Thankfully, most rational people recognize that the goals of the respective organizations are exactly what make one more moral and ethical than the other.
Yes. I think that falls under the heading intent, which I made several lengthy posts about. I say under, because goals are a function of intent. Or, as I'm using the terms, intent could be considered "disposition" of a sort, a more far-reaching aspect than a "goal", used in the sense of something more short-term.
Huh, then I've probably misunderstood what you were writing somehow. So you meant to morally equate, or perhaps even weight in al Queda's favor, the short-term strategic goals of the corresponding war efforts, rather than indict the US generally as being morally equivalent to al Queda?
Here, try this example out, so you don't get so confused by your anti-American hate.
If you truly think I'm motivated by anti-American hate, either you are dumb or I've managed to grossly misrepresent myself. Don't be offended, I
actually think it is the latter. I can't blame you for jumping to that conclusion since I have the rather non-mainstream opinion that we aren't the best people on earth.
Assuming by "best people" you mean something consistent with what you were talking about when morally equating the US with al Queda...
...then I don't see how that's particularly non-mainstream. From our public school system to our mass media, the education is constantly that we, the USA, are the primary, if not sole, reason for so much misery in the world, from oppressed poor, oppressed minorities, and oppressed nations to the ozone hole, global warming, and the fact that the sun itself will burn itself out in a few billion years.
But that's not hate... That's called "reality". I actually like this country a lot.
I'll take it on faith, but it's extremely difficult to discern that based on your other posts -- though, to be fair, that seems to be primarily the result of your assuming my concerns over your moral-equivalence equation was based entirely on the belief that the US had done, and could do, no moral wrong.
[Snipped a long analogy which is a stinging indictment of my backwards thinking and broken reasoning... or at least it would be if it was analogous to reality]
But it wasn't intended to be analogous to reality -- it was a scientific attempt to find an emotionally neutral means to figure out your moral equation.
I was specifically not trying to make it particularly analogous to the present situation, except to the degree necessary to highlight your equation.
(For example, Marsha indeed kills innocent children, despite being, analogously, the USA. I'd hardly do that if I was trying to be faithful to a "reality" I was promoting in which the US could do no wrong.)
First, a little backstory.
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?
Billy learned how to kill and rape because he was trained how by Marsha herself.
In reality, Billy, like most boys, learn how to kill and rape because that's pretty much human nature when not limited by societal pressures, such as civilization. Marsha didn't teach him that -- she taught him how to better protect himself against external aggression, even those with overwhelming superiority, by using the sort of tactics he later employed to avoid being caught by her when she finally decided he was too dangerous to continue to live.
Billy was being beaten up by Tina, a woman Marsha hated, and she gave Billy the training for free because of this.
And many of Tina's friends constitute those who later promote resentment of Marsha, always dredging up history of anything Marsha has done wrong, as if Marsha is incapable of (or not worthy of being morally judged in light of) learning from her mistakes and becoming a better person -- something Marsha herself has tended to allow for in others, including Billy.
Second, Marsha herself was hardly a saint. She'd committed murder and rape herself on a number of occasions.
Yes, back in her wild teen years, when pretty much everyone else was doing the same thing, and when she, like Billy vis-a-vis Tina, was under direct assault by superior forces.
She's since learned the error of her ways, though occasionally flashes of her temper and even misbehavior can be discerned -- something her enemies, mostly Tina's supporters, constantly call attention to. (I think Marsha is probably a lot like Xena on that syndicated show, or Angel on the show of that name, in this sense: it's not always crystal-clear that she's going to be morally perfect in any instance, but she's clearly fighting more on the side of "what's right" than Tina earlier, Billy later.)
The townsfolk knew, but they don't like to talk about it, and pretend it never happened, or that she "had a good reason".
Also, they're too dependent on her to defend them against the Tinas and Billys of the world, partly because Marsha sometimes tended to keep them disarmed (the "superhero syndrome", I call it), mostly because they're too prone to believe Tina's cadre of naysayers, who look forward to the day Tina can return to power and enslave anyone, murdering those who resist (e.g. intellectuals, Jews, priests, anyone who can read a book...).
She treated them nice, and they just couldn't admit they'd been taken in.
Well, what choice did they have, as long as she generally behaved herself well? How are they being "taken in", when they a) refuse to take up her cause of fighting against evil-doers like Tina and, later, Billy and b) aren't willing to endure the result of eliminating Marsha, their only practical protector?
