. Al Qaeda is operating within grossly different parameters of
political reality, capability, and public reaction. These differences
are the source of the conceptual problem of seeing the two groups as
"the same", but that is only a matter of situation, of "viewpoint" not
intent. The intent is the same -- what I want, no
matter what. It is my conclusion that were the U.S. government to
have the same limiting parameters as Al Qaeda, its actions would be no
different. Thus, they are morally
equivalent.
Again, here you seem to morally equate "what I want", as if what the
average American wants is morally equivalent to what the average Al
Queda wants. Is that correct? So, if I'm a typical American, and
want you to flourish and find your own way, as long as you don't tread
on my freedoms; and a typical Al Queda wants you to convert to Islam
and recognize him as your leader; then, in your view, these two
"wants" are "morally equivalent"?
Are you saying that if the US military was in the hands of Islamic
extremists, instead of being in the hands of a predominantly
Judeo-Christian population, it'd behave identically to Al Queda? If
so, what do you mean by that -- that it'd still confine itself to
taking down office buildings, or that it'd use nukes to blackmail the
US into adopting Islam, after perhaps nuking a US city or two?
Guess I still can't figure out what you're saying, since I don't
accept your apparent premise that governments have any
morality, even as an attribute, absent the populations that you
apparently dismiss, for purposes of your equation, as "political
reality".
Maybe you should define what you mean as "government", with what you
call "political realities" and "public response" removed.
So, please tell me, what exactly keeps the George Bush, who you
presumably believe is morally equivalent to Usama bin Laden, from
simply nuking Baghdad tomorrow? He could clearly do it, and he
doesn't seem to care about being President enough to be concerned with
possible impeachment afterwards. He's already targeted by assassins,
obviously, and the USA is too committed to the rule of law to try and
convict him as a criminal, since he'd be acting in his role as
President. Plus, just like you and I believe Clinton did, he could
quite easily gin up a wag-the-dog scenario sufficient to convince
Americans that he probably had a good-enough reason to nuke the
place, such that we can't treat him as a war criminal.
(My answer is that it comes from his innate moral code, which includes
the idea that even Iraqi citizens who gather in the streets to shout
"America is Satan", "Kill Bush", or whatever, deserve to live, and
that his responsibility as President includes representing that same
kind of morality as expressed by the citizens who elected him. I
think he was very sincere when, nearly in tears, he said "I'm a loving
guy, but I have a job to do", shortly after 09-11, and that he
represented a more moral choice than Mr. "I did not have sex with that
woman" or Mr. "No controlling legal authority", though I recognize
that more Americans actually voted for the latter over Bush in 2000,
an example of our system of governance -- election law -- overriding
pure democracy, with, IMO, a slightly more moral outcome on the whole,
though not through any morality inherent in the system that I'm aware
of.)
And, from my viewpoint, equally
reprehensible.
But your viewpoint is, in my opinion, simply inadequate to make such
assessments, given how thoroughly you're willing to explore the
excuses for one side while being unwilling to explore the same issues
to the corresponding depth for the other. I'm not sure whose vewpoint
is adequate to make such assessments, offhand. Complexity
being the tough nut we're really trying to crack here, it seems
to me the situation, especially to the depth you seem willing to
explore it at any point, is vastly more complex than a single person
can comprehend sufficiently to render final moral judgements.
So now you probably think I'm a loon.
That's fine. Is it because my analysis of events is flawed? Or
because you don't believe the events I describe transpired? The
former may be true, or it may just depend on my own subjectivity. The
latter... Well, that's really the triumph of our government. They
can release documents proving what I've said, readily available under
the FOIA, and people still don't believe it.
I think your analysis of events is, event by event, fine. I
think it's clear you can't manage the Big Picture -- you've had plenty
of trouble managing just this discussion without losing your
cookies, so to speak! And I think it's incredibly difficult for any
one to manage that Big Picture, which is why we have branches
of government, individual offices, rules of law, a huge array of
conflicting moral codes, and so on, instead of One World King who
simply orders everyone around.
Again, until you've thoroughly put into practice what you claim to
believe, and do so long enough for it to become virtually habitual (a
worthwhile exercise, I promise you), until you can see how easy or
hard it is to live life according to your own moral code while
facing the dangers of living a "normal life" that parallels what the
US government has to deal with in the world, you really have little
basis on which to judge that government, though you can (and
perhaps should) assess individual actions on a case-by-case basis.
Another point: the US government, being of the people, is evolving
morally, probably more swiftly than you are at times. By the time you
think you've figured out how it'd respond to a situation, it has
probably changed enough to respond differently.
(E.g. did you predict that Bush would decide to treat Taliban
prisoners at Gitmo under the Geneva Convention, as distinguished from
how he'd treat Al Queda? Based on your moral-equivalency argument, I
find it hard to believe you'd have predicted that, since Al Queda has
a proven record of treating prisoners, not to mention its own
people when they consider surrendering to the US, vastly worse than
anyone has been treated at Gitmo in decades.)
By the way, there is one question you
haven't asked, though it's probably because you think you know
the answer. You never asked me if I thought we should have
attacked Afghanistan, even though we all know civilians would die. If
you had asked, I would have said "I can't see what else we can do...
So yes."
I don't think you should draw any moral conclusions from that belief.
Actually, I proposed a radically different, much more peaceful, yet
practical, solution, but nobody (except my wife) cared about it, which
kinda surprised me. But, yeah, I too couldn't see that the US
government could continue to sit idly by and let Al Queda have free
reign in Afghanistan and elsewhere, which would clearly ultimate in
taking possession of nuclear missiles down the road; that would have
been an abrogation of its collective "office", something Americans
are, IMO, not yet morally prepared to accept in a positive way.
In the story of David v. Goliath, it's notable that David's response
to having had the typical soldier's army put on is to take it off,
saying "I haven't proved this works for me; I've proven that God will
deliver me from the bear and the lion", because that suggests the need
to prove one's own morality -- one's own reliance on God, or the law
of nature, whatever it's called -- in one's own life experiences,
before trying to transfer it to larger-scale venues involving millions
of people.
It's also notable that he didn't then turn around and tell all his
fellow soldiers that they, too, must take off their armour and "trust
in God". Perhaps his simple humility prevented him? Perhaps he
understood that they trusted in armour, and would be
better served by his simply demonstrating the effectiveness of
his comparatively-simple reliance on God than by ordering them about
as his moral inferiors?
Similarly, Christ Jesus' parable of the one, five, and ten "talents"
suggests the importance of being faithful to the simple, even trivial,
things in one's life, before being fit to take on the larger-scale
issues.
I've been striving (with some interesting challenges along the way) to
put into practice my own morality -- which probably doesn't differ
significantly from yours -- in the direct areas of my life, rather
than focus as much as I used to on contributing to human organizations
like churches and governments in the belief that they will
deliver me from the "paw of the bear and the lion" and faithfully
forward my morality on my behalf.
As I learn and demonstrate what does and doesn't work, I become more
willing to "extend my tent", but remain humbly grateful for those who,
while sometimes acting in the short-term against what I consider the
strictly correct moral code, nevertheless enable me, as a living,
breathing human being striving to be moral, to continue
breathing, by defending my freedoms and rights to do so.
Necessity is a horrible thing.
What a mean thing to say about someone's mother! ("Invention", y'see.;-)
You are ignorant of history -- even recent --
and actions taken by your own country.
Thanks for trying to educate me
(NOT!!).
Thanks for making it sound like it's my
fucking job! Educate yourself. I'm not your
tutor.
Generally, in forums where scientific-sounding assertions are made,
e.g. yours of moral equivalence, the burden of providing evidence
falls upon the one making the assertion.
And it strikes me as rather amazing that someone would assume that I
must be ignorant of events of the sort you describe above, simply
because we've come to different conclusions regarding the morality of
an entire nation. Do you really believe I'm either under 25 years
old, or that I was in a cave throughout the 1980s? The things you
describe above were widely reported by the mass media,
including live broadcasts of Congressional hearings. And while I
haven't consistently sought out such information throughout my adult
life, I read (aloud, as it happens) the book containing Nixon's
secretly-recorded tapes shortly after it was published in the
mid-1970s.
In fact, it occurs to me that you might yourself be so young that you
don't realize most Republicans over about, say, 35 years old are
highly unlikely to assume anything their party, or its leaders,
do must be "right". "We" went through the Nixon thing, we dealt with
it, we didn't devote massive amounts of PR, money, and energy
defending it, distracting people from it, and so on, over a large
period of time -- certainly nothing like what went on, and continues
to go on, to defend Clinton on the Democratic side.
And maybe the fact that we're pretty clear-headed about the evils
committed against the rule of law, separation of branches of
government, and so on, even though they occurred under a Republican
president, makes us more able to honestly and fairly assess what went
on under Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and go on under Bush, without
getting quite so caught up in political orthodoxy, which, on the other
hand, seems to be a requirement for being a Democrat wishing to
be widely regarded as supportive of the party, either in the party or
in the media.
But telling me I'm ignorant of history was a silly thing anyway, since
you, too, are ignorant of history -- even recent -- and actions
taken by your country.
I can say that because it's obvious that nobody can possibly
not be ignorant of such things, to some degree, even in a
comparatively open society like ours (never mind the things done in a
closed society like the USSR, things which factored greatly in what
the US government did from the 1940s through the 1990s).
Any moral code can only be worthwhile and practical if it takes the
reality of ever-incompete knowledge into account.
That's why I found it so annoying that you'd constantly introduce a
trickle of you-forgot-to-consider-this-type factoids into what started
out as a discussion of a pretty straightforward moral equation.
If your moral code was at all useful, you'd be able to confidently
make hypothetical judgements about hypothetical situations without
having to first complicate things. Your insistence on providing
backstories, dredging up history recent and ancient, suggests not that
you are more knowledgeable about the pertinent moral facts so
much as that your morality depends on perfect, objective
knowledge, or at least that your moral code includes the notion
that your moral judgement is superior to someone else's merely because
you possess more facts about a situation.
(This is a repeating theme in the left-vs.-right debates: "She got
pregnant out of wedlock, that's wrong." "But she's from a poor
family." "It's still wrong." "But she's in charge of her own body."
"Still wrong." "She had a lot of peer pressure to deal with, you
know." "Still wrong." "Her boyfriend kept pressuring her." "Still
wrong." "Condoms aren't readily available to her." "Still wrong."
"Marriage is a patriarchical straitjacket for women." "Still wrong."
"Society should care for her and her baby." "Still wrong." The Left
tends to provide a neverending stream of "factoids", which I find stem
from the chaotic, almost fractal, nature of life, in which, indeed,
nothing is ever black or white; but, to the Left, off-white can
be blacker than jet black and vice versa, as long as you finally agree
that they, not any objective moral code, make the judgements,
by first granting it the right to guide which factoids are
worth introducing, second granting it the right to decide their
weight in the equation, and third granting it the right to
choose the equation and change it anytime they want. Meanwhile,
"Still wrong" is more likely to personally attend to the immediate
moral needs of mother and child, while excuse-maker, really interested
only in pushing the socialism agenda, moves on to the next political
hot-button topic; her compassion plays out largely by taxing
the rich and doling it out to those she favors, like the unwed mother,
who would then raise chidren less able to secure and maintain moral
households for their children, as history has shown.)
And the fact that you willfully introduce factoids that solely support
your position without admitting that there might be more to know (and,
frankly, there always is), means I simply can't trust you to
present the truth, even in cases where you in fact know
it, but find it unsupportive of your rhetoric at the time.
Further, the more weight you give to obscure or ancient details, the
more you have to recognize that, since you don't know all such
details, any conclusions you come to are invalid. Again, that
reflects the increased chaos of the analysis you embrace: if you
instead agree to restrict yourself to here-and-now,
black-and-white-type issues, you can come to more reasonable
conclusions, logically speaking.
(The trick is having a filter that's correct enough to make up for the
loss of detailed information; the Right tends to oversimplify for its
own sake, in effect tossing the baby out with the bathwater in too
many cases, e.g. in the War on Drugs, which has moral underpinnings,
but which I think may be oversimplified, on the whole, to the point of
immorality.)
But I'll throw you a bone. Outside of Google, a
good place to start is [...]
I'll pass on that, until and unless somebody whose commitment to
presenting the truth, to approximating objective reality, tells me
it's worth reading. I've learned the futility of trying to "know it
all" myself, which, obviously, means I've had to become humble about
pronouncing moral equivalency of democratic republics like the USA and
terrorist organizations like Al Queda.
I'm drawing quotes from several previous posts.
If this gets confusing... tough. I don't mock you at all in this
post, except to exercise my love of self-referntial sentences and
admit that maybe you deserve it.
It's easier to deal with in a single post than in several, so I
think this is an improvement.
It does nothing to reduce our role in the
action, compared to your depiction of the US being fully responsible
-- Marsha unilaterally deciding to move Jacob into Bill's
house??
That's right. Sharing responsibility
doesn't reduce it. If there were 500 people in Al Qaeda all
with equal authority to bin Laden, and all agreed to bomb the WTC,
each would be as culpable as bin Laden is by himself
today.
Okay, so we went from you implying the US had sole
responsibility to merely sharing in responsibility, and though
I agree that might not "reduce our role" in the strict sense, your
original point vis-a-vis Marsha was that she did immoral things
unilaterally and therefore deserved to suffer at the hands of
Billy with no help from the townsfolk who you now appear to
agree also bore responsibility for those things. (I
believe the phrase you used was "without asking anyone else if they
minded".)
Why couldn't the townsfolk just take responsibility for their
own "immoral" decision and set it right, with or without
Marsha's approval? Because they themselves are moral idiots,
based on the story as you extended it: they murder Marsha down the
road, for doing what they themselves could and should have done all
along, but didn't because, supposedly, they were too "moral" to commit
violence, even against a known felon. I.e. they murder a flawed hero
because they couldn't bring themselves to stop a criminal.
Surely you can't mean that. Because that would
imply that the only way the USA could escape full culpability for that
act would be if it had launched all-out war on the UN to prevent it
happening.
Um, no. Having it be not our idea, and not agree
with the idea, would reduce our culpability greatly. If it was
plausible that we were a dissenting minority, pressured somehow into
accepting the majority decision, that would be sufficient. Given the
U.S.'s position after WWII, however, it is difficult to see what
"pressure" could have been great enough to cause us to bow. But
that's beside the point, because we didn't bow, we agreed
whole-heartedly.
With plenty of other nations, engaging in what's generally known as
"the rule of law" with regard to international politics. A rule of
law that, by the way, is crucial for any group to follow if it wishes
to obtain international recognition as a nation-state.
An entity that willingly attacks a nation like the USA for
participating in a legal decision it doesn't like is one that is, for
all intents and purposes, attacking the rule of law itself --
hardly an astonishing thing to say about Palestinians, given the
history of the rulers they choose for themselves, but, in this climate
of nearly completely moral idiocy among global leadership, that's
something that almost never seems to come up as a crucial distinction
between Israel and Palestine (the former sometimes, as almost everyone
does once in a while, disobeying the rule of law, the latter
actually attacking its legitimacy and force at its roots and
trunk).
As an illustration of this principle in operation here in the USA, we
have plenty of people who disobey laws by stealing, lying,
murdering, and so on, and we have a system of the rule of law
that, accordingly, tries and sentences them.
But that system treats, in a severe way compared to a simplistic look
at the "crime", those who attack the rule of law itself as a
sort of "uber-criminal", and even treats people "badly" simply because
they are considered, for the time being, a crucial part of the
system.
For example, our justice systems often imprisons people precisely
because they are considered, or hoped to be, fairly innocent --
decent, honest, fair, etc.
Who are these imprisoned people? Sequestered juries, important
witnesses needing protection, and so on. They're considered crucial
to the internal operation of the system, so they're actually
treated worse than external actors of the same evident "moral
status" (vis-a-vis threat or benefit to the system). Similarly, some
people are treated better (e.g. judges), given privileges that
they wouldn't have elsewhere despite doing similar jobs, because they
happen to be internal to the system, and it's extremely
difficult to construct a working system of any sort that treats its
innards and external entities under the same objective rules.
And, while a Bill Clinton can get away with lying to a grand jury, let
someone on a grand (or regular) jury act in a similarly
"trivial" way -- e.g. have sex with a fellow juror and then lie about
it -- the penalty can be far worse than a minor financial hit
and the suspension of one's law license.
To someone who insists on some kind of cosmic, or objective, fairness
in life, this seems perverted. Why should decent American citizens
be imprisoned and prosecuted more severely as jurors and witnesses
than the criminals the system is trying?
The answer lies in the fact, as you highlighted yourself, that the
objective viewpoint is unavailable in any specific instance;
that the system of the rule of law is, itself, a body that,
like all other bodies of that general type (from single-cells
creatures to governments to bodies of thought), must carefully
distinguish between, and thus have somewhat different
("unfair") rules for, external and internal entities; and so on.
Though Israel perhaps cannot be counted on to go along with every
single UN vote or meeting, it is far more supportive, in terms
of how its elected leaders operate, of the concept of
international rule of law than Palestinians -- it might disagree with
a decision, but it is unlikely to take down the UN building in NYC to
make its point, or kill a bunch of Saudi Arabian athletes in the
Olympics, or send suicide bombers to kill as many innocent men, women,
and children of the Islam and Christian faiths as possible. (From
what I understand, this is the result of moral growth on the
part of Israel -- that, just a few decades ago, Israel did
carry out actions like these at least once or twice.)
That doesn't necessarily make Israel "morally superior" from
the viewpoint of someone who, like me, seriously questions the
necessity of human organization, especially along moral lines.
But it certainly goes a long way towards explaining why such
organizations -- especially nation-state governments -- might choose
to treat Israel more as a peer than they'll treat a potential
Palestinian state.
In short, yes, Marsha and her comrades may well have made an "immoral"
decision earlier in vis-a-vis Jacob's placement in Billy's house.
Yet that decision was made according to principles of the rule
of law in that town, principles Billy has a long history of not only
ignoring, but actively attacking by targeting those who support
them in any form.
By attacking the system itself, obviously Billy hopes to
persuade enough people to reverse the decision vis-a-vis Jacob, or
simply kill Jacob outright for him, or let him do it himself.
What tends to happen instead is that the system responds to
defend itself, treating Billy as the invading force.
And under that sort of stress, it is even less able to make
calm, rational decisions that might help to reverse previous immoral
decisions -- decisions that can reflect a "higher morality", beyond
the localized self-interest any body, or system, has in protecting
itself.
Which is why, in my experience, one of the best ways to correct an
injustice is to calmly stand back and let that injustice be the sole
mountain peak on the horizon. Whereas trying to create all sorts of
new injustices might help illustrate, for some, how bad things might
get if we keep going down that road, it confuses the picture greatly,
to the point where many people won't be able to identify the original
injustice. (Hence my decision to not "protest" the public's handling
of the Clinton debacle by engaging in oral sex with women half my age
and then lying about it. See, we all must make sacrifices for
our beliefs!;-)
In practice, this takes the form of today's reality: despite all the
hoopla regarding the need for a Palestinian state, Arab nations have
not exactly lined up to create one out of their own vast tracts of
land, to my knowledge. Oh, they're happy to push for someone
else (especially Israel) to do it -- but it seems to me the
world would be better off, assuming Palestinians could
self-constitute a law-abiding, law-respecting state (a doubtful
proposition at this time), if they could do so in a place where there
is, at present, no such thing. No need to replace parts of Israel to
do that; dispense with the "Palestinian problem" by relocation,
assuming that's even possible, and Israel, as far as I can tell, makes
a reasonable fine nation-state, from the perspective of fellow
nation-states, the UN, and so on.
Now, the same solution could be suggested vis-a-vis Israel -- move
them wholesale to some similarly-sized place not generally acquainted
with the rule of law (Hollywood?;-) -- and that might be the easier
of the two to accomplish. But it seems to me that the end result
would be that the Middle East would become less, not
more, generally respectful of that rule of law, and, as
ecologists will tell you, it's crucial to have trees and bushes, not
just grasses, holding up a hillside, lest it be swiftly eroded
downhill, which might explain the original decision, still supported
in practice, to place Israel where it seemed most needed at the time,
not just because that particular place was sacred. Perhaps the best
solution of all would be to relocate both communities and make
the sacred regions into some kind of UN-governed area, allowing all
three major religions safe access to Jerusalem, etc. Well, this is
getting pretty far afield, and I'm certainly not qualified to even
suggest any of these in reality; this is just for the purposes of
discussion of the pertinent moral issues.
No, the analogy was from an objective
viewpoint, illustrating the distinctions between how people view
reality and reality itself.
Once I got done with it, yes.
Baloney -- it was a perfectly-useful hypothetical situation designed
to test your stated hypothesis of moral equivalence, but you
couldn't resist twisting it to suit your own political ends.
You see, when you said in the other
post...