Seems to me they're doing what's practical under the (cowardly) circumstances they find themselves in.
For myself, I'm prepared to take out a leader only when I'm prepared to lead myself, or prepared to accept the leadership of whoever takes over.
Perhaps that's how the townsfolk reason among themselves.
Plus, since she was the biggest and meanest, there was a sense of safety in having her around.
Well, that's only if by "meanest" you mean "meanest in a fight", since, if she's not fighting evil -- whatever the townsfolk find unacceptable -- they would have no sense of safety.
But they never liked Billy to begin with. His crimes they didn't have to ignore.
Indeed, since Billy offers little in the way of protection of their way of life to the townspeople, they find little reason to tolerate him.
But since they're too cowardly to fight him, partly because Tina's supporters keep reminding them that Billy can't really be that bad, since it's Marsha who represents his "opposite", and she's no saint, they don't really do much to stand against him.
Which leaves the problem to fester, until it draws Marsha's attention, as per my original story.
If the townsfolk had stood firm against Billy, being willing to make the kind of personal sacrifices Marsha had made before and would make again, Billy might have learned much earlier that he could not expect to get away with his acts, and maybe even "converted" to the right way, as Marsha had years ago.
But they concerned themselves primarily with living their own lives, thinking Billy was a sleeping dog they could just let lie.
Third, the reason Billy isn't getting what he wants out of life is because what he wants in life is for Marsha to leave his house.
No, what he wants in life is for Marsha to leave his town -- his entire world -- and he uses as an excuse some strange notion that he has preexisting rights to her house as a pretext to gain popular support for his long-term goal. (Specifically, once he destabilizes Marsha by getting the townsfolk to assail her for "occupying" his house, it'll be easier to dispense with her entirely. The townsfolk might not go along with that, but they'll be unwilling, or unable, to stop him.)
She'd already taken the porch facing the lake and given it to one of her homeless chums, without asking anyone else if they minded.
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.
And, sure, Billy had long tried to kill that homeless chum -- call him "Jacob" -- of Marsha's, and constantly preached the idea that his death was God's will, so it's not unreasonable that some community effort be made to ensure that the poor guy had some place to call home, a place where Jacob could defend himself from the likes of Billy, as well as Tina and her friends, all of whom resent Jacob, because he doesn't agree with Tina's approach to running things -- he's much more supportive of Marsha's stated approach, and he's pretty persuasive for a homeless guy, having become a sort of mascot for the downtrodden. (He's never had a problem making a living -- he keeps getting kicked out of his own house by people making him a scapegoat for their own problems.)
But taking part of Billy's house and giving it to someone Billy hated was probably not the brightest move, even though it was what Jacob said he wanted more than anyplace else in town, because of the sentimental value it held (his ancestors lived there, some of them driven away by aggressors, though originally they took it by force themselves once or twice).
What some people can't help noticing, though, is how the Jacob's part of Billy's home is the best-maintained, best-looking, most orderly, and so on. People who want to visit Billy's home usually prefer to stay in Jacob's area, though they visit Billy's too.
However, Billy, resentful of Jacob's evident success at organizing and cleaning his little area of the house, instead of just doing better himself, takes to attacking Jacob in his area -- just as so many have attacked Jacob in his home in the past -- and even attacks people who just visit Jacob!
Sadly, the townsfolk, still caught up in the "moral dilemma" of having to choose between Marsha and Tina, Marsha and Billy, and so on, end up thinking that it's not worth defending Jacob.
After all, just as some of them resent Marsha's standing up to Tina and even Billy, they're easily made to resent Jacob's standing up to Billy -- refusing to be driven from the home, defending himself against Billy's attacks, even occasionally going outside his own little area of the house to destroy weapons Billy continually tries to build to eliminate Jacob.
Why Billy can't just learn to get along with less-than-ideal circumstances like Jacob has learned to do over the years, some people wonder, but they figure "peace" is worth achieving, even if it means coming at the cost of Billy killing Jacob, Jacob no longer being around to support Marsha's ideas that townsfolk be generally able to live as they choose, and, ultimately, people like Tina and Billy running everything.
And she made it clear she wasn't going anywhere
Well, where could she go, but six feet under? Her enemies -- mostly Tina and her supporters -- had long been committed to killing her outright. Having failed to do so, they'd since undertaken a campaign to subvert whatever moral authority she seemed to have among the townsfolk, who weren't able to see that they were sewing the seeds of their own destruction by going along with the thesis that Marsha should be allowed to be destroyed because, in her vigorous defense of large-scale issues of freedom, she failed to be 100% perfectly morally correct by each townsperson's judgement.
And what's so sad is that each person has a different idea of what Marsha has done wrong. Because she's so "visible", due to being so strong, they all talk about her constantly, and few can agree on exactly what Marsha should have done to stop something really bad from happening in any instance.
But they're so convinced they're right about her being wrong, they overlook the fact that anyone acting successfully as Marsha had would also have lots of naysayers.
That is, after all, the penalty for acting to help others -- "no good deed goes unpunished", is what Marsha has learned.
When the fighting started, some were rather worried about the lengths Marsha would go to. They realized what Billy did was bad and he needed to be stopped, but they also realized that, really, Marsha was in a problem of her own creation (and they were paying the price for). And in the end she didn't give a shit about anyone who got caught in the crossfire.
Sure, they were "worried" -- but not enough to actually take care of the problem, Billy, so Marsha wouldn't have to.
That's the inevitable result of allowing evil to fester and spread in your local. At some point, someone else has to step in and fix it for you, and you have to accept whatever means they use to do it.
Blaming Marsha for how she solves the problem they allowed to fester is like Billy blaming Jacob for the poor condition of his house compared to the portion given for Jacob to live in -- they're merely shifting the blame to someone who acts, to draw attention away from the fact that they refused to act when given many opportunities to do so earlier, when dealing with the problem would have been much, much easier.
She'd do what it took to keep the townsfolk from turning on her, sure -- which
wasn't much, since they didn't want to. If she didn't force their hand, she was safe.
Yup, just as they were cowards in the face of tyrants like Tina and Billy, they'd have to accept pretty much whatever Marsha decided to do to set things right.
And, after Billy's dead, while some of them will thank Marsha, Tina's supporters will make sure that the story widely told is of Marsha going off half-cocked and killing innocent children, as if Billy, and especially the cowardly townsfolk, had nothing to do with it.
They realized that Marsha didn't really take any risks at all.
They didn't "realize" that, they chose to believe that, ignoring, as you did, the fact that Marsha had already lost her family and some of her friends to Billy, thanks to the inaction of the townsfolk, and their constantly discouraging Marsha from doing anything substantial to curb Billy's ever-growing appetite for violence in the past.
She was huge, strong, and the only skills Billy had to fight her were ones Marsha had given him.
That and all the apologists for Tina and Billy who helped make it a war between Billy and Marsha, rather than Billy and a law-abiding, rights-defending townsfolk.
And they remember how "open" the dialogue was. There was only one thing you could say to not be branded as a "Billy-lover" or
"Marsha-hater".
That's another of the pro-Tina sort of "half-lie" that's so widely told.
After all, we're to believe it's so bad to be "branded" something, which really means "someone said something I didn't like" (as in Chris Burke branding me as a "bully", an "idiot", and so on in another post).
But, somehow, that's "just as bad" as the things Tina and Billy have done, ranging from theft, lying, cheating, raping, to mass murder.
Meanwhile, while Marsha indeed did have "open" dialogs, Tina and Billy never allowed anyone any real opportunity to guide how they did things.
If the townsfolk wanted Marsha to not do something about Billy, she listened to them and, probably too often, heeded their advice. If Marsha thought somebody should give some of their money to the poor, and they disagreed, Marsha wouldn't do anything to force the issue.
Billy and Tina, of course, operated quite differently. Billy would just steal the money, or injure or kill someone he didn't like. Tina would steal the money, give it to the poor, and call it "compassion"; or systematically imprison, torture, and kill people who disagreed with her and call it "reeducation".
Sadly, too many townsfolk couldn't make such crucial moral distinctions between Tina and Marsha, so, to them, they were merely offering two morally equivalent choices regarding how to live. That's somewhat understandable, since, in the end, they could both be said to "rule by force", when given the opportunity.
The others didn't care about history. Their friends had died, and that was all that mattered. Perspective was an enemy, since it
damaged resolve.
Yet perspective also served as the only defense against the kind of moral equivalencing done by Tina and her supporters to discourage Marsha, and anyone else who would truly stand up against Billy, from taking action.
Tina, in failing to take over the town earlier, secretly wanted the whole town to fall under the criminal governance of Billy, because that would set the stage for the townsfolk to finally welcome Tina's Ultimate Solution -- the "utopia" of her governance -- and hand all their freedoms over to her.