(Note how cleverly this Tina supporter words
it: the dead ones were "involved" because Marsha "burst in" and were
merely "near Billy", not because Billy burst in, took hostages, and
killed a few. This sort of willfully-manipulative rhetoric is a
classic means by which Tina and her supporters convince many of the
moral equivalence of good and evil.)
... you weren't pointing out some horrible flaw in
my analogy, or the "classc means" of Tina... I was demonstrating
events as seen by those bystanders.
No, you were deliberately distorting the hypothetical situation
to suit your politics rather than focus on the fact that it
would expose, as fallacious, your original moral-equivalency
argument.
I caught you at it, so you chose to spin it your way. If you'd wanted
to simply and honestly demonstrate it, you'd have worded it
that way: "though Marsha risked life and limb to save lives by killing
Billy, the fact that she accidentally killed two innocent children was
treated by many townsfolk as if she was entirely culpable for the
deaths -- as if Billy bursting in earlier and taking them hostage,
murdering some of them himself, had little or nothing to do with
it".
Instead, you wrote this:
"They buried their friends, who hadn't been involved
at all except to be near Billy when Marsha burst in."
That's as clear a statement of objective fact as can be made in this
context.
You see, the third person perspective does not
need be objective. In literature, it rarely is. And honestly, you
must take into account subjective point of view to have any hope of
analyzing this situation. You use events as you see them to
make moral judgements and practical evaluations. Others do the same.
To discuss moral issues without perspective, to pretend to be able to
discuss them "objectively", is to accept that one's own view is the
only one worthy of judging. You yourself have judged events based
solely on your own experience, but called it "objective". By seeing
how someone else experienced something, and trying to
understand it, you expand your possible viewpoints to include another
view.
All of which I've done, throughout my posts, explaining how different
parties view things, though, of course, as the author
of the hypothetical case, designed solely to offer you a means
to explain or justify your moral-equivalency argument, I have the
"divine capability", within that hypothesis, of stating what is,
in fact, objective reality.
If you don't permit me to do that with regard to my own
hypothesis, then surely you can't claim any capability of
assessing anything "objective", regarding this reality or any
other, unless you believe yourself (as I'm almost convinced you do) of
having a Divine Ability to Know Truth that has been denied me.
So, having denied me the right to outline the objective reality of my
own hypothetical situation, you've denied yourself any
credibility to do pretty much everything you've done to date in this
thread: claim objective knowledge and/or understanding, either
directly or indirectly via your objective measures, and viciously
insult those who (like me) disagree with, or find themselves not in
possession of, similar knowledge and/or understanding.
This is not the path to objectivity (which is
still impossible -- you cannot escape subjectivity, no more than you
can escape the perception of self), it is the path to having more than
one subjective viewpoint from which to judge things. I believe that
having more viewpoints is always good, and I also believe that you can
understand another viewpoint and find it valid without
agreeing with it (which doesn't seem to be a commonly held
belief). So yes, I included a stilted viewpoint that is as those
people see it. The purpose was to show how their viewpoint on
Marsha's actions leads to similar decisions on their part as did the
townsfolk's viewpoint on Billy's actions.
Yet it was your choice to torture an otherwise perfectly-valid
hypothesis, rather than straightforwardly respond to it, or simply
decline to, or honestly offer to extend it for everyone's benefit in
an open way. Your failure to do so speaks volumes regarding your own
intellectual honesty (or lack thereof). And it's pretty consistent
with how many in the media choose to write about corresponding events,
even when they are claiming to write objectively, so I hardly
consider you unique. It's just amazing to see such a clear, shining
example of this tendency in a forum where it becomes a part of the
public record and cannot be denied for what it is (since it was a
hypothetical story of my own making, and you basically copped to what
you did).
Further, whatever you say you believe, you simply do not
consistently practice it. You've slammed me left and right throughout
this thread, spewing at me about how I'm an "idiot", resorting to
guilt-by-association (bringing up names like Jerry Falwell and Rush
Limbaugh), intellectually bullying me while falsely accusing me
of having been a bully, and so on. Hardly the tactics of someone
convinced they possess superior knowledge, understanding, etc., as you
have demonstrated you are with such ferocity.
So much for your claim "I believe that having more viewpoints is
always good", when, in fact, you believe that trashing any
viewpoint that substantively questions your own as well as
publically trashing its author is at least sometimes
preferable to simply accepting it as potentially valid.
(If your actions are consistent with your claimed beliefs, exactly
what do these beliefs mean, in practice?)
Basically, you've conducted yourself in an intellectually fraudulent
fashion in this thread.
Now, given your behavior, and your seeming inability to maintain any
sort of straightforward, coherent position on several challenging
issues, I claim this is not so much a moral failure on your part
regarding others, but an internal problem regarding how you
actually think about things -- a failure that can't help
manifesting itself when you undertake discussions regarding the moral
failings of others. And hardly a unique failing; perhaps the only
thing pertinently unique about you is your willingness to expose these
confusions in a forum like/., and try to maintain, clarify, or
justify them in the face of opposition.
Clearly you think very highly of your own brain-power, and very little
of my own. Yet, you've proven quite incapable of: practicing your own
beliefs regarding accepting other viewpoints; of tolerating dissent;
of calmly and rationally discussing politically challenging subjects;
of honestly presenting facts; of being capable of assessing the
character of others (calling me a "bully"); and of even following
through on your own "promises" to end the discussion.
(E.g. I notice in another post you claimed 100 Palestinian men, women,
and children are killed by Israel for every one Israeli
soldier that is killed, which is a flat-out lie, not even
close to the truth. But, then, you've established that
objective truth is either nonexistent or impossible for you to
pursue, and in any case that you're quite willing to state things, as
truth, that you know, in fact, are not the truth, to,
only later, when you're called out about it, basically claim
"oh, there's a good reason why I lied".)
So, my speculation, or educated guess, is that you aren't so much a
willful liar, dissembler, confuser of fact, confounder of morality,
and so on, as a personally very confused person, overloaded with
book-learnin' and philosophy and crap like that, compared to actual
life-experiences that temper, in most people, the belief that one
knows all that one needs to know about a topic to render Final
Judgement on people and governments.
And, you've chosen to read literature written by, and perhaps surround
yourself with, people who believe the sort of conduct you now engage
in constitutes valid, useful, intellectual discussion. Perhaps you've
enjoyed (or feared?) seeing someone's intellect slammed in the past,
so you act it out on me, as you did earlier. Perhaps you've been
suckered into a moral discussion, only to find someone "set you up" by
pretending to say one thing and then reinterpreting the language later
to mean something else, then depicting you as a fool for falling for
it, so you try the tactic out on me (and everyone else here as well).
Rather than stand up for a straightforward moral character and, at
least within yourself, rebuke these things as immoral, you have chosen
to try them out for yourself. And you're finding out they don't work
quite as well when somebody does stand up to them, point them
out, refuse to back down from legitimate, honest points, and so on,
and that appears to have left you somewhat flummoxed.
In a sense, your brain is, in personal-computing terms, a 4-processor
Intel Pentium IV running at 1.2GHz with 4GB of RAM -- that is,
tremendously powerful hardware.
The problem is, you have so many different "systems", or rule bases,
that you try to run all at once. In essence, you boot up Windows when
you want to imply that you have the One True Concept of what is Good
and Right and True; then you shut it down and boot up GNU/Linux when
you want to suggest that Any Approach Is Valid, to escape
responsibility when you're actually caught misrepresenting the
truth, fumbling logic, or failing to obey your own self-professed
precepts for living. Then you boot up OpenBSD when you want to hide,
or secure yourself, from any criticism of the tactics you've used
while running the other systems.
And you have so many tactics you want to try to "win" that you're
running bloated software most of the time, so your CPUs are busy
thinking through all sorts of different tactics, wondering "will this
help me win the debate", comparing potential outcomes, and so on,
leaving little CPU time and memory for actually focusing on what is
True, what is Right, and how best to bring it out.
Meanwhile, lowly little me, I'm running a single-processor Pentium II
at 233MHz, but, rather than constantly boot up and shut down different
OSes, each with tons of bloat, legacy baggage, and the lot, I just run
BeOS all the time (I pick that OS only for its reputation for being
lean, mean, and speedy, for illustrative purposes).
So, while you resort to all sorts of tactics of rhetoric to try
to "defeat" me in a debate -- trashing me, lying about the record,
constantly introducing new misinformation or half-information rather
than dealing with the facts already on the table, using
guilt-by-association, and so on -- all I do is chug along, focus on
what I know to be true (admittedly very little), stay humble about the
rest, and stand up for only those things that I think really matter,
like resisting tyranny in all its forms, as well as not standing idly
by every time some person or organization that resists tyranny is
trashed (lest it give up protecting me or others, for one thing).
The upshot is that, IMO, you've embarrassed yourself throughout this
discussion, by behaving like a confused, scrambled, self-absorbed,
arrogant pseudo-intellectual, so impressed by his own rhetorical
capabilities that he can't think straight, can't answer simple
questions with simple answers, and can't treat his fellow man in a
loving way that even remotely patterns how he pretends to judge
governments on a moral basis.
Now, I never intended to "convert" you to my way of thinking, score
debating points, etc.
But I believe I've accomplished the nearly-complete elimination, in a
public forum, via your own writings, of any moral or
intellectual authority you might have ever had that went into
your moral-equivalency argument. Anyone who might previously had
thought "wow, that Chris Burke guy sure seems to know his stuff, and
he has serious reservations about American morality" need only read
this thread to see how seriously you actually take the issue of
morality in your own life, how honest and straightforward you are (or
aren't), how willing you are (or aren't) to be up-front about your
agenda (compared to what you claim about the importance of it when it
comes to life-and-death issues like Iran/Contra), and so on.
So, go ahead, make all the claims you want about the "moral
equivalence" of Al Queda and the USA. It won't matter anymore, since
anyone can see that you don't even believe you can assess any
"objective reality" that permits such a precise judgement; that you
can't (or won't) propose and maintain, against questioning even from a
"simpleton" like myself, a coherent moral code; that you refuse to
follow even the simplest threads (or tatters) of your own moral
code; that you make wildly incorrect claims about the past moral
character of individuals like myself (calling me a "bully", something
most of my classmates in school would find hilarious); and that,
having failed to claim victory, admit defeat, or politely withdraw,
you can't even be relied upon to honor your own commitment to "get out
of the game".
(Not that I mind the continued debate or the other stuff. You haven't
offended me at all; in fact, I appreciate the opportunity to stand up
for what's Good and Right and Decent about America, while taking a few
of my own "shots" at what I see as having been moral mistakes.;-)
I mean, just as one little example: if you can be so completely
wrong about "predicting" that I was a bully in school, how can
you possibly believe your assessment of the morality of a
country like the USA has any useful degree of precision or
accuracy?
That being said, as you continue to post, you say lots of things that
suggest to me that at least part of you is a sincere seeker
for Truth, someone genuinely interested in carrying on an
intelligent, calm, sincere, yet vibrant, discussion about
sociopolitical issues that could involve life-and-death issues, so I'm
not about to toss you off, as I would probably have in the past, like
an annoying insect. Whatever is good about you -- and I'm assured by
God that there is much of that -- is worth preserving, cherishing,
loving, comforting, so I'll continue to offer what, of that, I can in
this forum.
Further, if one of your goals was, or has become, to rebuke the notion
that anything the US government does must be "right" simply because it
is "morally superior" compared to its enemy, then I believe your
continued posting has helped win that point. And I support that
rebuke: past behavior might suggest a general moral stance, but
is no guarantee of moral correctness in any given instance in the past
or the future. Even wildly patriotic Americans who froth at the mouth
at your moral-equivalency argument, however you've presented it,
should take this away from this debate: they cannot ever assume
that their moral guidance is unneeded by those leading the US
government at the time, because the US government derives its
entire morality from the people -- American citizens -- that
make it up. (Sounds trite, but turning off, or squelching, moral
concerns under stress is a typical response, one you alluded to
earlier, and which could be deadly in this and future conflicts.)
And that moral guidance can be expressed in a variety of ways, from
conversations with friends, to letters to editors, to voting, to
running for office, none of which necessarily require a direct assault
on the rule of law -- a "privilege" denied so many in other
governments and groups (Al Queda, for one), therefore one that should
be vigorously exercised in this day and age to ensure it isn't lost
forever.
How serious can your response truly be, when
you don't answer straightforward questions,like, did my original
analogy, with a morally neutral backstory, suggest to you Marsha was
morally equivalent, in her actions, to
Billy?
Perhaps because that is a ridiculous question.
No, because you answer it below. And you wouldn't answer it then,
because you needed the opportunity to greatly modify and extend your
original thesis by dredging up tons of past evil the US has done,
without offering any counterweights to that.
It seems to me that, whether you believe it or not, you hate
the USA, and your modifications to its role in the Marsha/Billy story
-- in which the townsfolk murder Marsha, who represented (by
your choice) the USA, to "reward" her for finally dealing with
Billy -- show how deeply you desire the ultimate destruction of
the USA, or at least how preoccupied you are with that likely outcome
(and presently unwilling to use your great intellectual and rhetoric
to prevent such an outcome).
Now, I wasn't sure that was the case at first, so I gave you a full
iteration to re-think how you wanted the story to end, without making
it too easy.
So, here is my take, FWIW: you chose to have townsfolk, who
never raised a finger against a known criminal anytime during his
crime spree, and left it up to a plainly-reformed strongman, Marsha,
to deal with him, go ahead and murder Marsha by collective
action, despite the fact that Marsha no longer posed any real
threat to the town, especially compared to Billy, especially given
that she'd already made huge personal sacrifices to ensure the
town's safety, and Billy was now gone.
You're happy (in the only sense I suppose you can be
happy in your present state of mind) with that outcome. You meant it
to be an ominous signal to me, or others, who refused to join in or
blindly accept your hateful pronouncements against the USA, but it
failed utterly, because those of us who appreciate the good
things the US does in protecting individual freedom and rights around
the world already understand (especially since 2001-09-11) how
little the rest of the world actually values it (beyond lip-service
when it's politically appropriate).
You can claim "I actually like America" all you like. Based on this
thread, it's pretty clear that such a claim is the product of a very
confused, self-contradictory mind, if not simply an all-out lie
designed to lull readers into believing they're going to read anything
approaching "the truth about America" from someone who say they "care"
about America. (Hey, Al Queda "cares" about America to, and wants
only "what's right" for it. I think most people can rationally and
legitimately interpret that, too, as "hatred".)
Your story was about as "morally neutral" as the
Brother's Grimm are neutral on the subject of gender roles.
I never said it was "morally neutral". I said, please
respond to it as if it had a morally neutral backstory.
Surely you can understand that term "backstory", since you used it
yourself to introduce, well, your backstory! (Which you
purposely rigged, in moral terms, to validate a "morally-equivalent"
conclusion at the end of the story.)
Obviously, that doesn't mean Marsha was incapable of past misdeeds, or
that everyone sprang from nonexistence immediately, just that you
could have taken as a given that, whatever they did in the
past, you would specifically not assume there was any overall
"moral imbalance" as of the story's beginning in my narration.
Surely, since you're such a self-professed expert when it comes to
assessing "moral equivalence" between a nation-state of some 250
million people with 250 or so years of history (the US) and a
far-flung, though small, band of committed extremists drawing on 1700
years of religious tradition (Al Queda), you couldn't have found it at
all difficult to simply start with a blank slate, look at a
hypothetical situation, and say "yea", "nay", or "not enough info".
You stilted it as much as you could, or at least
that's what you would have been doing if you weren't presenting what
you see as "reality". I didn't answer the question, because the
answer is meaningless. I ignore things that aren't worth responding
too, no matter how important you think they are. I normally
don't answer meaningless questions. Yet I will, and the answer would
be "no, they were not morally equivalent".
I didn't stilt it, I wrote it, and the more
stilted you claim it was, the easier it should have been
to answer without so much nonsense. That's the purpose of that sort
of hypothetical situation: to help us clarify what might seem to be
straightforward statements regarding, e.g., morality, in situations
that might be more or less emotionally laden, confusing, etc.
And, after all these posts, you finally answer it IMO correctly: no,
Marsha isn't as immoral as Billy, even though she accidentally
killed two innocent children while killing Billy, an action she
undertook because she had plenty of evidence to believe that he
would, if not stopped by her, murder many more. And even
though she knew she would be risking the deaths of innocents,
as well as herself, by her actions.
Which completely contradicts what you originally posted in this
thread, taken as you wrote it, without having all sorts of
backstory you later decided to patch in, but didn't have the
intellectual honesty to admit you simply failed to present in the
first place, even to say "because of this, and because of all the
naughty things the US did in the past, I claim it is just as
immoral as Al Queda".
And if that was just an oversight, you could have responded to the
howls of protest from people like myself by simply saying "oh, hey, I
meant: given all the evil and good the USA has done in the past,
compared to that of Al Queda, plus this war effort, make them
morally equivalent", and leaving it at that.
(Sure, people might have concluded you think the USA is more in need
of being wiped off the face of the earth than Al Queda. I think you
actually understood, at some level, that that would be the likely
conclusion from the beginning, and purposely obfuscated your
statements when you made them, afterwards, or both, to try to a)
indict the USA somewhat without b) indicting your own moral judgement.
I've seen that tactic used too often to be easily fooled by it.)
Now, getting back to one of my earlier points with regard to the
story: assuming you believe that it was therefore immoral for
the townsfolk to give Billy moral credibility equivalent to Marsha,
and ultimately murder Marsha; and that you might well have been one of
the townsfolk willing and able to speak out shortly after Marsha's
finally disposing of Billy in the narrative, yet knowing what is a
likely outcome; what should you, as one of those townsfolk, do
to bring about a more moral outcome?
IMO, if you do what you've done in this thread, you're doing something
immoral, or at least amoral, to wit: knowing that the
townsfolk are likely someday to murder Marsha because she finally
kills Billy less-than-perfectly to defend herself and the town from
Billy's crime spree (in which her own friends and relatives had been
murdered by him), you nevertheless choose to preach the moral
equivalency of Marsha and Billy.
The effect of that preaching does nothing to encourage the townsfolk
to be more alert in the future in defending against people like
Billy.
But Marsha, and especially her defenders, more of the sort of mind-set
that listens to feedback, end up being discouraged, while those who
seek the opportunity to murder Marsha end up being encouraged,
by your preaching.
See, in a strict sense, Marsha might be strong, but her strength had
long included a substantial component of moral legitimacy. You know
that, which is why you seek to attack it -- to
delegitimize her in the eyes of as many townsfolk as possible.
Else why would you, or anyone, bother to question someone's moral
legitimacy?
That way, you can help bring about the conditions whereby townsfolk
who would otherwise defend her remain quiet, perhaps some of them
start saying "Marsha must be destroyed", and a few of them find little
resistance carrying out their plan to murder her.
Instead, you could preach an argument of "moral superiority" --
that, imperfect as she may be, Marsha nevertheless fights for a
morally superior vision of how the townsfolk could and should
live, free of being robbed, beaten, raped, enslaved, murdered, and so
on -- even though, to survive personally, which sometimes
includes protecting her best supporters, she occasionally
trespasses on these rights in specific instances.
If your preaching wasn't in vain, you might help convince more
townsfolk to protect her (while perhaps keeping her "in line" by
offering to help resolve situations brought to her attention); more to
speak up for her, even if in simplistic, aka patriotic, ways ("Marsha
Is Great, Yay For Marsha!"); and, ultimately, fewer, maybe none,
willing to carry out a plan to murder her, if only because of the risk
that they might fail and/or be killed themselves by defenders of
Marsha.
And, if you preached early enough in the narrative, you might
actually help bring about the prevention of the worst of Billy's crime
spree, if not his outright rehabilitation, by encouraging townsfolk to
emulate the qualities they find themselves openly admiring in
Marsha -- of protecting the innocent, standing against crime and
tyranny, etc. (And, in a sense, that's where we are now in the
narrative; the USA hasn't been hurt by 09-11 as much as Marsha was by
killing relatives, and militant Islam's crime spree is still in the
pinprick stage, kinda like Billy's theft and occasional rape.)
So, in preaching the moral equivalency of the USA and Al Queda, you
are, in my opinion, making a clear moral choice
regarding the outcome you yourself seem to wish upon "Marsha" -- the
USA -- namely, its ultimate destruction as a reward for its zealously
defending the rights of everyone by destroying those who have proven
their willingness to commit mass-murder.
I stand by my strong opinion that such preaching is a case of moral
idiocy, especially now that it's been revealed how insightful
you're capable of being regarding the way events might well unfold.
And that's consistent with what you said very earlier on with being
bitter, cynical, not thinking clearly, whatever -- you're so focused
on the Marsha/USA evil you know, going back centuries, that you
find yourself unwilling to rouse your moral consciousness, explore the
issues more deeply, and figure out what you can do to make the
world a better place.