After all, Tina knew just which townsfolk should be doctors, which should be lawyers, which should be farmers, which should drive cars, which should ride bikes, which should walk, and so on, so she had a vision of order, which included everyone helping everyone else, either voluntarily or because Tina and her supporters forced them to.
And then, the prologue.
Marsha didn't kill everyone, of course.
No, of course not, just a couple of kids, but she'll get blamed for all the deaths Tina's supporters can possibly attribute to her.
But those left didn't necessarily feel "rescued" as the townsfolk had assumed they would. They buried their friends, who hadn't been involved at all except to be near Billy when Marsha burst in.
(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.)
They had never really liked or trusted Marsha -- they knew her past -- but they also didn't condone Billy's violence.
Of course, some of them recognized that, by allowing Billy to commit violence unchecked by themselves, they were virtually condoning it. Still, instead of blaming themselves, it was so easy to blame Marsha for the ill effects of having Billy around, free to do what he wants.
But then, reacting to their loss much as most of the townsfolk had, they suddenly saw Marsha in a different light. Suddenly, Billy didn't seem so crazy. They still disliked violence, but what else could they do? In an ironic reflection of the previous words of Marsha's supporters, they gathered together, grit their teeth, and said "We must do what has to be done".
Yes, having left it to Marsha to dispose of Billy, they then threw in their lot with Tina, helpepd her kill Marsha, Jacob, and all supporters of the Marsha/Jacob ideology of individual choice and freedom, and spent the rest of their days being virtual slaves to Tina. Any desire some might have had to rise up and overthrow her was quelched by killing the only real, practical defender of their freedoms they ever had -- Marsha, who they had killed for daring to take practical action in response to Billy's demonstrated desire for blood.
Repeat endlessly, in various villages of different sizes, over and over... and you have human history.
Pretty much.
If I've learned one thing from this, it's that learning history doesn't stop it from repeating -- it just lets you recognize it when it's happening.
Yup.
And it now seems quite clear what side of history you're on.
Seems to me that waging a war to, e.g. in just one dimension, ensure the freedom of peoples (especially US citizen) to practice the religion they individually choose is morally superior to Al Queda's waging war (I'll call it that, since you try to equate their terrorism to our war) to impose their religion throughout the world.
Hah. How exactly is this war "ensuring the freedom of peoples"?
Uhhhhh, hmmm, okay, so you can't see that killing people who are committed to killing anyone who doesn't willingly live under an incredibly narrow interpretation of Islam is a means to ensure the freedom of people who would rather not live under that interpretation?
The only threats to freedom I see are coming from John Ashcroft, the FBI, and the knee-jerk reactionism along with manipulative patriotism that lets them get away with it.
So you're convinced that Ashcroft is the reason 2,000+ people were killed on 9/11?
I'll be interested in hearing how relatives of the victims of that day's events react to your telling them that Al Queda, bin Laden, extremist Islam, etc., pose no threat to the US whatsoever.
You can argue that we're protecting -safety-, but freedom? It is to laugh. I bet you think Saddam was going to somehow steal your freedom, and that the Gulf War had nothing to do with oil.
More to the point, I'd say that oil is presently a critical component in the defense of my freedom.
Without oil at prices reasonably reflecting the market (I'm not arguing it's at that level, just vastly closer to it thanks to Operation Desert Storm), the US economy is able to continue pumping along quite smoothly.
So, not only does our military find itself more easily able to afford to continue training, even going into action to defend our interests (not that every military action truly does, but that's not my point here), our economic success, contrasted to that of nations that are even more restrictive of their citizen's freedoms, offers useful evidence of the dangers of going down the route of socialism, which is, in my book, anti-freedom.
Since I'd like to be free to choose how and when I work, and for what fee, and leave it to the market, rather than the heavy hand of government, to decide whether to take me up on my choice or leave me unemployed, I consider the preservation of the free operation of the market to be an important component in the practicalities needed to preserve my freedom.
And note the symmetry -- the following of the Golden Rule -- of my concern here: I wish Saddam Hussein the same freedom to choose for himself the price at which he'll buy (or, in his specific case, sell) oil, because I believe everyone else's freedom to participate in this market is as important as my own.
That's why I don't consider "it was just about oil" to be an emotional hot-button when it comes to Desert Storm. Am I justifying that operation on moral grounds per se? No, though I don't exactly reject it morally either (beyond the simple "it's a use of force rather than a turning of the cheek" moral reasoning of Christ Jesus, which I try to follow but cannot say I do fully).