In another post, you
said:
First, how about you answer the question based
solely on the analogy, assuming a morally neutral backstory, without
having to "decorate" in ways you didn't bother to mention in your
posts morally equating the US with al
Queda?
Ah, I see your issue now. When I posted without
decoration or backstory, I didn't bother to mention it not because it
is irrelevant, but because I assumed that since all the decorations
are part of the public record, I didn't have to. Because
intent is what matters, the backstory is critically important.
It is by viewing one's actions over time that you can begin to
determine intent. There is no better way to predict what someone
would do in a certain situation than to study what they have done in
previous situations. The past is the only guide we have to the
future. Thus for the question of intent, the why not
the what, we cannot ignore the
backstory.
Sorry, that's a nearly-complete rewrite of what you actually
said:
"I think the intent is the same. Our goals are more
important than their deaths. Which means, that if what you say is true
-- intent matters -- the only difference between the US government and
terrorists is that the goverment has a bigger budget."
There it is: you claimed the intent was the same,
i.e. the backstory can itself be canceled out (i.e. it doesn't
affect, on balance, the subsequent equation). The subsequent
equation: if intent matters, the only difference is budget --
not morality. Moral equivalence thus asserted.
(Then you went on to steer my hypothetical story "toward reality", a
reality you later claim is impossible to determine objectively....)
In case you're going to try to wiggle out of the morality claim above,
here's what you wrote earlier in that same post:
"Indeed, intent matters. But my observation is that our
cavalier attitude toward killing civilians ("collateral damage") makes
our intent not so much different from theirs. It is exactly the point
that treating civilian casualties as "regrettable but unavoidable" in
the pursuit of our goals makes us as culpable as them for those
civilians we kill."
We're as culpable as them for the civilians we kill by
accident as they are for the ones they murder on
purpose. That's a simple, direct statement of moral
equivalence, plainly requiring no backstory, plainly assuming none.
Can a lead-in like "It is exactly the point..." be made more
clear in that direction?
(How in the world Marsha avoids identical culpability to Billy in the
story, based on that statement, is beyond me, since the starting-point
of the stories -- moral neutrality -- is the same. "I think the
intent is the same" is an acceptance of a starting-point of
moral neutrality, given the other constraints at that point in the
discussion, is it not?)
As far as what's in the "public record", you've clearly seen fit to
dredge up all sorts of negative evidence with regards to the
USA (as you did with Marsha in the story), but how many instances can
you point to where you presented positive evidence in her
behalf, or negative evidence for the other side -- Al
Queda/Billy?
(I can't think of any such instances offhand, but you may have said
something nice about the USA once or twice.)
Based on what you chose to say about the USA and Al Queda,
respectively, it's pretty clear which one you hate more, which one
is more morally repugnant to you, and so on: the USA.
(If you did all that just to justify your moral-equivalency argument,
you sure have a skewed set of priorities, publically trashing a
country you claim to "like" just to avoid having to admit you
might have been wrong, speaking out of your butt, whatever.)
If, on the other hand, you were trying to present an open, honest
assessment of the relative morality of the USA and Al Queda, surely
you would have identified all sorts of things positive and negative
about both in their history? (And don't say "it's in the
public record, which I assumed everyone knew" -- that justified either
saying nothing about that record, or presenting all sides
fairly. My claim is that you did neither, though, because of
your hatred of the USA, you perhaps believed you were being
fair at the time.)
Which I hope explains why your analogy was not
worth it to me to consider seriously, as it
stood.
No, it doesn't, since you have proven you could have easily
addressed it as it stood, simply by doing so above.
Now, it occurs to me that perhaps you avoided doing so because you
didn't want me to turn around and say "aha, that means the USA is
not as bad as Al Queda", without your already having prepared
the way to rebut such a claim.
First, I wouldn't have made that claim, something you'll just
have to trust. What I was trying to rebut was your plain statement
of an equation, which did not appear to require any context
to have some validity, despite what you now claim.
(I might have said, "okay, just what is it that the USA is doing that
makes it more morally repugnant in this equation, such that it ends up
being equal to Al Queda?", or just stopped contributing entirely,
having made my point.)
Second, even if I, or someone else, had made the claim, you
could have then countered, explaining your belief that the USA
has done vastly more evil than good compared to Al Queda, and so
on.
But, especially consistent with published practices of left-wing
manipulation of truth, you chose to distort, duck and cover, distort,
duck and cover, proving a lack of honesty and faithfulness -- two
qualities that I, personally, consider necessary for anyone to
convince me they have the authority to pronounce moral equivalence as
you have done.
Now, with this understanding, let me explain my
position. First, anytime I say "we", or "the US", I'm referring
specifically to the government.
I.e. its system of governance combined with its citizens, especially
in the case of the USA, which is government by, for, and of the
people, moreso than in most any other nation.
In my (admittedly non-exhaustive, but
also self-directed and not driven solely by popular conception or word
of mouth) study of our own actions during and since WWII, I have
concluded that our intent is to protect our own interests, both
political and economic, by any means necessary.
Exactly like any other nation's government that proves able to survive
a dangerous world.
And note that, strictly speaking, "by any means necessary" differs in
several practical ways from "by any means convenient", though
sometimes the USA seems to practice the latter. (E.g. our agreement
on the bombing of the plant in Sudan, my opinion about the Elian
Gonzalez raid; how these were necessary, I fail to see, but can
see how they may well have been convenient for the leaders in
power at the time.)
By the way, sometimes I think you get too hung up on linguistics. If
John says "I'm gonna have sex tonight by any means necessary" and Fred
says "I'm gonna murder my wife tonight by any means necessary", you
talk as if they're morally equivalent, since, somehow, in your view,
their intent, goals, and conduct are the same. When someone points
out that all John did was to hire a prostitute, while Fred cut his
wife's throat, you respond "well, that's because John was easily able
to just hire a prostitute; Fred's goals required him to do what
he did, and I'm sure that if John was in Fred's position, he
would have done the same -- therefore, they're morally equivalent".
The mere fact that they use the same language does not mean
they're after the same thing. And the mere fact that you can
describe their conduct using similar language does not mean
they're engaging in morally equivalent conduct.
(At this point, I suppose you'll explain to me that the reason John
wants only to have sex instead of murder his wife is that he murdered
his girlfriend years earlier, therefore he is, indeed, "morally
equivalent" to Fred.)
These "means" are restrained by political reality,
public reaction to the means (if they are discovered), and our
capabilities.
Exactly, which includes a very high component of morality
(positive and negative), which a large percentage of the citizenry
believe is critical to not only be close to God, but to be safe in
the world, as well as a substantial component of morality in the
form of the degree to which citizen participation in government is
encouraged compared to the extremes of tyrannical leadership and that
form of "mob rule" that might be called "raw democracy".
(You've apparently decided to never get back to me on the crucial
issue of whether moral superiority implies an improved ability
to survive or flourish in this world, after having
ridiculed me for suggesting it might, when it comes to how nations
govern their citizens. I think that's a pretty important issue,
though I'm not near 100% convinced that it is the case. So I'd
love to know what you think about those issues, in simplified form at
least, as in my examples of Moses, Jesus, and so on.)
Nothing else obvious comes to mind. Not an
abiding sense of "goodness", to be sure.
How in the world can a government have an "abiding sense of
goodness", once you remove people from the equation (which is
what you appear to have done by relegating them to "political reality"
and "public reaction", which you treat as distinct from the
government)?
Do you really believe any system, aside from the human beings
that might inhabit it, has any "sense of good", or of anything
else, for that matter?
Methinks you've been looking in the wrong place for an "abiding sense
of goodness".
I suggest you look in the hearts of people first, starting with
yourself: find the goodness you've think you believe in, focus
exclusively on that for a time (an hour, day, week, month, whatever
you can manage), and bring it out in your dealings with others
(including fellow/. posters).
Then see how well it works, learn from it, rinse, and repeat.
As you get more "centered" in your own morality, you expand it to
include others -- teaching, preaching, and, on rare occasion, judging
those who come within your circle and whom you are expected to
judge.
Continue to observe the effects your activities have on others,
positive and negative, and on yourself of course, and modify your
behavior, and morality, accordingly.
Until you've done that, you have neither the moral
experience or moral authority to assess, much less
preach regarding, the relative morality of nation-states, governments,
corporations, or even Boy Scout troups.
[To Be Continued...]
And a particular system of governance might do better or worse,
along various dimensions, when it comes to amplifying good and
squelching evil, but, ultimately, 100% good people can overcome any
bad system, just as 100% bad people can destroy any good system,
acting from within or without -- though, in practice, if there are
such things as people 100% good or bad, they are too few in number to
ever conduct an experiment in these directions, so we must satisfy
ourselves with vast areas of gray.
Actually, the townsfolk themselves did that, via their "United Townsfolk" organization, thinking that the solution to homelessness was to take other people's property and give it to the homeless.
You're right. You're actually right. But you're not so right that you aren't still a retard. The action was taken by the UN, but that does nothing to reduce our role in that action, what with being a superpower and all.
It does nothing to reduce our role in the action, compared to your depiction of the US being fully responsible -- Marsha unilaterally deciding to move Jacob into Bill's house??
Surely you can't mean that. Because that would imply that the only way the USA could escape full culpability for that act would be if it had launched all-out war on the UN to prevent it happening.
And in the analogy, it was from the perspective of those pissed off about the
action, and they don't care about whatever dismissive crap you want to pile on the issue.
No, the analogy was from an objective viewpoint, illustrating the distinctions between how people view reality and reality itself.
I realize it helps your case to keep ignoring my questions and keep distorting the analogy in your favor, while rarely bringing anything new into the discussion that might not favor your case (as compared to my own efforts, where I do so often), but it sure seems like a waste of time.
No wonder you're giving up and going home, spitting back at me in the process.
Despite trying to give you a serious response, I'm not interested in yours.
How serious can your response truly be, when you don't answer straightforward questions, like, did my original analogy, with a morally neutral backstory, suggest to you Marsha was morally equivalent, in her actions, to Billy?
Nor did you address the issues I raised concerning the use of political rhetoric to "tame" immorality, as far as I can tell. Instead, you've responded by just slamming me left and right, like an angry dog with a bunny in its mouth.
I'm a very sad little bunny.
I'm done mocking, and there's nothing else I could do with more insane
reversals of cause and effect where their hatred of us causes them to be pissed about us fucking with them instead of the reverse.
Head...spinning...must...lie...down....
You're a loon, and your cyclical logic that our justification is that we're morally superior, and we're morally superior because we're justified.
Sentence missing something.
You are ignorant of
history -- even recent -- and actions taken by your own country.
Thanks for trying to educate me (NOT!!).
Okay, I'm starting to mock again. I'm done now. Really.
I didn't take that as referring to lives under the Taliban, though I guess maybe that's what he meant, though I would think "civilian attacks" meant attacks on the US, not Afghans, without knowing the context better.
And note that I entered the discussion shortly after his message in the thread, when you started stating what appeared to be equations not needing much in the way of context.
You didn't read it that way because you're a semi-literate idiot of incomprehensible stupidity and a brain shielded by three feet of cement against outside thought.
Oh, sure, but that's because of the space aliens trying to infiltrate my brain, and, as to my being a "semi-literate idiot", well, both my parents were Republicans, so it's not my fault.
To quote:
"The number of lives saved is estimated to be in excess of 100,000 over the next few years, mostly woman and children. They have been saved because food supplies can now reach famine stricken areas. Something not possible when the Taliban ran things."
How the hell could you not read that as saving lives "of those living under Taliban rule"?!
I guess because I simply did not read it in the first place, therefore my interpretative skills vis-a-vis the quote were somewhat lacking.
Ah, now I found it, further up in the thread.
And I see the problem: you responded by saying "That's our justification", referring to the saving of an estimated 100K (or whatever) lives under the Taliban.
But that isn't our justification. I mean, it's not what I've heard Bush or Rummie (admittedly, I rarely listen) or most anyone else say. Most of the justification is "its self-defense".
Saving lives under the Taliban is a desired side-effect, and justifies why we don't "just nuke Afghanistan", as some gonzo-warriors wanted shortly after 9/11, more than it does going to war there in the first place, IMO.
Looking back at your messages, it's hard to see whether you're saying it is our justification, or that it isn't.
Perhaps all you meant to do was refute an apparent claim that it was justifiable to kill 1K-3K Afghan innocents to save an estimated 100K more via knocking down the Taliban.
If so, that was hard to tell from the wording of any individual message you posted, especially for a semi-literate idiot (etc.) like myself.
Or maybe you meant to focus narrowly on the issue of whether it's okay for Westerners to not go hysterical over the reports of civilian casualties in Afghanistan -- in which case, your moral-equivalency stuff sure sent a mixed message, since that seemed to apply to a much broader scope.
My take: rossz, the one you quote, was suggesting that maybe killing 1K-3K Afghans wasn't worth going bananas over because we figure, in the long run, we saved maybe 100K of similarly innocent ones, while taking reasonable precautions against further unfettered attacks on us by Al Queda.
In a sense, he's right: given that the West (US heading it up) has undertaken the operation, the comparative figures suggest we shouldn't panic over the current rates of loss of life, especially given the apparent success of the operation. (Hardly the "quagmire" that was both predicted before, and claimed during, the first month or so.)
However, I agree with you that this should not form anywhere near a complete justification for waging war against another nation, if that's what you meant to say.
I disagree, of course, with the assertion you appeared to make, that the mere fact that we're accidentally (despite our best efforts in this war) killing civilians makes us morally equivalent to al Queda, whose goal is to murder as many civilians in the West as possible.
Jeeze, you should just end all your posts with "I'm an idiot. Q.E.D.", since that seems to be the subtext of every word you utter.
I figure it's fairly implicit in my signature, the web site I link to, and, as you point out, the subtext of every word I utter.
(Kinda like why I don't write "I write in English" in my signature; it's obvious, right?)
But thanks for the advice. I'll take it under consideration.
So, no, I don't buy the Divine Right argument.
Ah, glad to know you think we can fall out of favor. So it's only George W. Bush who rules by Divine Right.
Huh? Who said that? Sure, he hasn't (to our knowledge) committed lewd sex acts with interns half his age, lied under oath, had his law license revoked, and so on, but that hardly makes him a Divine Leader!;-/
Haha. He's the source of our moral (and thus military) superiority -- a man who thinks free speech should be limited to stop people from making fun of him?
I'd really love a link to a quote supporting that, besides the simple "there should be limits to freedom" he uttered offhand, apparently in response to seeing a negative web site.
I mean, it's not like he's going all-out for campaign finance reform, which seems to include provisions making it even harder for citizens to criticize incumbents shortly before an election (something he, as an outed DUI'er, should theoretically appreciate!).
Me, I like to think Bush43 is just about as idiotic as I am. The great thing about us idiots is, we're so busy trying to figure out stuff like eating pretzels, putting on socks, and reading books without lots of pictures, we're too busy to contemplate how to run everyone else's lives.
I'm dying here.
I'll pray for you, if you like.
You'll question the Democrat's actions, but you aren't even inquisitive about what happens when a Republican is in office.
I'm too dumb to be inquisitive. I couldn't miss knowing about White House actions when Clinton was in office -- he was always in my face, so to speak, telling me how great my life would be if I'd only let him (or his wife) run it. It's like the guy couldn't avoid a camera to save his life.
But I didn't even vote for Bush43, so it's not like I'm totally in love with that guy either...just, so far, he's been less in my face, trying to take away rights I happen to cherish, than Clinton, and he hasn't wildly reversed course on promises he made (yet), like promising to cut my taxes and then raising them retroactively as soon as he was elected like Clinton did.
And, as bad as Ashcroft might be, wake me up when he rolls some tanks into a compound of poor left-wing religious nuts, killing them all in the process...until then, I figure I've seen worse and, for better or worse, survived.
I would take heart that we mostly agree about the Sudanese incident , but since your "reasoning" is basically a direct repitition of the Official Republican Party Line on the subject, and you don't show any other critical thinking skills, I can't use it to think that maybe - maybe - you can open your eyes and see reality past your Democracy-colored glasses.
I don't wear glasses. And I hardly worship democracy -- it's tyranny of the majority, if you ask me. I happen to think our democratic republic is pretty good compared to alternatives I'm aware of that have been demonstrated to at least limp along for more than a couple of generations, but, most important, people have to be moral and willing to stick their necks out more for moral than selfish reasons, generally, for any system of governance to operate properly.
I.e. I think forms of government are idiot-proof just like computer systems are (i.e. they're not).
Your particular brand of insanity only lets you home in on the actions of that one individual, and not consider all the other actions taken by other (and oddly Republican) Presidents in the Middle East. Do the words Iran Contra mean a [] thing to you?
Oh, sure, and I still have reservations about what in the world Reagan was trying to accomplish, what with trying to get some American hostages freed and all.
But, frankly, I am unaware of the existence of lots of Muslims unhappy with that incident. I figured all the unhappy ones were Democrats, Communists, and so on, but not Muslims. I should research it more.
And, of course, it was Reagan who tucked tail and ran after the barracks bombing in Lebanon, akin to Clinton's response to a series of terrorist attacks on the US throughout his term. (I don't really put the attack on the USS Cole in that category; it was a guerilla-style attack, perhaps, but not terrorist exactly, since, like the barracks attack, the target was purely military.)
While I suspect Reagan's response to the barrack attacks suggested to some that the US didn't have much resolve, it's also reasonable to think they might have been aware of our fortitude vis-a-vis the USSR and not come to too hasty a conclusion.
Whereas, we apparently have bin Laden's own words "thanking" Clinton for his handling of the Somalia incident, "proving" our spinelessness, as our attack on the Sudanese plant probably "proved" our immorality to many Muslims.
I'll concede, though, that as Reagan was distracted by the USSR and its Stalinesque history of mass murder and expansionism, Clinton was distracted by the GOP and its Gingrichesque history of trying to lower taxes and conform to the Independent Counsel law the Democrats put in place (and now return to loving, thanks to Enron).
Oh no, it's all that damn dirty Democrat liar's fault!
You sound like my dad, who taught me my most important political lesson as a teenager.
We were alone on a boating trip and, beer in hand, he launched into his usual rant about welfare, morality, and so on (not that he was a paragon of morality, but this was a political rant).
He actually said something very close to this:
"So they blame others for being on welfare, they blame others for their immorality. It's blame, blame, blame. Blame him, blame her, blame them, but never blame themselves.
"And, the thing is, it's all the Democrats' fault!"
I am alive today because of my skill at avoiding laughing out loud.
But that episode taught me that labels don't substitute for rationality, morality, and so on. His being a Republican made him no smarter or better than anyone else, in that specific case. Even though he was very smart, he, like anyone else, could be dumb in an instant (like you say I am all the time).
(And, yes, I realize you're parodying what you believe is my line of thinking.)
It's sad, because you're an
offense to those who are merely mindlessly partisan and closed minded. Rush Limbaugh (who is at least smarter than a very, very stupid rock)
would disown you.
Your other, mind-bendingly insane post demonstrates exactly what you think, you damn loon. Your crazy "right makes might" philosophy (if something so primitive can be called by such a lofty name) is tainted by your politics, which seem to have been aquired by shoving a Jerry Fallwel book up your ass until it hit your brain stem. The result is one of the most bizarre (yet stupid) things I've ever seen. It's oddly fascinating, like roadkill. Which explains that smell of rotting flesh coming from your head.
Been watching reruns of the "dead parrot" sketch a lot lately?
*sigh* Well, I'm actually starting to get bored of mocking you, so I'm done. Thanks for being so insane/stupid. It's been fun.
Nothing I said implied that nation X winning a victory over nation Y meant it was morally superior.
Sorry, couldn't resist... You're such an idiot, you don't even know what you say means.
I apologize for being such an idiot. Sadly, there appears to be nothing I can do about that at present.
Yet the history of what I'd call morally superior cultures suggests that they need not have "on-paper" military muscle that matches the enemy to win.
Here I did not intend to say (nor believe I said) that they therefore always will win, and that such victories therefore always imply moral superiority.
What history shows is two things: a nation-state, culture, people, whatever, that values human life, democracy, freedom of thought, and so on, will be able to defeat an enemy possessing greater numbers, land, and ammunition, if that enemy doesn't value those things nearly as much.
Again, here, I did not say "will always defeat". Further, I used the word "nearly" to suggest there must be quite a chasm in the way the nation-state treats its individual citizens to make up for an on-paper disadvantage.
Therefore, the fact that Al Queda is militarily inferior to the USA suggests that it is morally inferior as well, since it is willing to target innocent civilians to achieve political aims.
Here, "suggests" was way too strong on my part, especially taking the statement in isolation. It should have said something like "prompts consideration of whether it is morally inferior".
Put another way: if Al Queda was sufficiently moral as an organization, surely the Islamic communities, being pious (at least to my distant view), would wholeheartedly embrace it, fund it, be sure it is able to defend itself, and project its power where necessary.