So, what I am saying is that, relative to certain other acts of aggression, the USA, often enough, acts to preserve important, practical, freedoms for all people, beyond just US citizens, certainly beyond just preserving the iron hand of governmental control.
(It's possible Bush41 was considering only that last aspect when he initially was of the mind that the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait wasn't worth bothering about -- that was before Margaret Thatcher "set him straight", as I recall.)
WHAT ARE THEIR AIMS, in your words? What are the corresponding aims of the US government?
Ah, you see I thought we both knew that.
In the short term, al queda wants us the hell out of the middle east. To them, we are meddlers and imperialists with no right to be there. We control the local governments and then stand back and pretend we're not, as if they're too stupid to realize that we're doing it. I know this must be hard for you to grasp, but to them we are oppressors. Ceasing that oppression is their goal. Long term? Who is to say.
Oh, they make that quite clear.
And, for a nation that "controls local governments", we sure manage to control them to do lots of things not in our own short-term interest, don't we? Hmm.
"Destroy America" might go the way that "Destroy Communism" did in this country, were they to get their near-term goal.
Frankly, that is my hope as well -- that, if we did stop "meddling" in their affairs, they'd get tired of bashing us and move on to live their lives.
I see too much evidence to the contrary. For one thing, there's plenty of reason to believe that if we removed ourselves wholesale from the region, it would end up a nuclear wasteland pretty quickly (Israel would perhaps not simply allow itself to be forced into the Mediterranean without an endgame-style fight). In my experience, people blame America not just for America's meddling, but for America's failure to meddle.
For another, it's clear that the USA gets little or no "cred" from Islam for its efforts on the part of Muslims to defend themselves from external attack, just as it gets no cred from you when it comes to things like that.
So, we can't participate in their markets (that's part of what you call "meddling" in their books, though you may well dispute whether it is meddling -- see, too many of their children buy our blue jeans, listen to our music, etc., and it's our fault, at least party, for offering it in their markets), we can't risk our own lives helping them out, we can't even meddle in the affairs of their enemies even to stay the hand of said enemies (we get no cred for keeping Israel from going even further, when it could have, in seizing and holding land, killing Arafat in the '80s, etc.).
The upshot is: complete and utter withdrawal from all Islamic territories.
And since many such territories have a proven record of being a breeding-ground for those committed to mass murder of Americans, we simply sit back and hope that doesn't happen.
Since that won't happen -- Americans would not choose to simply curl up and die, which is the upshot of your recommendation as I see it -- it's reasonable to expect all Islamic territories to be nuked in the near future, since we can't go in and meddle, yet must prevent them massacring us by the hundreds of thousands, millions, etc., which enough of them fully intend to do.
If you disagree, perhaps you could explain just what you do expect the US to do to protect itself against what is already a demonstrated threat as far as most Americans are concerned (i.e. no point saying Iraq wouldn't have ever had nukes even without Desert Shield/Storm; most Americans believe the risk was high enough, so go with what would be likely based on what Americans believe and how they act).
Feel free to argue why they're wrong, but you will be wasting your breath because it's beside the point.
Agreed.
The U.S. goals? Harder to say, but expanding our hegemony seems to be chief among them.
Hmm, seeing as the US is the world's sole superpower and has now demonstrated that we are easily capable of quite literally ruling the world by merely threatening any combination of nuke attack, large-scale conventional warfare, all the way down to pinprick, special-ops-type stuff, limited only by our own tendency to keep our military budget comparatively small, I'd say expansionism is extremely low on our list of things to do -- especially compared to historical superpowers.
But you consistently ignore one of my points, which is: the US has an imperfect military, therefore it is impossible for it to exist, especially be deployed in any useful fashion, without accidentally taking innocent human life.
That's true, I am ignoring it. If by "ignoring it" you mean "using it as one of the central cruxes of my argument, without which I wouldn't have a leg to stand on". I assume you are using that definition, because you're not too stupid to have realized how important this was. You obviously recall me saying that because civilian causualties are -inevitable-, and -unavoidable-, there is no way we could take military action without knowing in advance that civilian causualties -would- result. Then you remember me saying, when we take the action and civilians die, calling those deaths "accidents" or acting like they weren't -expected- is balderdash. We might not have -wanted- civilians die, but we -knew- they would.