The USA, on the other hand, has had that kind of support, both from its own citizens and from other nations, including those it soundly defeated only decades earlier (Germany, Japan) or centuries earlier (Britain).
Now, support from powerful friends does not imply morality, but the fact that powerful friends that do not normally interfere with each others' business to a high degree are willing to offer support in a risky environment (read: they're all targets of Al Queda as well) suggests that the USA isn't a morally repugnant animal, the way Al Queda is in most pertinent quarters.
Morally superior nations win over morally inferior [ones]. You say this explecitly and repeatedly, using almost those exact words.
Again, sorry for the confusion my poorly worded quotes caused. As should be clear (finally), I meant only this: morally superior nations can win over militarily superior, yet morally inferior, ones. Sometimes without even firing much of a shot (USA vs. USSR, for example).
Morally superior implies victory.
I'd hardly put it that way.
I'd say morally superior, in the sense I mean of morality (not killing people for political ends, for example, thus allowing more vigorous political discourse in society), implies a degree of military, as well as socioeconomic, superiority that is hard to quantify, especially in the eyes of those who don't value (or share) that morality, from the outside.
Some of the Founding Fathers of the USA seem to have shared a related vision of a nation that didn't have a standing army, but would spontaneously defend itself against attack, in the form of individual land-owning (and thus "self-interested" in the security of the nation) citizens taking up arms as needed.
Not that the USA has remained true to that model, but its behavior before, and response to, being seriously attacked has patterned that model in several instances.
And where it has made moral miscalculations -- that is, misunderstood the degree to which ordinary citizens would fight for what they believed was right -- the US has not fared so well (e.g. Vietnam, where the "moral justification" the US typically has, of defending the nation against direct attack, was absent).
The challenge is not so much to never make a moral mistake, but rather to learn from that mistake...which I believe the US did following Vietnam, and which I hope and pray many in Islam have been doing even more sincerely since 9/11.
(Relating back to my mythical story: Marsha has been hoping Billy would change his ways, because she greatly admires his willingness to act, to stick his neck out, compared to the relative cowardice of the population. If Billy figured out that behaving uprightly was way better than behaving badly, he'd make a great ally, as happened to several other bad boys whom Marsha cluesticked into correction awhile earlier.)
You're retarded ass can't even make the logical leap with your own statement to see that the contrapositive - Not victory implies
not morally superior -- follows directly!
Oh, I understand that perfectly, being a computer programmer. That's why I take the trouble to correct/clarify my statements; it would severely undercut much of what I'm trying to say about morality. The issue of how to defend morality per se vs. defending people who generally share that morality against those who don't by choosing to temporarily set aside that morality is important to me. I believe saying "any victory implies moral superiority" would ultimately undercut my "message" urging people to carefully consider these issues for themselves.
But I'm sure my retarded ass makes plenty of other mistakes, so your point is well taken.
Slashdot Mirror
Why bother? I was referring to the distinctions between how Bush (and, say, 80+% of Americans) define the war and how others (perhaps wilfully) distort that definition when trying to attack it.
Having gone around with you before on this, I'm 0% interested in the "moral status" of the USA. As an American citizen, I am now, when it comes to my relationship to the US federal government, interested only in my personal safety, freedom, and that of my fellow citizens.
I know you hate America. We all know you hate America. I know you are doing everything you can to motivate those who actually do intend to murder innocent Americans (a phrase I concede you won't admit applies to anyone, even two-year-olds on airplanes) to carry out their schemes, murder even more, etc. We all know that now.
And I also suspect you do this primarily because you hold America 100% guilty for the defeat of global communism, a system that murdered tens of millions in the 20th century alone, and which the USA fought, in fits and starts, using all sorts of tactics, including supporting efforts involving the things you list -- Pinochet, Idi Amin, Vietnam, El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama (though I'm not sure about that last one).
So, I no longer take you seriously as a communicator of moral uprightness, but rather as a hopeful leader of mass-murder against myself, my family, and my fellow citizens.
Further, I recognize that the left-wing socialist/communist establishment fully embraces Arab-Muslim acts of mass murder as politically legitimate because it believes those acts can be connected to left-wing canards like "poverty", "injustice", "shame", the exact problems the left loves to trump up in order to extort funding, freedom, and military power from the West, especially the USA. (Personally, I agree with the sentiment that labels as "slander" statements that point to poverty as a root cause of terrorism or violence generally. I find poor people no more prone to violence than the wealthy, but the left disagrees when it finds such disagreement convenient.)
So it treats what amounts to right-wing fanatics as brothers-in-arms, mainly as a political ploy to convince the USA that if only it'd adopt the "enlightened" sort of leadership that involves less freedom, higher taxation, international redistribution of wealth, and further restrictions on business (if it's even allowed to exist at all), the problems of terrorism would evaporate -- which, of course, they would not, if history is any guide (since it's historically proven that such systems of government fail in the most crucial test: the ability to locate and promote qualified leaders of moral character).
That's why it's primarily left-wing publications that have trouble using the phrase "terrorist" today, instead equating it with "freedom fighter" -- suggesting that, deep down inside, they know that the so-called "freedom fighters" of the leftist revolutions of the past 100+ years were all, in fact, just terrorists. (Meanwhile, the right-wing publications with which I'm familiar have little trouble declaring people like Timothy McVeigh "terrorists", even though they were acting out in line with right-wing causes like opposing gun control.)
Meanwhile, last I was aware, the USA was no longer involved in any of those things you list. Heck, last I checked, neither were Germany nor Japan involved in murdering innocent civilians as they were in WWII -- and, surprise surprise, Bush is not targeting them, either. (I guess you really resent the US focusing exclusively on present threats rather than trying to bring about some sort of cosmic justice by annihilating itself and all its citizens?)
And until I see you invoke the reality of what the Soviet Union did, Cuba does, China does, on a regular basis in this forum and in these sorts of discussions, especially in the context of any unfortunate activity in which the US military gets involved, rather than constantly (as it seems to me) spewing hatred towards the USA -- as if the world needs more of that presently -- I won't change my opinion of you.
It's really sad, and at the same time kinda funny, that someone like you, pretending to be a moral compass for the US, conducts his campaign by spreading so much hatred and venom towards every single citizen, based on any act carried out in the name of, or even remotely funded or even not actively discouraged (e.g. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait) by, the US, even acts carried out decades before those, whom you hold as morally responsible for them, were born, as you did in this message.
So, since the USA can and will never, no matter what it does (except possibly by becoming a totalitarian communist dictatorship, run by the "enlightened idealists" who run, say, Cuba), meet your standard of morality and thus no longer be validly called a "terrorist regime", and since you're just one voice among many who will, similarly, never acknowledge the US's "moral superiority" in any matter, especially a matter involving actions it takes to defend itself against attack, I've completely given up my interest in the US carrying out our collective defense on the basis of any morality whatsoever.
Instead, all I care about is effectiveness. As long as there are those who declare themselves (by word or deed) enemies of the USA, the federal government had better deal with them, and do that effectively.
I'm not insisting that it do so. Oh, no -- I'm also a Christian, and therefore don't have a desire to commit violence, either directly or by proxy (e.g. by government) -- which is the main reason why I don't cotton to left-wing politics (since it's full of violence by proxy -- against the wealthy, against gun owners, against yet-to-be-born children, against white European males, and so on -- in the form of threat and the spreading of mass hatred and resentment, if not action), and why I have little interest in some strains of right-wing politics as well.
All I ask is, if the government won't do its primary duty and defend me and my fellow citizens, it dissolve itself entirely, leaving all of us free to defend ourselves, conduct our lives, earn and spend our money, plan for our retirement, teach our children, take care of our elderly, contribute to local charitities, and so on, as we each see fit.
In the meantime, people like you have convinced me to not even care, from the point of view of my duties of citizenship (e.g. voting), whether the US is intentionally bombing innocent civilians elsewhere in the world, except insofar as it is calculated as an effective means of defense. After all, people like you refuse to grant me or other Americans even the slightest whiff of good moral intentions, instead castigating us as equally evil to any modern-day terrorist planning to blow up a pediatrics ward. So there is no basis on which I can possibly encourage the US government to conduct itself "more morally". Why should I bother encouraging moral behavior on the premise that it'd earn more friends for the USA, when what the world seems to really respect is the aggressive use of force? After all, the most-respected international organization is the United Nations, and, in that body, the USA gets exactly as many votes as a mass-murdering, politically repressive nation like China gets. So much for international respect for any semblance of morality.
And, since there's plenty of evidence that attempts at morality led to 2001-09-11 (e.g. the restrictions on the sorts of local contacts the CIA may have, the refusal to engage in anything remotely like "racial profiling"), from the defense-of-my-country point of view, I see no practical reason to encourage the US government to behave morally. According to your claimed standards, the US can never become a more moral nation, and to the degree it tries, even I can see that it'll become far less able to defend itself against enemies that already exist and have already taken action against it.
So, thanks for your constant interjections in these and other discussions -- you've really clarified and simplified my outlook, and probably that of many others.
Yeah, let's dispense with corporations, capitalism, and the greed that goes along with the whole lot.
Then we can see how technology fares under the government that isn't beholden to corporate influence and the almighty dollar, leaving only the "idealists" to run things.
Could you please provide a quote or a link to one showing Bush (or whoever) saying something exactly like this, so we can determine for ourselves whether you're misinterpreting what has been actually said?
I haven't exactly paid close attention, but from what I've heard the US government saying post-09-11, they have not declared war on "all non-government-supported organized violence".
In fact, I was under the distinct impression they had declared war on all terrorism of global reach -- that is, all murdering of civilians, in order to terrorize a population into accommodating political goals, carried out across national borders -- and that they, in fact, will specifically target governments that fund, aid, or harbor terrorists of this sort.
Assuming I've heard the "party line" correctly, how it gets twisted into a war on "all non-government-supported organized violence" is a mystery. So presumably you have actual quotes, rather than anecdotal mumblings, to back up your claims?
(No, I'm not trying to "support Bush". How Arafat and the PLO manage to escape his earlier declaration of war on terrorists with global reach has been left entirely unexplained, at least to me, for just one example. I really am interested in actual evidence that his widely-supported "war on terror" is a fraud, beyond just evidence of political posturing to try to preserve an internation coalition including Arab states.)
But different from the never-ending, vastly expensive, and internally divisive wars started by FDR, LBJ, and others against poverty, against unemployment, against racism, against drugs, against pr0n, and so on?
At least Bush admitted up-front it would be never-ending and expensive, unlike other Presidents when they launched, or relaunched, most or all of these other wars.
And I admit I'm not 100% up on which of my rights have been taken away as a direct result of the War on Terror. I'm still stunned that my 1st-amendment rights have been directly attacked by Congress and Bush as a direct result of the War on Supposedly Too Much Money In Politics, aka "The Incumbent Protection Act", aka "Campaign Finance Reform", so maybe I just haven't paid attention to the other.
But of all these wars, the only one I'm reasonably certain is better fought by the US federal government than by citizens employing their own intelligence, rights, and compassion, happens to be the War on Terror. And, so far, it's a lot less expensive for me, less intrusive on my rights than those other wars have been, as far as I can tell. (Note that I distinguish between rights I have and rights I actually exercise; even rights I never wish to exercise, I desire for myself and others, to be able to choose whether to exercise.)
I'd rather the US government fight the War on Terror than leave the general population to do as it sees fit with the Arab Muslims in its midst (not to mention those who just happen to look like Arab Muslims, like Arab Christians, Indian Sikhs, and so on).
But I'll admit that, at this point, I can't really tell that it's a War on Terror anymore, so much as a War on Politically Unpopular Terrorists. Oh well.
There seems to be a leap across a chasm of irrationality here. Exactly how does voting against a government protect ourselves from it? From the perspective of an individual, it can't possibly.
From my point of view, for example, I protected myself fully from Yahoo's and TRUSTe's behavior by choosing to not use their products. To do that, I didn't even have to vote -- I simply chose to not purchase their products, sign up on their web sites, whatever.
On the other hand, I've actually voted in many elections (certainly all the federal ones for which I've been eligible), yet, despite my voting pattern, my 1st and 2nd Amendment rights (for example) have not been protected against assaults by all three branches of government.
So, while I feel I can pretty heartily endorse the thought-process you encourage others to adopt in your post, it doesn't make me any less concerned about the role of government.
After all, the role of government (in human hands, that is) remains pretty much the same as ever: to impose the will of some people on others. The role of a business (including a corporation) is quite different: to offer a service, product, or currency in exchange for something considered, generally, of equivalent value in the market. (Let me make it clear that the degree to which this "works" in a useful way depends strongly on the quality of the market, which is where government oversight is generally welcome, even by many who downplay the utility of government in other areas.)
Participation in the "rules" set by a given business is therefore quite voluntary on a case-by-case basis. Participation in the "rules" set by a given government almost never is voluntary.
As to "dollar votes have been proven not to work", I can point to Arthur Andersen as just one obvious counterexample. Unlike massive failures on the part of the US federal government, the failure of Arthur Andersen to properly carry out one of its "core functions" resulted in a rapid "routing around" of its existence in favor of other, presumably less corrupt, organizations. One could even argue the punishment has been excessively severe -- yet it was imposed almost entirely by the public (okay, the "market"), largely voluntarily, and not as the result of a large number of meetings of congressional oversight committees, judicial proceedings, etc. (Contrast with the Microsoft antitrust proceedings, for one, and with the federalization of baggage screeners following 2001-09-11, despite said screeners having almost literally zero culpability compared to the existing federal oversight at the time, for another.)
Yes, a corporation tends to seek its financial survival over and above ethical behavior. But, correspondingly, a government tends to seek the perpetuation of its power over other human beings over and above ethical behavior, which is why more-dispersed, multi-dimensional governmental structures, compared to monolithic ones (in the same sense that anarcho-capitalism might be compared to corporatism?), seem to display less focused tyranny over time -- because the number of "agents" acting to preserve their control, divided by the amount of control exerted over a given populace, is greater, so the overlap of disparate interests grabbing for the same "power pot" tends to reduce tyranny, all else being equal. (Agents include individuals holding office, the "abstraction" of political offices themselves, the organizations that are composed of, and run by, one or more officeholders, etc.)
Corporations that research our behaviors "too well" always run the risk that we may one day wake up and change our collective behavior, as we did when we stopped buying slide rules, stopped buying LPs (records), stopped buying pet rocks, etc.
The typical response of a corporation in such a situation is to try to survive by re-evaluating its offerings, repositioning itself, whatever it takes to meet our new needs and desires.
The typical response of a government in such a situation is to try to force us to go back to the old behavior, on which its (typically slower-moving) power structure has come to depend.
(Consider the different ways in which corporations vs. government have responded to the digital revolution vis-a-vis images, music, videos: a substantial percentage of corporations generally have changed, even sprung up, to enable the revolution, while a much-larger percentage, correspondingly, of governments have been at least studying, if not deploying, ways to stop it, or at least slow it down for the benefit of a few corporations -- which it interprets as the benefit of its own ability to preserve its grasp on power.)
In both cases, I suppose there's a similarity to evolutionary pressure -- specifically, both entities tend to evolve towards specialization vis-a-vis their target audience -- and it does seem as though the radiation-style adaptation displayed by corporations provides more overall stability and less imposition of wills on the populace than the more monolothic adaptation displayed by governments, which are less prone to respond to disfavorable conditions in the local area by simply relocating. (That is, a species that has generally evolved in a radiating fashion might suffer the extinction of some strains that specifically adapted to local conditions when those conditions changed, but the species overall won't necessarily die out, and in fact might be better disposed to evolve a more-adaptable form. Whereas, a species more dependent on monolithic adaptation over a similar ecosystem carries a somewhat higher risk of complete extinction as local conditions in its ecosystem change out from under it.)
Note that, aside from the somewhat-simplistic, black-and-white language I use above, it's clear to me that there's substantial overlap between corporations and governments, especially in specific instances where the entities are nearly indistinguishable.
But it therefore stands to reason that the future, which already clearly includes greater global mobility of corporate entities (due to a vastly more fluid market, thanks to improved communications technologies, among other things), will naturally include, though perhaps on a substantially delayed basis, greater global mobility of governments.
Therefore, I don't find Dysonesque predictions (advocacies?) quite so off-the-wall when I think about similar predictions made in the past. The future might not have the precise, or even recognizable, forms talked about by Dyson, but future generations might recognize a corresponding degree of fluidity in the systems of their day, compared to what we have today, when the ability of a citizen to "protect himself" from his government by merely relocating (physically or virtually) has been growing at a much lower rate than his ability to choose with whom to do business -- a rate that might soon experience the same kind of acceleration that the business-choice rate did recently.
I'm confused. I've spent my entire life trying to commit myself to the highest ideals of moral, civilized behavior I can find.
Yet I have yet to come across any requirement that, if someone says I must do X to avoid something I'd prefer to avoid, I must therefore indeed do X.
As far as I can tell, as a moral, civilized being, I am entirely within my rights to assess, for myself, whether the action being suggested/offered (X; in this case, clicking on a "remove" link) will actually serve my interests as advertised.
If I determine that it won't, or at least is less likely to do so than it is to cause other things with which I am even less satisfied, I hold myself entirely guiltless by declining the invitation to do X.
In no way do I consider myself to be even remotely "lowering" myself to their "level" by refusing to click on a link.
Note that I employ somewhat-related "moral logic" in my "rant" against chain-style email, with which not everyone agrees.
I just think that anyone who claims to respect your wishes will respect them fully, not just far enough for you to take some action they outline for you to indicate whether you agree with them, trust them, etc.
Refusing to let others set your agenda for you is not inconsistent with highly moral behavior. And carrying out any agenda set for you by even those you consider to be your moral superiors -- much less known spammers -- offers no assurance that your actions, in carrying out that agenda, will be moral and/or civilized.
So, you might think that you're demonstrating your civility by clicking on the link they offer, but I don't see how you're doing that, and they likely take it as a demonstration of your naivete and/or gullibility.
(Having discovered, after warning explicitly against it, that my wife "responded" to some illegal SPAM faxes by calling the "remove me from the list" toll-free numbers listed on those very faxes -- which resulted in her getting spam-faxed more, of course -- this is a bit of a sore spot for me these days. It's difficult to avoid resenting those who would take advantage of her innocence, though, strictly speaking, it was her gullibility of which they took advantage.)
A very wise person once said something like "Be wise as serpents, and harmless as doves", which I find helpful. Innocence doesn't necessarily imply stupidity, naivete, or gullibility; it coexists quite happily with wisdom.
How long do you give us humans?
Exactly. Ideally, the environmental movement should focus exclusively on studying the environment, learning about how it works, and educating the public, so individual citizens can decide, for themselves, how best to value it and fold that value into the way they conduct their daily activities, organize charities, governments, run corporations, and so on.
I realize the environmental movement does study, learn, and educate, but all three seem, to me, to have long been subordinated to the overall goal of taking away freedoms from individuals -- which are, in turn, themselves part of the environment, something environmentalists act as if were not the case.
If the movement would put aside its tyrannical and totalitarian aims, it would not only do a much better job of the crucial aspects of environmentalism (study, learn, and educate), it'd be much more well received by the general public, who would be less inclined to, upon hearing any pronouncement from an environmentalist, to reach for their wallet with one hand and their gun with another.
If many prominent members of the environmental movement had their way, my freedoms would not exist at all except by dint of government. (Consider the nearly-totalitarian agenda promoted by Ralph Nader, who was chosen as the "Green Party" candidate.)
But I agree, obviously, that my freedoms do not exist in a vacuum. Neither does the environment -- without mankind to defend it, it is as defenseless against external attack as mankind would be without a vigorous, healthy, diverse environment. They need each other, obviously. But by "mankind" I don't mean some kind of world government dictating the kind of car I drive -- that kind of government interference has a solid record of destroying the environment.
My impression is, that's not the case, and we should be as careful when listening to environmentalists as we are when listening to the NRA when it comes to protecting our own freedoms.
That being said, I'm not aware of specific ways in which the NRA intends to take away my freedoms, so perhaps that's not as good an example as the ACLU or, for example, NOW.
(But my impression is that elitism in any form ultimates in tyranny, so perhaps it doesn't really matter, in the long run, that the NRA is presently campaigning for my freedoms as well as their own; if left unchallenged on the bases that I've been highlighting and you've underscored as well, I believe their agenda would mutate into a tyrannical one just as did the agenda of the '60s "flower power" generation.)
And, you're right: the language used by the environmentalists doesn't make them wrong, just as, for example, the OKC bombing didn't make Timothy McVeigh "wrong" about the issues he cared about.
But people who constantly entertain the viewpoint that they are best suited to run other peoples' lives are, I believe, inherently less capable of making full use of their own minds in a rational way, so I tend to trust such people less than I trust those who restrict their rhetoric, as well as their aims, to setting positive examples for others rather than imposing their views upon them.
Let's see every American who voted for Gore or Nader in 2000 commit, and fulfill, to not drive a vehicle getting less than 35mpg by 2003, then I'll begin to take their so-called "environmentalism" seriously. (And think what they'll do to reduce global warming even if I fail to pay attention!)
Until then, environmentalists who sincerely believe some kind of global government, directed by their concerns, is necessary to protect the environment, won't impress me, in terms of their ability to govern, until they successfully drive all left-wingers (Marxists, those who campaign for "social justice" from the seat of government, however they identify themselves) from their midsts, something that is necessary if their supposedly environment-centered views are to be taken seriously by those who reject the accompanying sociopolitical dogma.
If they can't do that, they can't govern the world. Period.
In the meantime, I'll certainly concede that CO2 emissions may be harmful in the long term. But given that CO2 emissions are inherent to humans breathing, thus making quite a distinction from the example you gave of putting lead in groundwater, what exactly do you prescribe to reduce CO2 emissions? And are there any prominent environmental groups that both a) raise the warnings and b) stress that the most harmonious solution is one in which every person is informed of the warning and left maximally free to decide for themselves how best to respond, for their own, their children, and their further descendants interests?
Put another way: if human activity is seen as central to the planet's problems, how exactly can human tyranny -- specifically, a form of governance that does not otherwise exist in nature, namely, global government -- be anything other than an unnatural solution?
Since you seem to have a grasp, at least, on these very issues, I'm wondering if you know of any environmental groups that focus on them as inherently part of the equation of addressing global environmental concerns. My somewhat-shallow acquaintance with the field reinforces my perception that it's pretty much "we run global weather models, they say the earth warms, therefore we must pass global legislation curtailing the West's economic engine", without any serious attempt to model the global impact of such legislation.
IMO, such an approach is akin to the cells of the body voting to have the brain "voluntarily" lower its consumption since, after all, the brain consumes resources at a much greater rate "per-capita" (per-cell). And if the brain fails to fulfill its reduction quotas, the hands promise to choke off its blood supply until the reduction is achieved.
Smart? Hardly, yet it's both democratic and roughly parallel to what today's prominent environmental groups suggest -- a logic that, if we aren't all equal, steps must be taken to impose equality, in the name of the environment (if not Marx, "social justice", or whatever).
And that agenda gets whispered into our ears through the association of guilt with groups, as in "as humans, we're much better at destroying than creating".
I was referring to the use of the phrase "as humans", which is about as pertinent to our excess ability to destroy vs. create as the use of the phrase "as whites" is to humanity's history of slavery.
Look through the whole thread on /. and you'll see this pattern repeated quite often, generally in the following form:
When examined closely, one discovers that the first "we" refers to all of humanity, while the second focuses its effects, mainly in the form of restrictions on human activity, on the West, especially the USA.
So when someone says "as humans" in this context, what they seem to be saying is "we're a failure as a species, but if you vote for a certain elite group of leaders, we can change humanity" -- exactly the sorts of promises made in the past, leading, generally, to the murder of millions of innocents.
Instead, I choose to combat such apparent attempts to denigrate the freedom of individual humans to conduct their lives as they see fit, a tactic I find is typically intended to make a case for, essentially, totalitarian rule by any elite (including "scientific environmentalists", or whatever you want to call them).
I offer, as alternative wording, phrases like "being inhabitants of this universe, it's far easier to destroy than create; but, being humans, we're uniquely suited to render judgement on what constitutes creation in our sphere, and, therefore, we should be very careful about threatening the destruction of individual humans' property, freedom, and lives in the name of any global mission".
In summary, I find much of the language of the environmentalists itself to be inherently anti-freedom, anti-individual, and quite elitist.
So, while phrases like "as humans" aren't directly harmful, they are uttered (perhaps unwittingly) as part of a pattern of language that ultimates in celebrating the unique abilities of some humans to govern others.
Yet I find little evidence in history or in pertinent theories of social organization supporting the existence of such abilities in humans, and no evidence whatsoever that such abilities can be identified a priori by other humans.
Rather than bathe in "human guilt", perhaps you should consider what role the three laws of thermodynamics might play?
In particular, can you name any species that, examined at the equivalent level of activity, does not have greater destructive than constructive ability?
By using a coding system that provides incremental fractal-based refinement of images using ASCII strings of English-language names, such as "eye", "cat", "flesh tone", and "money shot".
So is having two items numbered `1' in your list!
You must be using Netscape or MSIE. Try lynx.
But suppose they weren't: how would they ever find out about it?
He said latest, not most. MS practices planned obsolescence in its products -- just as you finally get used to a particular bug, they go and fix it in the next product.
Another GOP lie. All Al Gore ever claimed was that he "took the initiative in creating" running away.
Isn't all German made up?
Detained and beaten for a week? I had no idea it was that bad.
I've heard horror stories about those who got on the wrong side of the IRS, but not involving beatings AFAIK.
Indeed. I've come to the tentative conclusion that simplicity in laws challenges the rule of tyrants, who generally prefer laws to be sufficiently complex that they can more easily get away with selective enforcement targeting their enemies.
In that vein, while I picked on the IRS, it's difficult for me to think of an area of federal law that is not unnecessarily and excessively complicated, and tending further in that direction (DMCA and SSSCA being examples pertinent to /.)!
Bush, take the same advice, substituting "IRS" for "INS" and dropping the last part.
Importing goods produced by University slave labor
Transferring "last mile" distribution costs to customers, taxpayers, the environment, web-browser safety, ...
This second item bears more explanation:
GNU/Linux takes from its customers. Customers "willingly" hack more to run GNU/Linux, but usually based on their hourly income ($40/hr) rather than the full amortized price of hacker uptime, which according to ACM is $135/hr.
GNU/Linux takes from taxpayers. GNU/Linux generates a lot of bandwidth but doesn't pay for the capacity to carry it. Oh, it may pay for an extra server and router in front of a website, but not for increased capacity in the several-hundred-thousand-node market area.
GNU/Linux takes from everyone in its market area. Bandwidth by its nature steals from the public good because servers on a connect-time/data basis don't pay for their negative side effects: spam, pr0n (including temperature rises due to impervious surface runoff), MP3s, increased danger to neophytes and AOL users.
GNU/Linux takes from the environment. Besides the environmental concerns due to increased bandwidth, there are two more. First, there is the runoff from its vast data farms and large IP address space (during a DDOS, this suddenly increases the data flow of intranets by several GB/s, which kills W98 boxes since they cannot tolerate dataflow changes the way Sun servers can). Second, GNU/Linux makes disposable releases. GNU/Linux builds its large releases to last seven months, then leaves them as vacant blighted DVDs as they move to even bigger releases.
When it comes to GNU/Linux, "efficiency" means "theft" -- not the sort of efficiency that Wal-Mart should associate itself with.
No, that's the access of evil.
The axis of evil started out as the States of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.
Last week, after meeting with the Canadian Prime Minister, Bush added French Skating Judges to the list.
Meanwhile, there's a figure skater from North Korea who threatens to win Gold Thursday night, because she's the only one who can perform the dreaded Quadruple Axel of Evil.
(How soon they forget!!)
"Lignux" was the original name RMS used in his campaign to head off the renaming of the entire GNU OS to "Linux" in the popular imagination.
IIRC, it first appeared in a GNU EMACS tarball for a new dot-revision or something.
When you unpacked it and ran ./configure, you'd see, instead of "linux", the OS identified as "lignux"...
Somewhere in there you completely skipped over the degree to which either organization's goals are, actually, "in the right".
I.e. you went right from "I don't think US interests aren't good" to "it's a given that the US believes it is right, and that Al Queda believes it is right" [emphases changed], to jumping directly to an abstract statement of what the respective governments do to project their interests.
In that sense, you can't possibly have "completed" any "picture of similarity". Billy and Marsha both believed they were "in the right", and they both demonstrate they would achieve goals they decided were critical by any means necessary; that hardly "completes the picture of similarity", unless, by that, you mean "consists of all that is similar, the rest being potentially quite different, morally speaking". (Is that what you meant? Doesn't seem like it on the one hand, where you seem to jump from "completes a picture of similarity" to "therefore, they're morally equivalent"; on the other hand, you seem logical enough to understand that a "picture of similarity", even if complete, must be taken into account along with a correspondingly complete "picture of dissimilarity", to which you seem to have paid little attention in this thread, before any judgement on relative morality can possibly be made.)
I claim that anyone who can't make a moral assessment between US interests, as they are generally perceived (promoting individual liberty, freedom of choice, freedom of religion, free trade, etc.), and Al Queda interests (imposing Islam, destroying Israel, the USA, etc.), is not fit to make precise moral judgements regarding the willingness of the respective militaries to project force, the means by which the respective governments operate, and so on.
(And, yes, obviously US interests include "defending the US government and citizens by any means necessary", but that pretty much merely cancels the equivalent interests in Al Queda, that is, to defend its system of human organization and the humans that make it up against external attack. Here, I've canceled out all claims to morality, external goals for the respective organizations, etc., focusing on the pure, unadulterated need for any body or system to defend its content as well as its structure.)
What is clear is that Al Queda would consider failure to murder noncombatants a failure of their overall mission, while the USA has long considered that not to be an indication of the failure of any mission. (Would WWII USA have mourned had it discovered, upon dropping two nukes, that all noncombatants miraculously survived, even though all military/industrial stuff was knocked down? Probably not. But even Chinese journalists visiting the USA on 2001-09-11 cheered when seeing the trade towers collapse, because, like Al Queda, they knew failure to murder noncombatants would be failure to hurt America, hence the choice of office hours to deliver the jets, rather than using a red-eye getting into the area around 5am. That is, I believe the Chinese journalists, and especially Al Queda, were happier that it started at 9am, because more noncombatants would be killed. That the US trades with China and tolerates Cuba, rather than going all-out to destroy their US-hating governments, IMO testifies to a moral sense that is superior to most nations, even though, to me, it borders, at times, on the nearly-suicidal.)
That's a big reason why the US has been so keen on developing precision-guided munitions that can take out military targets without necessarily wiping out neighboring civilian populations. The US could simply not bother, instead using tactical nukes and thermonukes. So, it incurs substantial costs to research, develop, produce, and deploy more-precise munitions, missiles "famous" for being able to take out a reinforced military target while not touching the occupied school or hospital 1/4 mile away, as rough examples.
(Think of how easy it would be, even avoiding the nuke issue, to simply drop daisy-cutter-type bombs anyplace where the US presently might use a precision missile. The daisy cutters are used, of course; in places where the military is sufficiently convinced they're necessary to achieve an objective and there'll be low likelihood of large loss of civilian life, though maybe some loss of friendly combatants, as it -- sadly -- turns out.)
Whereas Al Queda, to achieve its much-less-moral objectives, looks to murder maximum numbers of civilians, despite the fact that doing so will clearly not give it any more security, safety, or room for maneuvering than targeting solely military (and related industry) targets.
In fact, I can recall a CNN (or Headlines News, same thing) report that started out something like this, a couple of months back: "The Bush Administration got bad news in the war effort today, where it has been claimed that a bomb went astray and hit a hospital containing Afghan civilians. It's been a similarly bad day for Al Queda, as it's been confirmed that their #2 leader was killed."
"Similarly bad"?? That might not be an exact quote, but I believe it's a faithful rendition of what the CNN commentator said.
Now, while I believe CNN is happy to downplay Bush(R) successes vis-a-vis an enemy, this illustrates the fact that US citizens are in fact perceived, by CNN, as considering our accidentally killing noncombatants as about as bad for our Commander-in-Chief as our killing our enemy's #2 man is for them.
I mean, how could killing a bunch of Afghan civilians be "bad news" for Bush if it wasn't for the fact that we're not about winning "by any means necessary" in the way you appear to mean -- with nearly-complete disregard for the lives of noncombatants?
Let me tell you, if Al Queda managed to kill Dick Cheney, that wouldn't run, as a story on Al Jazeera TV, on an equal basis to them accidentally killing an American journalist: "Bad news for Al Queda, they accidentally killed an American journalist; similarly bad news for America, Al Queda killed their Vice President". That sort of report would be inconceivable anywhere in all of Islam, China, and many other corners of the world, I'm pretty sure.
(Still sticking to your moral equivalence claim?)
And, another of my original points stands: you are still alive, despite our having this discussion. You would not be alive, being in Al Queda (or Taliban) territory, having the same kind of discussion. (So much for the Ashcroft Threat you've talked about, eh?)
Not only does this upset your moral-equivalency apple cart, it illustrates the fact that your preaching is fundamentally about discouraging America from defending herself, since it won't have anything but a positive effect on Al Queda and its friends. (I don't care that you claim to ultimately agree with the need to go to war -- your agreement with that decision is, relative to your other talk, insignificant, so the weight of your verbeage is, as far as I can see, to demonize America.)
In other words, you're little different from the townsfolk who trash Marsha over the years to favor Tina's interests in enslaving the population, ultimating in the needless murder of Marsha. That you might say, in private, "oh, hey, I happen to agree Marsha needed to act" does not get you off the hook for the effects your voluminous preaching in the other direction has had.
Right, it might not have seemed necessary, but the devastation of it was sufficient to convince Americans, believing in the importance of morality, to not have to use nukes again, despite plenty of opportunities to do so -- opportunities sufficiently tempting that few people doubt they would have been used, had the population been at the moral level of pre-WWII Germany or Japan, or present-day Al Queda.
(Keep in mind, American inattention to the national stage is clearly what typical prompts the more severe wars in which the US inflicts significant casualties. While that may seem to draw attention to Democratic presidents -- FDR, JFK, LBJ, and Clinton come to mind, allowing for realities regarding genuine opportunity to do things better -- it also happened to George H.W. Bush, whose ambassador to Iraq, I think it was, managed to completely confuse the issue and convince Iraq the US wouldn't mind much if it invaded Kuwait. The issue is not so much Democratic Presidents, though I do believe we have enough evidence that "character counts" to dispense with continuing that argument any longer; it's with a population that too-often decides to distract its government, asking for candy and other handouts, when it should be encouraged to simply keep its eye on the road and firm hand on the wheel, leaving the entertaining of children to others. To wit: the US government should simply defend our national interests, our "homeland", secure the rule of law within it, and maybe ensure a reasonably stable national currency; we, the citizens, can take care of the rest -- education, the handouts, the environmental issues, preventing drug use, encouraging abstinence, and so on. Heck, read Biden's speech on 2001-09-10 to get an idea of just how chillingly inalert our Congressional leaders were to the threat of exactly what happened within 24 hours -- a threat of which we were not entirely unaware, when you take into account all sort of credible sources and prior, published events, that simply didn't get enough attention in an overly-busy, busybody government.)
And, of course, the American public had little general awareness, or input into, nuking Japan at that time. It had put into place a military that was generally morally superior (compare treatment of POWs in USA vs. Japan as just one example), if not militarily superior, but wasn't permitted, for obvious reasons, fine-grained control over things like the Manhattan project.
Having survived WWII, Americans had, and took, the opportunity to learn and practice an improved (if only slightly) morality.
Having been defeated in WWII, the surviving Japanese were, basically, forced to better approximate Western-style morality, ultimately competing quite strongly with the US on economic terms (remember the "Japan is taking over the US" scares of the '80s, which we solved by fine-tuning our economy, not dropping more nukes on them?). For example, the Japanese are much better at following international rule of law than they were back in the '30s, I'd guess.
The upshot: the winner being morally superior in the first place, and helping rebuild the loser according to an improved moral code, the world because a substantially safer and more moral place.
That might have happened had the nukes not been dropped, but we'll never know, and if Japan had won, or the situation stalemated, the opportunities for moral progress might have been severely depleted or lost.
Now, do you know of any Al Queda people who are advocating a sort of Marshall Plan for the NYC Trade Towers, the way so many people in the West, immediately after 09-11, started talking about the importance of "rebuilding Afghanistan after the war", as we did Japan and Germany, even though no attacks on Afghanistan had yet even been made in response to 09-11?
"Moral equivalence", you say?
You don't mention the other important point: we leave it to the proxy to decide how, and whether, to fight. We left it up to Iraqis to decide whether and how to topple Hussein; they failed to do so, yet we haven't nuked Baghdad.
The wonderful thing about this kind of "proxy battle" is that it allows us to tolerate failures to achieve our missions, because, by using proxies, we've already basically agreed it isn't important enough for a "DIY" approach.
Of course, most other substantial nations and belief-systems use proxies as well, so I hardly see it as a count against American morality anyway.
In a sense, the USA has allowed itself to be used as a proxy for international organizations such as the UN and NATO. I don't consider this to be prima fascia evidence of immorality on the part of those organizations. It isn't clear to me why you do.
I do see reasons to avoid the use of proxies. As examples, doing so implies lower visibility regarding the viability of the conflict, less control of the moral quality of the conflict, and so on, some of which you seem to care highly about.
But it isn't the job of the US to ensure that any enemy that an enemy of ours faces will meet our own moral code. We can try to help that happen, and we can (and sometimes do) help bring people up on charges who violate it afterwards.
Ultimately, though, war is hell, and the existence of the US military as well as our ability to form coalitions, use proxies, and so on, without being willing, certainly without being able, to guarantee a certain moral quality to "our" side, probably contributes more to a moral world than an immoral one.
And there are serious problems with not using proxies -- especially local, self-interested combatants -- in certain situations. Certain cultures do not appreciate being helped out very much (most of Islam fits this description, apparently), especially after their desires are fulfilled. Giving them a strong role in bringing about victory is important, as is ensuring they really want victory, and set reasonable conditions for it, by having them fight for it, meaning they, not some alien force (the US military), must bear the brunt of fulfilling their desires.
So while I accept that there are moral considerations to be made when it comes to the use of proxies, I do not see that it is immoral, or moral, by using them per se.
(Clearly, if we undertook as many military campaigns without proxies as we presently do both with and without them, we'd have to be a significantly stronger occupying nation, literally expansionist, throughout the world. So arguing for disuse of proxies amounts to arguing to not going to war in certain circumstances, without regard to issues of national security -- e.g. survivability.)
Just as we were the tools by which they exercised theirs.
(And, of course, Congressional Democrats, Soviet Communists, and Central American Communists happily used each other as tools, proxies, and so on. You say "they were starting to show communist tendencies", a half-truth very typical of leftists; that was hardly spontaneous.)
Indeed, that's behavior of highly questionable morality (I'd say it was, on its own, somewhat immoral, since it went against the rule of law, such as it was, in the pertinent branches of US government).
But, it was done in counterpoint to similarly questionable behavior (again, frankly, immoral) on the part of Communists and Congressional Democrats at the time. The things Congressional Democrats wrote to each other, to newspapers, to Ortega, and so on, are hilarious, yet frightening in context, to read. Kinda like reading what Lenin, who is generally (and incorrectly) not regarded as a willing mass-murderer, said and wrote -- when you consider the impact on the ground of what is being written, promoted, and projected, it's quite chilling.
Remember, these are many of the same people who later called the bursting-in of INS agents, who pointed assault weapons at innocent, poor, right-wing Christians, including little Elian Gonzalez, and removed him from his family's house at 5am, without any court order having been made forcing the executive branch to do that, a "rescue". Right, a "rescue". From what? Hmm, whatever required him to be "rescued" like that didn't end up in any charges against his family that I'm aware of, so why the gunplay?
I've learned to read between the lines. When the media uses a word like "rescue", it often means "this is something we like", and when it says "assault", it often means "this is something we don't like", even though the thing itself could be fundamentally the same. You've used this tactic occasionally yourself in this thread ("near Billy" vs. "Marsha burst in"), so you know what I mean.
So, when you read letters of support to Daniel Ortega, and find out just what he was doing that they were supporting, and what that meant to people striving to preserve their individual rights and freedom, you'll understand why I don't exactly see Reagan (and the Executive Branch under his "command") as the "bad guy" compared to all that was going on at the time.
(That doesn't let the USA off the hook, since there was some seriously bad stuff going on at the behest, even applause, of many elected to Congress.)
Why you choose to stop your research and/or "testimony" here exactly at that point that you're able to indict the USA, especially Republican leaders, as sharing responsibility to evils committed by others, rather than explore further to understand who and what might, in a similar fashion, share responsibility for those evils, is something you might wish to address.
Yep, more immorality, of the sort hidden from the public compared to the fairly open, yet immoral, behavior of the other side of the aisle -- which, by the way, was, at the time, generally more favorable to widespread use of drugs to "have a good time", in that an inner-city youth born into a Republican family and embracing Republican policies would perhaps have been less likely to take up smoking crack than his friends.
(Just like the complaints a few years back that "crack cocaine use gets higher penalties than regular cocaine, which means the law is racist", which turned out to really be a case of inner-city legislators getting the stiff sentences and low tolerance they had asked for in the first place, when the crack epidemic started spiraling out of control. Why didn't they insist on similar treatment of regular cocaine? Because, apparently, it wasn't in their local interest at the time, which is quite understandable.)
Morally superior to what, since we've both been talking about equations, rather than some kind of ideal standard? The Soviet Communist government?
Where would you rather have been a "political prisoner" during the '60s, '70s, or '80s -- the USA, or the USSR?
Look at the clearest examples of free vs. Communist splits that we had at the time, in terms of treatment of political prisoners, economic progress, and so on: East vs. West Germany; North vs. South Korea; China vs. Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Is it any wonder why some might decide it's worth breaking a few eggs to make an omelette, given that the enemy has a policy of eradicating chickens once they're in power?
Clearly we weren't doing whatever it takes back then, since we could have done so much more, if we didn't give jack squat about civilians, noncombatants, etc.
And, clearly, a fair number (probably not enough) have been left with a bad taste in their mouth over that whole shady episode to reign in the CIA since then. That's moral improvement in action.
(Some might say it was reigned in "too much", leading to 2001-09-11. I sure don't know. I prefer morality to reign, of course, but am not so swift to condemn those who sacrifice their own morality to preserve my freedom and/or life down the road.)
Yup, it was pretty bad all around, though at least it had the "moral excuse" of protecting US interests, not just in the narrow sense of protecting national security, but in the larger sense of projecting forcibly the idea that individuals should have the freedom to choose their own jobs, set their own wages, trade with whomever they choose, and so on.
All sorts of similar rampant concealment and manipulation of information was hardly a thing of the past by 1993, though: public reaction was clearly manipulated in response to the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, an episode that didn't involve the protection of any credible national or moral interest, despite all sorts of claims (e.g. of Executive Privilege) to the contrary -- a torturing of the law that would have been better deployed in the taking, rather than refusing, of various reported opportunities to "get" Usama bin Laden before 09-11.
So, while I might not react as strongly as you to the Iran/Contra affair, I agree with the general thrust that a government organization, even the USA's, cannot be trusted to have a general "sense of goodness".
Again, another moral failing of our government, and our nation's people clearly have lurched hither and yon in response to that sort of thing (Somalia being basically a media-inspired debacle, for example).
But we could have done much worse, but didn't, because humanitarian reasons were not "so much crap", they were just weighted, sometimes too lightly, in the scale with other things we considered important at the time. (You talk about arming Iraq against Iran as if that situation existed in a vacuum. It didn't. Who was USSR's proxy in the Middle East at the time? Yet you focus on our connection with Iraq. I can't think offhand of a mess the US has gotten into recently that doesn't have earlier roots in Communist oppression, though I'm sure there must be a few. If you haven't read "The Black Book of Communism", you probably should; from what I've read about it, it brings to light many important realities of 20th Century politics, and it wasn't written by a bunch of right-wing wackos, either.)
We try to do the right thing, but as a superpower of 250 million people still not fully interconnected, and a mass media that was (especially then) pretty much committed to one particular political ideology, it's understandable, to me anyway, why "the right thing" wasn't done in every single instance.
On the whole, though, of the few nations that have proven willing and able to project power to defend internationally moral concepts, I can't think of one offhand that is more moral, throughout comparable history, than the USA.
And "projecting power" is an important component to me. Given a hypothetical situation where I'm in a world with 100 other people, and I can conduct myself such that I'll either have 97 friends and 3 enemies, or 97 enemies and 3 friends, I'd choose the former, all else being equal.
But, often, all else is not equal. If, in that scenario, I know that the 97 friends I might have are unwilling to take risks to defend me against my 3 enemies, who are very vigorous in projecting their power, then I'd be a fool to choose that option, since I'd surely end up dead.
Instead, I'd choose to make those 3 friends, knowing they'd be much better at defending me against 97 "morally lazy" enemies, who'll do little more than resent me and talk about me behind my back. My odds of surviving are simply higher in that scenario.
So popular (or "democratic") politics isn't my bag, practical politics being much more interesting to me.
Which is why, on a practical level, I don't care a whole lot whether the USA is morally perfect, since I know it'll do a much better job protecting me than Al Queda, while imposing so much less on me than Al Queda or even, say, the European Union or China might.
What about it indeed? I agree with you almost wholeheartedly.
First of all, though, "never again" is, to my knowledge, not a statement taken by our government, much less our military, regarding genocide. Maybe I'm missing something?
(Okay, maybe Clinton, panderer that he was and is, joined that call as President? But if he did, who really took him seriously -- given that he wasn't exactly advocating beefing up the US military sufficiently to take on any threat of genocide occurring anywhere in the world anytime in the future? Remember, Clinton got elected, in 1992, on a platform that included, as a fundamental component, the idea that "it's the economy, stupid" and that George H. W. Bush had attended too much to international matters.)
My recollection of "never again", as a phrase, is that it pertains more to the notion that moral people, especially of the Judeo-Christian tradition, should never again remain silent in the face of genocide, as happened in WWII.
I'm unaware of any significant commitment to act, militarily, in its face. Seems to be something the UN, not the US, would commit to, anyway, but I wouldn't bet my life on the UN even if it did so commit.
Second, I find the "never again" philosophy to be one of the things that favors my argument for moral superiority of the USA over Al Queda (or most any other predominantly Muslim nation), because it courses through our culture far more than it does through Islam, which seems to have, on its side, "destroy Israel" and "America is Satan" to roughly the same degree of combination of breadth (in population) and depth (of effect on government policies).
In short: AMERICA and THE WEST: "NEVER AGAIN"; AL QUEDA and ISLAMIC ARABIA: "ANYTIME NOW". An exaggeration in both cases, of course.
But the events in Rwanda and Bosnia weren't exactly precipitated by us -- certainly not to the degree you seem to imply by interpreting our "intent" in those situations. Why hold the US to a standard that, basically, no other nations chose to meet at that time -- nations that could just as easily, or even more easily (due to being closer), could have met?
Meanwhile, the US has good reason to focus on doing the Big Things that it, and only it, can do, as it did in resisting the expansionist, evil empire called the USSR. Becoming a busybody and interfering in every backwater where "bad things are happening", something we've tried here and there, seems to sew little but resentment, and rarely actually improves things substantially enough to have made the exercise worthwhile. (Which is part of why I think Bush, rather than Gore, was elected; many people assumed Gore would continue the kind of big-picture-avoiding, photo-op-preferring "military actions" that characterized the Clinton era, with little in the way of real, long-term victories to point to.)
Exactly what things do we, the USA, do, comparable to torturing people for being Christians, as has recently been done not only in China, but in Cuba?
But, really, I agree "by any means necessary" is a phrase that could be borrowed -- except, for my part, from the handbook of those willing to overlook any human-rights violation when its committed by regimes considered "commie-friendly", like Castro's.
Really, when I look at the numbers of innocents murdered, I don't get nearly as concerned about right-wing despots (numbers typically reach no higher than the thousands) as left-wing ones (where we're talking millions of murdered). The latter get a pass in the mass media, and get little in the way of the cold, hard looks about how they actually conduct themselves compared to the former.
In fact, the Left has shown itself to be highly skilled at pursuing a strategy of focusing public and press attention on the gnats of right-wing tyranny precisely so it can distract people from the camels of left-wing tyranny. Not a surprising choice for an amoral orthodoxy, since one of the alternatives would be to commit to a course of truly and thoroughly apologizing for having served as apologists for left-wing despots throughout the 20th Century, apology they seem to have generally chosen to continue, to the extent they speak of those sins at all.
Ensuring that any connection between a major evil and a right-wing idea or person is stressed, while the connection to a left-wing idea is ignored (e.g. how many times, when the media talks about the internment of American Japanese during WWII, do they mention FDR?); and actively seeking to shut down, or at least disrupt, the ability of right-wing media outlets to continue their work, while claiming about "free speech" to protect whatever they might say through theirs; these also are well-documented tactics of the Left.
(That might explain why, apparently, right-wing US political organizations were audited by the Clinton-era IRS at a much higher rate than left-wing ones. "By any means necessary" indeed. But the media didn't generally pick up on it, it seems.)
But, my semi-depression at how gullible America seemed, or how willing it seemed to tolerate open, plain evil as the Clinton era unfolded, has given away to the realization that America is showing signs it has learned from that debacle, is willing to continue learning, and is willing to act on that knowledge.
(E.g. consider the change in attitude towards individual responsibility for one's own security: we've gone from a pro-gun-control culture so strong we basically applauded the Waco tragedy, to passengers on airlines personally risking themselves to subdue suspected terrorists, rather than just passively waiting for Big Daddy Government to do all the nasty stuff for them.)
And as much as you seem to think your concerns about Iran-Contra and other right-wing debacles is so unique, I promise you there are lots of people -- left-wing and right -- who have also been deeply concerned, who have made individual accountability and willingness to take responsibility higher priorities in assessing the character of potential leaders, etc.
So I believe both those ends of the issues illustrate moral progress on the part of the populace.
(You never seem to acknowledge the importance of allowing for some reasonable rate of moral growth on the part of a person, or at least a nation. Is that assessment correct? If so, do you really believe a person or nation, having committed any evil, must therefore be destroyed, that forgiveness is not a factor in a valid system of morality? By whom is this judgement to be delivered, without them, in turn, becoming evil and thus requiring destruction, may I ask? What is your judicial philosophy regarding these issues?)
But, just as we learn how to deal with the past, new challenges come up (like 09-11), testing our ability to more rapidly respond in more practical, yet also more moral, ways.
(It's hardly a straight, or even consistently upward, line, but the trend has been, over the last 15 years or so, generally upward, in the areas I believe I can assess reasonably well. I consider some well-known conservative authors, writing about moral decay in our society, to be somewhat behind the curve, though still helpful in alerting us to potential moral dangers.)
Again, here you seem to morally equate "what I want", as if what the average American wants is morally equivalent to what the average Al Queda wants. Is that correct? So, if I'm a typical American, and want you to flourish and find your own way, as long as you don't tread on my freedoms; and a typical Al Queda wants you to convert to Islam and recognize him as your leader; then, in your view, these two "wants" are "morally equivalent"?
Are you saying that if the US military was in the hands of Islamic extremists, instead of being in the hands of a predominantly Judeo-Christian population, it'd behave identically to Al Queda? If so, what do you mean by that -- that it'd still confine itself to taking down office buildings, or that it'd use nukes to blackmail the US into adopting Islam, after perhaps nuking a US city or two?
Guess I still can't figure out what you're saying, since I don't accept your apparent premise that governments have any morality, even as an attribute, absent the populations that you apparently dismiss, for purposes of your equation, as "political reality".
Maybe you should define what you mean as "government", with what you call "political realities" and "public response" removed.
So, please tell me, what exactly keeps the George Bush, who you presumably believe is morally equivalent to Usama bin Laden, from simply nuking Baghdad tomorrow? He could clearly do it, and he doesn't seem to care about being President enough to be concerned with possible impeachment afterwards. He's already targeted by assassins, obviously, and the USA is too committed to the rule of law to try and convict him as a criminal, since he'd be acting in his role as President. Plus, just like you and I believe Clinton did, he could quite easily gin up a wag-the-dog scenario sufficient to convince Americans that he probably had a good-enough reason to nuke the place, such that we can't treat him as a war criminal.
(My answer is that it comes from his innate moral code, which includes the idea that even Iraqi citizens who gather in the streets to shout "America is Satan", "Kill Bush", or whatever, deserve to live, and that his responsibility as President includes representing that same kind of morality as expressed by the citizens who elected him. I think he was very sincere when, nearly in tears, he said "I'm a loving guy, but I have a job to do", shortly after 09-11, and that he represented a more moral choice than Mr. "I did not have sex with that woman" or Mr. "No controlling legal authority", though I recognize that more Americans actually voted for the latter over Bush in 2000, an example of our system of governance -- election law -- overriding pure democracy, with, IMO, a slightly more moral outcome on the whole, though not through any morality inherent in the system that I'm aware of.)
But your viewpoint is, in my opinion, simply inadequate to make such assessments, given how thoroughly you're willing to explore the excuses for one side while being unwilling to explore the same issues to the corresponding depth for the other. I'm not sure whose vewpoint is adequate to make such assessments, offhand. Complexity being the tough nut we're really trying to crack here, it seems to me the situation, especially to the depth you seem willing to explore it at any point, is vastly more complex than a single person can comprehend sufficiently to render final moral judgements.
I think your analysis of events is, event by event, fine. I think it's clear you can't manage the Big Picture -- you've had plenty of trouble managing just this discussion without losing your cookies, so to speak! And I think it's incredibly difficult for any one to manage that Big Picture, which is why we have branches of government, individual offices, rules of law, a huge array of conflicting moral codes, and so on, instead of One World King who simply orders everyone around.
Again, until you've thoroughly put into practice what you claim to believe, and do so long enough for it to become virtually habitual (a worthwhile exercise, I promise you), until you can see how easy or hard it is to live life according to your own moral code while facing the dangers of living a "normal life" that parallels what the US government has to deal with in the world, you really have little basis on which to judge that government, though you can (and perhaps should) assess individual actions on a case-by-case basis.
Another point: the US government, being of the people, is evolving morally, probably more swiftly than you are at times. By the time you think you've figured out how it'd respond to a situation, it has probably changed enough to respond differently.
(E.g. did you predict that Bush would decide to treat Taliban prisoners at Gitmo under the Geneva Convention, as distinguished from how he'd treat Al Queda? Based on your moral-equivalency argument, I find it hard to believe you'd have predicted that, since Al Queda has a proven record of treating prisoners, not to mention its own people when they consider surrendering to the US, vastly worse than anyone has been treated at Gitmo in decades.)
I don't think you should draw any moral conclusions from that belief. Actually, I proposed a radically different, much more peaceful, yet practical, solution, but nobody (except my wife) cared about it, which kinda surprised me. But, yeah, I too couldn't see that the US government could continue to sit idly by and let Al Queda have free reign in Afghanistan and elsewhere, which would clearly ultimate in taking possession of nuclear missiles down the road; that would have been an abrogation of its collective "office", something Americans are, IMO, not yet morally prepared to accept in a positive way.
In the story of David v. Goliath, it's notable that David's response to having had the typical soldier's army put on is to take it off, saying "I haven't proved this works for me; I've proven that God will deliver me from the bear and the lion", because that suggests the need to prove one's own morality -- one's own reliance on God, or the law of nature, whatever it's called -- in one's own life experiences, before trying to transfer it to larger-scale venues involving millions of people.
It's also notable that he didn't then turn around and tell all his fellow soldiers that they, too, must take off their armour and "trust in God". Perhaps his simple humility prevented him? Perhaps he understood that they trusted in armour, and would be better served by his simply demonstrating the effectiveness of his comparatively-simple reliance on God than by ordering them about as his moral inferiors?
Similarly, Christ Jesus' parable of the one, five, and ten "talents" suggests the importance of being faithful to the simple, even trivial, things in one's life, before being fit to take on the larger-scale issues.
I've been striving (with some interesting challenges along the way) to put into practice my own morality -- which probably doesn't differ significantly from yours -- in the direct areas of my life, rather than focus as much as I used to on contributing to human organizations like churches and governments in the belief that they will deliver me from the "paw of the bear and the lion" and faithfully forward my morality on my behalf.
As I learn and demonstrate what does and doesn't work, I become more willing to "extend my tent", but remain humbly grateful for those who, while sometimes acting in the short-term against what I consider the strictly correct moral code, nevertheless enable me, as a living, breathing human being striving to be moral, to continue breathing, by defending my freedoms and rights to do so.
What a mean thing to say about someone's mother! ("Invention", y'see. ;-)
Generally, in forums where scientific-sounding assertions are made, e.g. yours of moral equivalence, the burden of providing evidence falls upon the one making the assertion.
And it strikes me as rather amazing that someone would assume that I must be ignorant of events of the sort you describe above, simply because we've come to different conclusions regarding the morality of an entire nation. Do you really believe I'm either under 25 years old, or that I was in a cave throughout the 1980s? The things you describe above were widely reported by the mass media, including live broadcasts of Congressional hearings. And while I haven't consistently sought out such information throughout my adult life, I read (aloud, as it happens) the book containing Nixon's secretly-recorded tapes shortly after it was published in the mid-1970s.
In fact, it occurs to me that you might yourself be so young that you don't realize most Republicans over about, say, 35 years old are highly unlikely to assume anything their party, or its leaders, do must be "right". "We" went through the Nixon thing, we dealt with it, we didn't devote massive amounts of PR, money, and energy defending it, distracting people from it, and so on, over a large period of time -- certainly nothing like what went on, and continues to go on, to defend Clinton on the Democratic side.
And maybe the fact that we're pretty clear-headed about the evils committed against the rule of law, separation of branches of government, and so on, even though they occurred under a Republican president, makes us more able to honestly and fairly assess what went on under Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and go on under Bush, without getting quite so caught up in political orthodoxy, which, on the other hand, seems to be a requirement for being a Democrat wishing to be widely regarded as supportive of the party, either in the party or in the media.
But telling me I'm ignorant of history was a silly thing anyway, since you, too, are ignorant of history -- even recent -- and actions taken by your country.
I can say that because it's obvious that nobody can possibly not be ignorant of such things, to some degree, even in a comparatively open society like ours (never mind the things done in a closed society like the USSR, things which factored greatly in what the US government did from the 1940s through the 1990s).
Any moral code can only be worthwhile and practical if it takes the reality of ever-incompete knowledge into account.
That's why I found it so annoying that you'd constantly introduce a trickle of you-forgot-to-consider-this-type factoids into what started out as a discussion of a pretty straightforward moral equation.
If your moral code was at all useful, you'd be able to confidently make hypothetical judgements about hypothetical situations without having to first complicate things. Your insistence on providing backstories, dredging up history recent and ancient, suggests not that you are more knowledgeable about the pertinent moral facts so much as that your morality depends on perfect, objective knowledge, or at least that your moral code includes the notion that your moral judgement is superior to someone else's merely because you possess more facts about a situation.
(This is a repeating theme in the left-vs.-right debates: "She got pregnant out of wedlock, that's wrong." "But she's from a poor family." "It's still wrong." "But she's in charge of her own body." "Still wrong." "She had a lot of peer pressure to deal with, you know." "Still wrong." "Her boyfriend kept pressuring her." "Still wrong." "Condoms aren't readily available to her." "Still wrong." "Marriage is a patriarchical straitjacket for women." "Still wrong." "Society should care for her and her baby." "Still wrong." The Left tends to provide a neverending stream of "factoids", which I find stem from the chaotic, almost fractal, nature of life, in which, indeed, nothing is ever black or white; but, to the Left, off-white can be blacker than jet black and vice versa, as long as you finally agree that they, not any objective moral code, make the judgements, by first granting it the right to guide which factoids are worth introducing, second granting it the right to decide their weight in the equation, and third granting it the right to choose the equation and change it anytime they want. Meanwhile, "Still wrong" is more likely to personally attend to the immediate moral needs of mother and child, while excuse-maker, really interested only in pushing the socialism agenda, moves on to the next political hot-button topic; her compassion plays out largely by taxing the rich and doling it out to those she favors, like the unwed mother, who would then raise chidren less able to secure and maintain moral households for their children, as history has shown.)
And the fact that you willfully introduce factoids that solely support your position without admitting that there might be more to know (and, frankly, there always is), means I simply can't trust you to present the truth, even in cases where you in fact know it, but find it unsupportive of your rhetoric at the time.
Further, the more weight you give to obscure or ancient details, the more you have to recognize that, since you don't know all such details, any conclusions you come to are invalid. Again, that reflects the increased chaos of the analysis you embrace: if you instead agree to restrict yourself to here-and-now, black-and-white-type issues, you can come to more reasonable conclusions, logically speaking.
(The trick is having a filter that's correct enough to make up for the loss of detailed information; the Right tends to oversimplify for its own sake, in effect tossing the baby out with the bathwater in too many cases, e.g. in the War on Drugs, which has moral underpinnings, but which I think may be oversimplified, on the whole, to the point of immorality.)
I'll pass on that, until and unless somebody whose commitment to presenting the truth, to approximating objective reality, tells me it's worth reading. I've learned the futility of trying to "know it all" myself, which, obviously, means I've had to become humble about pronouncing moral equivalency of democratic republics like the USA and terrorist organizations like Al Queda.
It's easier to deal with in a single post than in several, so I think this is an improvement.
Okay, so we went from you implying the US had sole responsibility to merely sharing in responsibility, and though I agree that might not "reduce our role" in the strict sense, your original point vis-a-vis Marsha was that she did immoral things unilaterally and therefore deserved to suffer at the hands of Billy with no help from the townsfolk who you now appear to agree also bore responsibility for those things. (I believe the phrase you used was "without asking anyone else if they minded".)
Why couldn't the townsfolk just take responsibility for their own "immoral" decision and set it right, with or without Marsha's approval? Because they themselves are moral idiots, based on the story as you extended it: they murder Marsha down the road, for doing what they themselves could and should have done all along, but didn't because, supposedly, they were too "moral" to commit violence, even against a known felon. I.e. they murder a flawed hero because they couldn't bring themselves to stop a criminal.
With plenty of other nations, engaging in what's generally known as "the rule of law" with regard to international politics. A rule of law that, by the way, is crucial for any group to follow if it wishes to obtain international recognition as a nation-state.
An entity that willingly attacks a nation like the USA for participating in a legal decision it doesn't like is one that is, for all intents and purposes, attacking the rule of law itself -- hardly an astonishing thing to say about Palestinians, given the history of the rulers they choose for themselves, but, in this climate of nearly completely moral idiocy among global leadership, that's something that almost never seems to come up as a crucial distinction between Israel and Palestine (the former sometimes, as almost everyone does once in a while, disobeying the rule of law, the latter actually attacking its legitimacy and force at its roots and trunk).
As an illustration of this principle in operation here in the USA, we have plenty of people who disobey laws by stealing, lying, murdering, and so on, and we have a system of the rule of law that, accordingly, tries and sentences them.
But that system treats, in a severe way compared to a simplistic look at the "crime", those who attack the rule of law itself as a sort of "uber-criminal", and even treats people "badly" simply because they are considered, for the time being, a crucial part of the system.
For example, our justice systems often imprisons people precisely because they are considered, or hoped to be, fairly innocent -- decent, honest, fair, etc.
Who are these imprisoned people? Sequestered juries, important witnesses needing protection, and so on. They're considered crucial to the internal operation of the system, so they're actually treated worse than external actors of the same evident "moral status" (vis-a-vis threat or benefit to the system). Similarly, some people are treated better (e.g. judges), given privileges that they wouldn't have elsewhere despite doing similar jobs, because they happen to be internal to the system, and it's extremely difficult to construct a working system of any sort that treats its innards and external entities under the same objective rules.
And, while a Bill Clinton can get away with lying to a grand jury, let someone on a grand (or regular) jury act in a similarly "trivial" way -- e.g. have sex with a fellow juror and then lie about it -- the penalty can be far worse than a minor financial hit and the suspension of one's law license.
To someone who insists on some kind of cosmic, or objective, fairness in life, this seems perverted. Why should decent American citizens be imprisoned and prosecuted more severely as jurors and witnesses than the criminals the system is trying?
The answer lies in the fact, as you highlighted yourself, that the objective viewpoint is unavailable in any specific instance; that the system of the rule of law is, itself, a body that, like all other bodies of that general type (from single-cells creatures to governments to bodies of thought), must carefully distinguish between, and thus have somewhat different ("unfair") rules for, external and internal entities; and so on.
Though Israel perhaps cannot be counted on to go along with every single UN vote or meeting, it is far more supportive, in terms of how its elected leaders operate, of the concept of international rule of law than Palestinians -- it might disagree with a decision, but it is unlikely to take down the UN building in NYC to make its point, or kill a bunch of Saudi Arabian athletes in the Olympics, or send suicide bombers to kill as many innocent men, women, and children of the Islam and Christian faiths as possible. (From what I understand, this is the result of moral growth on the part of Israel -- that, just a few decades ago, Israel did carry out actions like these at least once or twice.)
That doesn't necessarily make Israel "morally superior" from the viewpoint of someone who, like me, seriously questions the necessity of human organization, especially along moral lines.
But it certainly goes a long way towards explaining why such organizations -- especially nation-state governments -- might choose to treat Israel more as a peer than they'll treat a potential Palestinian state.
In short, yes, Marsha and her comrades may well have made an "immoral" decision earlier in vis-a-vis Jacob's placement in Billy's house.
Yet that decision was made according to principles of the rule of law in that town, principles Billy has a long history of not only ignoring, but actively attacking by targeting those who support them in any form.
By attacking the system itself, obviously Billy hopes to persuade enough people to reverse the decision vis-a-vis Jacob, or simply kill Jacob outright for him, or let him do it himself.
What tends to happen instead is that the system responds to defend itself, treating Billy as the invading force.
And under that sort of stress, it is even less able to make calm, rational decisions that might help to reverse previous immoral decisions -- decisions that can reflect a "higher morality", beyond the localized self-interest any body, or system, has in protecting itself.
Which is why, in my experience, one of the best ways to correct an injustice is to calmly stand back and let that injustice be the sole mountain peak on the horizon. Whereas trying to create all sorts of new injustices might help illustrate, for some, how bad things might get if we keep going down that road, it confuses the picture greatly, to the point where many people won't be able to identify the original injustice. (Hence my decision to not "protest" the public's handling of the Clinton debacle by engaging in oral sex with women half my age and then lying about it. See, we all must make sacrifices for our beliefs! ;-)
In practice, this takes the form of today's reality: despite all the hoopla regarding the need for a Palestinian state, Arab nations have not exactly lined up to create one out of their own vast tracts of land, to my knowledge. Oh, they're happy to push for someone else (especially Israel) to do it -- but it seems to me the world would be better off, assuming Palestinians could self-constitute a law-abiding, law-respecting state (a doubtful proposition at this time), if they could do so in a place where there is, at present, no such thing. No need to replace parts of Israel to do that; dispense with the "Palestinian problem" by relocation, assuming that's even possible, and Israel, as far as I can tell, makes a reasonable fine nation-state, from the perspective of fellow nation-states, the UN, and so on.
Now, the same solution could be suggested vis-a-vis Israel -- move them wholesale to some similarly-sized place not generally acquainted with the rule of law (Hollywood? ;-) -- and that might be the easier
of the two to accomplish. But it seems to me that the end result
would be that the Middle East would become less, not
more, generally respectful of that rule of law, and, as
ecologists will tell you, it's crucial to have trees and bushes, not
just grasses, holding up a hillside, lest it be swiftly eroded
downhill, which might explain the original decision, still supported
in practice, to place Israel where it seemed most needed at the time,
not just because that particular place was sacred. Perhaps the best
solution of all would be to relocate both communities and make
the sacred regions into some kind of UN-governed area, allowing all
three major religions safe access to Jerusalem, etc. Well, this is
getting pretty far afield, and I'm certainly not qualified to even
suggest any of these in reality; this is just for the purposes of
discussion of the pertinent moral issues.
Baloney -- it was a perfectly-useful hypothetical situation designed to test your stated hypothesis of moral equivalence, but you couldn't resist twisting it to suit your own political ends.
No, you were deliberately distorting the hypothetical situation to suit your politics rather than focus on the fact that it would expose, as fallacious, your original moral-equivalency argument.
I caught you at it, so you chose to spin it your way. If you'd wanted to simply and honestly demonstrate it, you'd have worded it that way: "though Marsha risked life and limb to save lives by killing Billy, the fact that she accidentally killed two innocent children was treated by many townsfolk as if she was entirely culpable for the deaths -- as if Billy bursting in earlier and taking them hostage, murdering some of them himself, had little or nothing to do with it".
Instead, you wrote this:
That's as clear a statement of objective fact as can be made in this context.
All of which I've done, throughout my posts, explaining how different parties view things, though, of course, as the author of the hypothetical case, designed solely to offer you a means to explain or justify your moral-equivalency argument, I have the "divine capability", within that hypothesis, of stating what is, in fact, objective reality.
If you don't permit me to do that with regard to my own hypothesis, then surely you can't claim any capability of assessing anything "objective", regarding this reality or any other, unless you believe yourself (as I'm almost convinced you do) of having a Divine Ability to Know Truth that has been denied me.
So, having denied me the right to outline the objective reality of my own hypothetical situation, you've denied yourself any credibility to do pretty much everything you've done to date in this thread: claim objective knowledge and/or understanding, either directly or indirectly via your objective measures, and viciously insult those who (like me) disagree with, or find themselves not in possession of, similar knowledge and/or understanding.
Yet it was your choice to torture an otherwise perfectly-valid hypothesis, rather than straightforwardly respond to it, or simply decline to, or honestly offer to extend it for everyone's benefit in an open way. Your failure to do so speaks volumes regarding your own intellectual honesty (or lack thereof). And it's pretty consistent with how many in the media choose to write about corresponding events, even when they are claiming to write objectively, so I hardly consider you unique. It's just amazing to see such a clear, shining example of this tendency in a forum where it becomes a part of the public record and cannot be denied for what it is (since it was a hypothetical story of my own making, and you basically copped to what you did).
Further, whatever you say you believe, you simply do not consistently practice it. You've slammed me left and right throughout this thread, spewing at me about how I'm an "idiot", resorting to guilt-by-association (bringing up names like Jerry Falwell and Rush Limbaugh), intellectually bullying me while falsely accusing me of having been a bully, and so on. Hardly the tactics of someone convinced they possess superior knowledge, understanding, etc., as you have demonstrated you are with such ferocity.
So much for your claim "I believe that having more viewpoints is always good", when, in fact, you believe that trashing any viewpoint that substantively questions your own as well as publically trashing its author is at least sometimes preferable to simply accepting it as potentially valid. (If your actions are consistent with your claimed beliefs, exactly what do these beliefs mean, in practice?)
Basically, you've conducted yourself in an intellectually fraudulent fashion in this thread.
Now, given your behavior, and your seeming inability to maintain any sort of straightforward, coherent position on several challenging issues, I claim this is not so much a moral failure on your part regarding others, but an internal problem regarding how you actually think about things -- a failure that can't help manifesting itself when you undertake discussions regarding the moral failings of others. And hardly a unique failing; perhaps the only thing pertinently unique about you is your willingness to expose these confusions in a forum like /., and try to maintain, clarify, or
justify them in the face of opposition.
Clearly you think very highly of your own brain-power, and very little of my own. Yet, you've proven quite incapable of: practicing your own beliefs regarding accepting other viewpoints; of tolerating dissent; of calmly and rationally discussing politically challenging subjects; of honestly presenting facts; of being capable of assessing the character of others (calling me a "bully"); and of even following through on your own "promises" to end the discussion.
(E.g. I notice in another post you claimed 100 Palestinian men, women, and children are killed by Israel for every one Israeli soldier that is killed, which is a flat-out lie, not even close to the truth. But, then, you've established that objective truth is either nonexistent or impossible for you to pursue, and in any case that you're quite willing to state things, as truth, that you know, in fact, are not the truth, to, only later, when you're called out about it, basically claim "oh, there's a good reason why I lied".)
So, my speculation, or educated guess, is that you aren't so much a willful liar, dissembler, confuser of fact, confounder of morality, and so on, as a personally very confused person, overloaded with book-learnin' and philosophy and crap like that, compared to actual life-experiences that temper, in most people, the belief that one knows all that one needs to know about a topic to render Final Judgement on people and governments.
And, you've chosen to read literature written by, and perhaps surround yourself with, people who believe the sort of conduct you now engage in constitutes valid, useful, intellectual discussion. Perhaps you've enjoyed (or feared?) seeing someone's intellect slammed in the past, so you act it out on me, as you did earlier. Perhaps you've been suckered into a moral discussion, only to find someone "set you up" by pretending to say one thing and then reinterpreting the language later to mean something else, then depicting you as a fool for falling for it, so you try the tactic out on me (and everyone else here as well).
Rather than stand up for a straightforward moral character and, at least within yourself, rebuke these things as immoral, you have chosen to try them out for yourself. And you're finding out they don't work quite as well when somebody does stand up to them, point them out, refuse to back down from legitimate, honest points, and so on, and that appears to have left you somewhat flummoxed.
In a sense, your brain is, in personal-computing terms, a 4-processor Intel Pentium IV running at 1.2GHz with 4GB of RAM -- that is, tremendously powerful hardware.
The problem is, you have so many different "systems", or rule bases, that you try to run all at once. In essence, you boot up Windows when you want to imply that you have the One True Concept of what is Good and Right and True; then you shut it down and boot up GNU/Linux when you want to suggest that Any Approach Is Valid, to escape responsibility when you're actually caught misrepresenting the truth, fumbling logic, or failing to obey your own self-professed precepts for living. Then you boot up OpenBSD when you want to hide, or secure yourself, from any criticism of the tactics you've used while running the other systems.
And you have so many tactics you want to try to "win" that you're running bloated software most of the time, so your CPUs are busy thinking through all sorts of different tactics, wondering "will this help me win the debate", comparing potential outcomes, and so on, leaving little CPU time and memory for actually focusing on what is True, what is Right, and how best to bring it out.
Meanwhile, lowly little me, I'm running a single-processor Pentium II at 233MHz, but, rather than constantly boot up and shut down different OSes, each with tons of bloat, legacy baggage, and the lot, I just run BeOS all the time (I pick that OS only for its reputation for being lean, mean, and speedy, for illustrative purposes).
So, while you resort to all sorts of tactics of rhetoric to try to "defeat" me in a debate -- trashing me, lying about the record, constantly introducing new misinformation or half-information rather than dealing with the facts already on the table, using guilt-by-association, and so on -- all I do is chug along, focus on what I know to be true (admittedly very little), stay humble about the rest, and stand up for only those things that I think really matter, like resisting tyranny in all its forms, as well as not standing idly by every time some person or organization that resists tyranny is trashed (lest it give up protecting me or others, for one thing).
The upshot is that, IMO, you've embarrassed yourself throughout this discussion, by behaving like a confused, scrambled, self-absorbed, arrogant pseudo-intellectual, so impressed by his own rhetorical capabilities that he can't think straight, can't answer simple questions with simple answers, and can't treat his fellow man in a loving way that even remotely patterns how he pretends to judge governments on a moral basis.
Now, I never intended to "convert" you to my way of thinking, score debating points, etc.
But I believe I've accomplished the nearly-complete elimination, in a public forum, via your own writings, of any moral or intellectual authority you might have ever had that went into your moral-equivalency argument. Anyone who might previously had thought "wow, that Chris Burke guy sure seems to know his stuff, and he has serious reservations about American morality" need only read this thread to see how seriously you actually take the issue of morality in your own life, how honest and straightforward you are (or aren't), how willing you are (or aren't) to be up-front about your agenda (compared to what you claim about the importance of it when it comes to life-and-death issues like Iran/Contra), and so on.
So, go ahead, make all the claims you want about the "moral equivalence" of Al Queda and the USA. It won't matter anymore, since anyone can see that you don't even believe you can assess any "objective reality" that permits such a precise judgement; that you can't (or won't) propose and maintain, against questioning even from a "simpleton" like myself, a coherent moral code; that you refuse to follow even the simplest threads (or tatters) of your own moral code; that you make wildly incorrect claims about the past moral character of individuals like myself (calling me a "bully", something most of my classmates in school would find hilarious); and that, having failed to claim victory, admit defeat, or politely withdraw, you can't even be relied upon to honor your own commitment to "get out of the game".
(Not that I mind the continued debate or the other stuff. You haven't offended me at all; in fact, I appreciate the opportunity to stand up for what's Good and Right and Decent about America, while taking a few of my own "shots" at what I see as having been moral mistakes. ;-)
I mean, just as one little example: if you can be so completely wrong about "predicting" that I was a bully in school, how can you possibly believe your assessment of the morality of a country like the USA has any useful degree of precision or accuracy?
That being said, as you continue to post, you say lots of things that suggest to me that at least part of you is a sincere seeker for Truth, someone genuinely interested in carrying on an intelligent, calm, sincere, yet vibrant, discussion about sociopolitical issues that could involve life-and-death issues, so I'm not about to toss you off, as I would probably have in the past, like an annoying insect. Whatever is good about you -- and I'm assured by God that there is much of that -- is worth preserving, cherishing, loving, comforting, so I'll continue to offer what, of that, I can in this forum.
Further, if one of your goals was, or has become, to rebuke the notion that anything the US government does must be "right" simply because it is "morally superior" compared to its enemy, then I believe your continued posting has helped win that point. And I support that rebuke: past behavior might suggest a general moral stance, but is no guarantee of moral correctness in any given instance in the past or the future. Even wildly patriotic Americans who froth at the mouth at your moral-equivalency argument, however you've presented it, should take this away from this debate: they cannot ever assume that their moral guidance is unneeded by those leading the US government at the time, because the US government derives its entire morality from the people -- American citizens -- that make it up. (Sounds trite, but turning off, or squelching, moral concerns under stress is a typical response, one you alluded to earlier, and which could be deadly in this and future conflicts.)
And that moral guidance can be expressed in a variety of ways, from conversations with friends, to letters to editors, to voting, to running for office, none of which necessarily require a direct assault on the rule of law -- a "privilege" denied so many in other governments and groups (Al Queda, for one), therefore one that should be vigorously exercised in this day and age to ensure it isn't lost forever.
No, because you answer it below. And you wouldn't answer it then, because you needed the opportunity to greatly modify and extend your original thesis by dredging up tons of past evil the US has done, without offering any counterweights to that.
It seems to me that, whether you believe it or not, you hate the USA, and your modifications to its role in the Marsha/Billy story -- in which the townsfolk murder Marsha, who represented (by your choice) the USA, to "reward" her for finally dealing with Billy -- show how deeply you desire the ultimate destruction of the USA, or at least how preoccupied you are with that likely outcome (and presently unwilling to use your great intellectual and rhetoric to prevent such an outcome).
Now, I wasn't sure that was the case at first, so I gave you a full iteration to re-think how you wanted the story to end, without making it too easy.
So, here is my take, FWIW: you chose to have townsfolk, who never raised a finger against a known criminal anytime during his crime spree, and left it up to a plainly-reformed strongman, Marsha, to deal with him, go ahead and murder Marsha by collective action, despite the fact that Marsha no longer posed any real threat to the town, especially compared to Billy, especially given that she'd already made huge personal sacrifices to ensure the town's safety, and Billy was now gone.
You're happy (in the only sense I suppose you can be happy in your present state of mind) with that outcome. You meant it to be an ominous signal to me, or others, who refused to join in or blindly accept your hateful pronouncements against the USA, but it failed utterly, because those of us who appreciate the good things the US does in protecting individual freedom and rights around the world already understand (especially since 2001-09-11) how little the rest of the world actually values it (beyond lip-service when it's politically appropriate).
You can claim "I actually like America" all you like. Based on this thread, it's pretty clear that such a claim is the product of a very confused, self-contradictory mind, if not simply an all-out lie designed to lull readers into believing they're going to read anything approaching "the truth about America" from someone who say they "care" about America. (Hey, Al Queda "cares" about America to, and wants only "what's right" for it. I think most people can rationally and legitimately interpret that, too, as "hatred".)
I never said it was "morally neutral". I said, please respond to it as if it had a morally neutral backstory. Surely you can understand that term "backstory", since you used it yourself to introduce, well, your backstory! (Which you purposely rigged, in moral terms, to validate a "morally-equivalent" conclusion at the end of the story.)
Obviously, that doesn't mean Marsha was incapable of past misdeeds, or that everyone sprang from nonexistence immediately, just that you could have taken as a given that, whatever they did in the past, you would specifically not assume there was any overall "moral imbalance" as of the story's beginning in my narration.
Surely, since you're such a self-professed expert when it comes to assessing "moral equivalence" between a nation-state of some 250 million people with 250 or so years of history (the US) and a far-flung, though small, band of committed extremists drawing on 1700 years of religious tradition (Al Queda), you couldn't have found it at all difficult to simply start with a blank slate, look at a hypothetical situation, and say "yea", "nay", or "not enough info".
I didn't stilt it, I wrote it, and the more stilted you claim it was, the easier it should have been to answer without so much nonsense. That's the purpose of that sort of hypothetical situation: to help us clarify what might seem to be straightforward statements regarding, e.g., morality, in situations that might be more or less emotionally laden, confusing, etc.
And, after all these posts, you finally answer it IMO correctly: no, Marsha isn't as immoral as Billy, even though she accidentally killed two innocent children while killing Billy, an action she undertook because she had plenty of evidence to believe that he would, if not stopped by her, murder many more. And even though she knew she would be risking the deaths of innocents, as well as herself, by her actions.
Which completely contradicts what you originally posted in this thread, taken as you wrote it, without having all sorts of backstory you later decided to patch in, but didn't have the intellectual honesty to admit you simply failed to present in the first place, even to say "because of this, and because of all the naughty things the US did in the past, I claim it is just as immoral as Al Queda".
And if that was just an oversight, you could have responded to the howls of protest from people like myself by simply saying "oh, hey, I meant: given all the evil and good the USA has done in the past, compared to that of Al Queda, plus this war effort, make them morally equivalent", and leaving it at that.
(Sure, people might have concluded you think the USA is more in need of being wiped off the face of the earth than Al Queda. I think you actually understood, at some level, that that would be the likely conclusion from the beginning, and purposely obfuscated your statements when you made them, afterwards, or both, to try to a) indict the USA somewhat without b) indicting your own moral judgement. I've seen that tactic used too often to be easily fooled by it.)
Now, getting back to one of my earlier points with regard to the story: assuming you believe that it was therefore immoral for the townsfolk to give Billy moral credibility equivalent to Marsha, and ultimately murder Marsha; and that you might well have been one of the townsfolk willing and able to speak out shortly after Marsha's finally disposing of Billy in the narrative, yet knowing what is a likely outcome; what should you, as one of those townsfolk, do to bring about a more moral outcome?
IMO, if you do what you've done in this thread, you're doing something immoral, or at least amoral, to wit: knowing that the townsfolk are likely someday to murder Marsha because she finally kills Billy less-than-perfectly to defend herself and the town from Billy's crime spree (in which her own friends and relatives had been murdered by him), you nevertheless choose to preach the moral equivalency of Marsha and Billy.
The effect of that preaching does nothing to encourage the townsfolk to be more alert in the future in defending against people like Billy.
But Marsha, and especially her defenders, more of the sort of mind-set that listens to feedback, end up being discouraged, while those who seek the opportunity to murder Marsha end up being encouraged, by your preaching.
See, in a strict sense, Marsha might be strong, but her strength had long included a substantial component of moral legitimacy. You know that, which is why you seek to attack it -- to delegitimize her in the eyes of as many townsfolk as possible. Else why would you, or anyone, bother to question someone's moral legitimacy?
That way, you can help bring about the conditions whereby townsfolk who would otherwise defend her remain quiet, perhaps some of them start saying "Marsha must be destroyed", and a few of them find little resistance carrying out their plan to murder her.
Instead, you could preach an argument of "moral superiority" -- that, imperfect as she may be, Marsha nevertheless fights for a morally superior vision of how the townsfolk could and should live, free of being robbed, beaten, raped, enslaved, murdered, and so on -- even though, to survive personally, which sometimes includes protecting her best supporters, she occasionally trespasses on these rights in specific instances.
If your preaching wasn't in vain, you might help convince more townsfolk to protect her (while perhaps keeping her "in line" by offering to help resolve situations brought to her attention); more to speak up for her, even if in simplistic, aka patriotic, ways ("Marsha Is Great, Yay For Marsha!"); and, ultimately, fewer, maybe none, willing to carry out a plan to murder her, if only because of the risk that they might fail and/or be killed themselves by defenders of Marsha.
And, if you preached early enough in the narrative, you might actually help bring about the prevention of the worst of Billy's crime spree, if not his outright rehabilitation, by encouraging townsfolk to emulate the qualities they find themselves openly admiring in Marsha -- of protecting the innocent, standing against crime and tyranny, etc. (And, in a sense, that's where we are now in the narrative; the USA hasn't been hurt by 09-11 as much as Marsha was by killing relatives, and militant Islam's crime spree is still in the pinprick stage, kinda like Billy's theft and occasional rape.)
So, in preaching the moral equivalency of the USA and Al Queda, you are, in my opinion, making a clear moral choice regarding the outcome you yourself seem to wish upon "Marsha" -- the USA -- namely, its ultimate destruction as a reward for its zealously defending the rights of everyone by destroying those who have proven their willingness to commit mass-murder.
I stand by my strong opinion that such preaching is a case of moral idiocy, especially now that it's been revealed how insightful you're capable of being regarding the way events might well unfold.
And that's consistent with what you said very earlier on with being bitter, cynical, not thinking clearly, whatever -- you're so focused on the Marsha/USA evil you know, going back centuries, that you find yourself unwilling to rouse your moral consciousness, explore the issues more deeply, and figure out what you can do to make the world a better place.
Sorry, that's a nearly-complete rewrite of what you actually said:
There it is: you claimed the intent was the same, i.e. the backstory can itself be canceled out (i.e. it doesn't affect, on balance, the subsequent equation). The subsequent equation: if intent matters, the only difference is budget -- not morality. Moral equivalence thus asserted.
(Then you went on to steer my hypothetical story "toward reality", a reality you later claim is impossible to determine objectively....)
In case you're going to try to wiggle out of the morality claim above, here's what you wrote earlier in that same post:
We're as culpable as them for the civilians we kill by accident as they are for the ones they murder on purpose. That's a simple, direct statement of moral equivalence, plainly requiring no backstory, plainly assuming none. Can a lead-in like "It is exactly the point..." be made more clear in that direction?
(How in the world Marsha avoids identical culpability to Billy in the story, based on that statement, is beyond me, since the starting-point of the stories -- moral neutrality -- is the same. "I think the intent is the same" is an acceptance of a starting-point of moral neutrality, given the other constraints at that point in the discussion, is it not?)
As far as what's in the "public record", you've clearly seen fit to dredge up all sorts of negative evidence with regards to the USA (as you did with Marsha in the story), but how many instances can you point to where you presented positive evidence in her behalf, or negative evidence for the other side -- Al Queda/Billy?
(I can't think of any such instances offhand, but you may have said something nice about the USA once or twice.)
Based on what you chose to say about the USA and Al Queda, respectively, it's pretty clear which one you hate more, which one is more morally repugnant to you, and so on: the USA.
(If you did all that just to justify your moral-equivalency argument, you sure have a skewed set of priorities, publically trashing a country you claim to "like" just to avoid having to admit you might have been wrong, speaking out of your butt, whatever.)
If, on the other hand, you were trying to present an open, honest assessment of the relative morality of the USA and Al Queda, surely you would have identified all sorts of things positive and negative about both in their history? (And don't say "it's in the public record, which I assumed everyone knew" -- that justified either saying nothing about that record, or presenting all sides fairly. My claim is that you did neither, though, because of your hatred of the USA, you perhaps believed you were being fair at the time.)
No, it doesn't, since you have proven you could have easily addressed it as it stood, simply by doing so above.
Now, it occurs to me that perhaps you avoided doing so because you didn't want me to turn around and say "aha, that means the USA is not as bad as Al Queda", without your already having prepared the way to rebut such a claim.
First, I wouldn't have made that claim, something you'll just have to trust. What I was trying to rebut was your plain statement of an equation, which did not appear to require any context to have some validity, despite what you now claim.
(I might have said, "okay, just what is it that the USA is doing that makes it more morally repugnant in this equation, such that it ends up being equal to Al Queda?", or just stopped contributing entirely, having made my point.)
Second, even if I, or someone else, had made the claim, you could have then countered, explaining your belief that the USA has done vastly more evil than good compared to Al Queda, and so on.
But, especially consistent with published practices of left-wing manipulation of truth, you chose to distort, duck and cover, distort, duck and cover, proving a lack of honesty and faithfulness -- two qualities that I, personally, consider necessary for anyone to convince me they have the authority to pronounce moral equivalence as you have done.
I.e. its system of governance combined with its citizens, especially in the case of the USA, which is government by, for, and of the people, moreso than in most any other nation.
Exactly like any other nation's government that proves able to survive a dangerous world.
And note that, strictly speaking, "by any means necessary" differs in several practical ways from "by any means convenient", though sometimes the USA seems to practice the latter. (E.g. our agreement on the bombing of the plant in Sudan, my opinion about the Elian Gonzalez raid; how these were necessary, I fail to see, but can see how they may well have been convenient for the leaders in power at the time.)
By the way, sometimes I think you get too hung up on linguistics. If John says "I'm gonna have sex tonight by any means necessary" and Fred says "I'm gonna murder my wife tonight by any means necessary", you talk as if they're morally equivalent, since, somehow, in your view, their intent, goals, and conduct are the same. When someone points out that all John did was to hire a prostitute, while Fred cut his wife's throat, you respond "well, that's because John was easily able to just hire a prostitute; Fred's goals required him to do what he did, and I'm sure that if John was in Fred's position, he would have done the same -- therefore, they're morally equivalent".
The mere fact that they use the same language does not mean they're after the same thing. And the mere fact that you can describe their conduct using similar language does not mean they're engaging in morally equivalent conduct.
(At this point, I suppose you'll explain to me that the reason John wants only to have sex instead of murder his wife is that he murdered his girlfriend years earlier, therefore he is, indeed, "morally equivalent" to Fred.)
Exactly, which includes a very high component of morality (positive and negative), which a large percentage of the citizenry believe is critical to not only be close to God, but to be safe in the world, as well as a substantial component of morality in the form of the degree to which citizen participation in government is encouraged compared to the extremes of tyrannical leadership and that form of "mob rule" that might be called "raw democracy".
(You've apparently decided to never get back to me on the crucial issue of whether moral superiority implies an improved ability to survive or flourish in this world, after having ridiculed me for suggesting it might, when it comes to how nations govern their citizens. I think that's a pretty important issue, though I'm not near 100% convinced that it is the case. So I'd love to know what you think about those issues, in simplified form at least, as in my examples of Moses, Jesus, and so on.)
How in the world can a government have an "abiding sense of goodness", once you remove people from the equation (which is what you appear to have done by relegating them to "political reality" and "public reaction", which you treat as distinct from the government)?
Do you really believe any system, aside from the human beings that might inhabit it, has any "sense of good", or of anything else, for that matter?
Methinks you've been looking in the wrong place for an "abiding sense of goodness".
I suggest you look in the hearts of people first, starting with yourself: find the goodness you've think you believe in, focus exclusively on that for a time (an hour, day, week, month, whatever you can manage), and bring it out in your dealings with others (including fellow /. posters).
Then see how well it works, learn from it, rinse, and repeat.
As you get more "centered" in your own morality, you expand it to include others -- teaching, preaching, and, on rare occasion, judging those who come within your circle and whom you are expected to judge.
Continue to observe the effects your activities have on others, positive and negative, and on yourself of course, and modify your behavior, and morality, accordingly.
Until you've done that, you have neither the moral experience or moral authority to assess, much less preach regarding, the relative morality of nation-states, governments, corporations, or even Boy Scout troups.
[To Be Continued...]
And a particular system of governance might do better or worse, along various dimensions, when it comes to amplifying good and squelching evil, but, ultimately, 100% good people can overcome any bad system, just as 100% bad people can destroy any good system, acting from within or without -- though, in practice, if there are such things as people 100% good or bad, they are too few in number to ever conduct an experiment in these directions, so we must satisfy ourselves with vast areas of gray.
It does nothing to reduce our role in the action, compared to your depiction of the US being fully responsible -- Marsha unilaterally deciding to move Jacob into Bill's house??
Surely you can't mean that. Because that would imply that the only way the USA could escape full culpability for that act would be if it had launched all-out war on the UN to prevent it happening.
No, the analogy was from an objective viewpoint, illustrating the distinctions between how people view reality and reality itself.
I realize it helps your case to keep ignoring my questions and keep distorting the analogy in your favor, while rarely bringing anything new into the discussion that might not favor your case (as compared to my own efforts, where I do so often), but it sure seems like a waste of time.
No wonder you're giving up and going home, spitting back at me in the process.
How serious can your response truly be, when you don't answer straightforward questions, like, did my original analogy, with a morally neutral backstory, suggest to you Marsha was morally equivalent, in her actions, to Billy?
Nor did you address the issues I raised concerning the use of political rhetoric to "tame" immorality, as far as I can tell. Instead, you've responded by just slamming me left and right, like an angry dog with a bunny in its mouth.
I'm a very sad little bunny.
Head...spinning...must...lie...down....
Sentence missing something.
Thanks for trying to educate me (NOT!!).
Promise?
I'm sorry, I was referring to this quote:
That's what dvdeug wrote in his earlier message in this thread.
I didn't take that as referring to lives under the Taliban, though I guess maybe that's what he meant, though I would think "civilian attacks" meant attacks on the US, not Afghans, without knowing the context better.
And note that I entered the discussion shortly after his message in the thread, when you started stating what appeared to be equations not needing much in the way of context.
Oh, sure, but that's because of the space aliens trying to infiltrate my brain, and, as to my being a "semi-literate idiot", well, both my parents were Republicans, so it's not my fault.
I guess because I simply did not read it in the first place, therefore my interpretative skills vis-a-vis the quote were somewhat lacking.
Ah, now I found it, further up in the thread.
And I see the problem: you responded by saying "That's our justification", referring to the saving of an estimated 100K (or whatever) lives under the Taliban.
But that isn't our justification. I mean, it's not what I've heard Bush or Rummie (admittedly, I rarely listen) or most anyone else say. Most of the justification is "its self-defense".
Saving lives under the Taliban is a desired side-effect, and justifies why we don't "just nuke Afghanistan", as some gonzo-warriors wanted shortly after 9/11, more than it does going to war there in the first place, IMO.
Looking back at your messages, it's hard to see whether you're saying it is our justification, or that it isn't.
Perhaps all you meant to do was refute an apparent claim that it was justifiable to kill 1K-3K Afghan innocents to save an estimated 100K more via knocking down the Taliban.
If so, that was hard to tell from the wording of any individual message you posted, especially for a semi-literate idiot (etc.) like myself.
Or maybe you meant to focus narrowly on the issue of whether it's okay for Westerners to not go hysterical over the reports of civilian casualties in Afghanistan -- in which case, your moral-equivalency stuff sure sent a mixed message, since that seemed to apply to a much broader scope.
My take: rossz, the one you quote, was suggesting that maybe killing 1K-3K Afghans wasn't worth going bananas over because we figure, in the long run, we saved maybe 100K of similarly innocent ones, while taking reasonable precautions against further unfettered attacks on us by Al Queda.
In a sense, he's right: given that the West (US heading it up) has undertaken the operation, the comparative figures suggest we shouldn't panic over the current rates of loss of life, especially given the apparent success of the operation. (Hardly the "quagmire" that was both predicted before, and claimed during, the first month or so.)
However, I agree with you that this should not form anywhere near a complete justification for waging war against another nation, if that's what you meant to say.
I disagree, of course, with the assertion you appeared to make, that the mere fact that we're accidentally (despite our best efforts in this war) killing civilians makes us morally equivalent to al Queda, whose goal is to murder as many civilians in the West as possible.
I figure it's fairly implicit in my signature, the web site I link to, and, as you point out, the subtext of every word I utter.
(Kinda like why I don't write "I write in English" in my signature; it's obvious, right?)
But thanks for the advice. I'll take it under consideration.
Huh? Who said that? Sure, he hasn't (to our knowledge) committed lewd sex acts with interns half his age, lied under oath, had his law license revoked, and so on, but that hardly makes him a Divine Leader! ;-/
I'd really love a link to a quote supporting that, besides the simple "there should be limits to freedom" he uttered offhand, apparently in response to seeing a negative web site.
I mean, it's not like he's going all-out for campaign finance reform, which seems to include provisions making it even harder for citizens to criticize incumbents shortly before an election (something he, as an outed DUI'er, should theoretically appreciate!).
Me, I like to think Bush43 is just about as idiotic as I am. The great thing about us idiots is, we're so busy trying to figure out stuff like eating pretzels, putting on socks, and reading books without lots of pictures, we're too busy to contemplate how to run everyone else's lives.
I'll pray for you, if you like.
I'm too dumb to be inquisitive. I couldn't miss knowing about White House actions when Clinton was in office -- he was always in my face, so to speak, telling me how great my life would be if I'd only let him (or his wife) run it. It's like the guy couldn't avoid a camera to save his life.
But I didn't even vote for Bush43, so it's not like I'm totally in love with that guy either...just, so far, he's been less in my face, trying to take away rights I happen to cherish, than Clinton, and he hasn't wildly reversed course on promises he made (yet), like promising to cut my taxes and then raising them retroactively as soon as he was elected like Clinton did.
And, as bad as Ashcroft might be, wake me up when he rolls some tanks into a compound of poor left-wing religious nuts, killing them all in the process...until then, I figure I've seen worse and, for better or worse, survived.
I don't wear glasses. And I hardly worship democracy -- it's tyranny of the majority, if you ask me. I happen to think our democratic republic is pretty good compared to alternatives I'm aware of that have been demonstrated to at least limp along for more than a couple of generations, but, most important, people have to be moral and willing to stick their necks out more for moral than selfish reasons, generally, for any system of governance to operate properly.
I.e. I think forms of government are idiot-proof just like computer systems are (i.e. they're not).
Oh, sure, and I still have reservations about what in the world Reagan was trying to accomplish, what with trying to get some American hostages freed and all.
But, frankly, I am unaware of the existence of lots of Muslims unhappy with that incident. I figured all the unhappy ones were Democrats, Communists, and so on, but not Muslims. I should research it more.
And, of course, it was Reagan who tucked tail and ran after the barracks bombing in Lebanon, akin to Clinton's response to a series of terrorist attacks on the US throughout his term. (I don't really put the attack on the USS Cole in that category; it was a guerilla-style attack, perhaps, but not terrorist exactly, since, like the barracks attack, the target was purely military.)
While I suspect Reagan's response to the barrack attacks suggested to some that the US didn't have much resolve, it's also reasonable to think they might have been aware of our fortitude vis-a-vis the USSR and not come to too hasty a conclusion.
Whereas, we apparently have bin Laden's own words "thanking" Clinton for his handling of the Somalia incident, "proving" our spinelessness, as our attack on the Sudanese plant probably "proved" our immorality to many Muslims.
I'll concede, though, that as Reagan was distracted by the USSR and its Stalinesque history of mass murder and expansionism, Clinton was distracted by the GOP and its Gingrichesque history of trying to lower taxes and conform to the Independent Counsel law the Democrats put in place (and now return to loving, thanks to Enron).
You sound like my dad, who taught me my most important political lesson as a teenager.
We were alone on a boating trip and, beer in hand, he launched into his usual rant about welfare, morality, and so on (not that he was a paragon of morality, but this was a political rant).
He actually said something very close to this:
I am alive today because of my skill at avoiding laughing out loud.
But that episode taught me that labels don't substitute for rationality, morality, and so on. His being a Republican made him no smarter or better than anyone else, in that specific case. Even though he was very smart, he, like anyone else, could be dumb in an instant (like you say I am all the time).
(And, yes, I realize you're parodying what you believe is my line of thinking.)
Been watching reruns of the "dead parrot" sketch a lot lately?
"I exist only to serve."
I apologize for being such an idiot. Sadly, there appears to be nothing I can do about that at present.
Here I did not intend to say (nor believe I said) that they therefore always will win, and that such victories therefore always imply moral superiority.
Again, here, I did not say "will always defeat". Further, I used the word "nearly" to suggest there must be quite a chasm in the way the nation-state treats its individual citizens to make up for an on-paper disadvantage.
Here, "suggests" was way too strong on my part, especially taking the statement in isolation. It should have said something like "prompts consideration of whether it is morally inferior".
Put another way: if Al Queda was sufficiently moral as an organization, surely the Islamic communities, being pious (at least to my distant view), would wholeheartedly embrace it, fund it, be sure it is able to defend itself, and project its power where necessary.
The USA, on the other hand, has had that kind of support, both from its own citizens and from other nations, including those it soundly defeated only decades earlier (Germany, Japan) or centuries earlier (Britain).
Now, support from powerful friends does not imply morality, but the fact that powerful friends that do not normally interfere with each others' business to a high degree are willing to offer support in a risky environment (read: they're all targets of Al Queda as well) suggests that the USA isn't a morally repugnant animal, the way Al Queda is in most pertinent quarters.
Again, sorry for the confusion my poorly worded quotes caused. As should be clear (finally), I meant only this: morally superior nations can win over militarily superior, yet morally inferior, ones. Sometimes without even firing much of a shot (USA vs. USSR, for example).
I'd hardly put it that way.
I'd say morally superior, in the sense I mean of morality (not killing people for political ends, for example, thus allowing more vigorous political discourse in society), implies a degree of military, as well as socioeconomic, superiority that is hard to quantify, especially in the eyes of those who don't value (or share) that morality, from the outside.
Some of the Founding Fathers of the USA seem to have shared a related vision of a nation that didn't have a standing army, but would spontaneously defend itself against attack, in the form of individual land-owning (and thus "self-interested" in the security of the nation) citizens taking up arms as needed.
Not that the USA has remained true to that model, but its behavior before, and response to, being seriously attacked has patterned that model in several instances.
And where it has made moral miscalculations -- that is, misunderstood the degree to which ordinary citizens would fight for what they believed was right -- the US has not fared so well (e.g. Vietnam, where the "moral justification" the US typically has, of defending the nation against direct attack, was absent).
The challenge is not so much to never make a moral mistake, but rather to learn from that mistake...which I believe the US did following Vietnam, and which I hope and pray many in Islam have been doing even more sincerely since 9/11.
(Relating back to my mythical story: Marsha has been hoping Billy would change his ways, because she greatly admires his willingness to act, to stick his neck out, compared to the relative cowardice of the population. If Billy figured out that behaving uprightly was way better than behaving badly, he'd make a great ally, as happened to several other bad boys whom Marsha cluesticked into correction awhile earlier.)
Oh, I understand that perfectly, being a computer programmer. That's why I take the trouble to correct/clarify my statements; it would severely undercut much of what I'm trying to say about morality. The issue of how to defend morality per se vs. defending people who generally share that morality against those who don't by choosing to temporarily set aside that morality is important to me. I believe saying "any victory implies moral superiority" would ultimately undercut my "message" urging people to carefully consider these issues for themselves.
But I'm sure my retarded ass makes plenty of other mistakes, so your point is well taken.