Okay, you're right, you weren't ignoring it.
So you are, indeed, arguing that it is exactly as immoral to defend oneself against attack as it is to be an Al-Queda-style terrorist, simply because the former has a risk of killing innocents, just as the latter has, as its tactical goal the killing of innocents?
Well, that's what I thought you might be saying at one point yesterday, but decided you couldn't possibly mean that, and that you must instead think we're immoral because we aren't conducting this war more perfectly.
So, in your view, self-defense itself is immoral, because of the risks to innocents?
You try to support their claim by presenting some kind of "cosmic fairness" argument: "Al Queda has a weaker military, therefore it is necessary for them to murder civilians".
What the hell? That's not even close. Cosmic fairness? Where did you even get the idea I'm talking about fairness? I'm talking about practicality. al Queda can't match our military, and thus engaging our military is removed from the list of practical actions.
Well, under similar circumstances, the US, and Western nations in particular, have shown a tendency to simply give up, i.e. surrender. Why couldn't al Queda simply say "hey, we're outmatched, and what we're doing isn't important enough to engage in a likely-fruitless campaign to murder innocent people"?
I mean, if I take myself as an example, I could say that I'm pretty powerless. So does that mean I can go around killing innocent people to get attention for whatever cause I consider just?
Put another way: do you believe Timothy McVeigh was morally equivalent to Al Queda and the US government?
And, by extension, do you believe advocates of gun control are morally equivalent to Timothy McVeigh?
After all, McVeigh had basically no power -- certainly less than al Queda -- and he murdered fewer innocents than they (presumably) did on 9/11.
Further, he did it (if we can believe the evil US government;-) to call attention to the lack of constitutional and political safeguards surrounding the Waco debacle. I.e. not only did laws he considered trumped by the 2nd amendment get passed and brutally enforced, the woman who ordered the tanks in, precipitating (if not directly causing) the obliteration of an obscure right-wing Christian sect was allowed to remain in office, relatively unscathed by presiding over such a severe act.
Further, since things like the Waco debacle are clearly risks that anyone takes when they pass laws -- which are enforced by imperfect (albeit generally well-intentioned) law-enforcement agencies and agents (like Janet Reno) -- then those who push to pass gun-control laws, who do (clearly) have the power to affect others, are just as immoral as McVeigh.
Correct by your reasoning, or no?
just as someone would be a mathematical idiot if they equated two expressions that were clearly not identical by simply renaming two independent variables to the same name and then canceling them -- regardless of how much pseudo-intellectual hand-waving they engaged in to justify their results.
That's great! I love that analogy. So I guess I'm an idiot, because no matter how I try to make the equations look the same with some hand-waving -- let's call this process "algebra" -- you'll still insist they are different because the variables have different names.
Well, your earlier posts seemed to be saying that because al Queda had to use willful mass-murder of innocents to achieve its goals, while the USA need use only direct attacks on military combatants with inevitable, and intentionally small numbers of, collateral damage to achieve its goals, the two sides are morally equivalent.
That's an equation, right? I mean, arguing for equivalency amounts to an equation?
Now, it seems reasonable that accidentally killing someone isn't as morally repugnant as willfully doing so, and that the US killing innocents in the "War On Terror" is somewhere between those two extremes (closer to the former in any specific instance, closer to the latter overall), while al Queda is full-tilt on the latter extreme (they consider failure to murder innocents equivalent to failure regarding their
mission).
Therefore, one must conclude that, to achieve "equivalence", you've either canceled out the "goals" entirely, as if al Queda's and the USA's are morally equivalent (which you appear to argue elsewhere), or that you see al Queda's goals as morally superior to the USA's goals.
If that's the case, you haven't done a good job making it.
For example, the USA's goals do not include preventing Arab Muslims from "meddling" in its affairs to anywhere near the same extent as vice versa.
I.e. the US has no problem with them moving here, living here, participating in our sorta-free markets here, voting here, running for office here, recruiting people to Islam here, preaching in mosques here, and so on.
I mean, sure, we're in the process of negotiating just how permissive we'll be on many of these fronts: is preaching mass murder of Americans in mosques going to still be allowed, for example? (That's been going on in Britain, at least, and they're reconsidering their permissiveness as well.)
But, on the whole, the US is much more willing to allow Muslims to live freely here than vice versa.
In my book, that's exactly the sort of thing that makes the USA's goals morally superior to those of al Queda (and many other Muslim organizations) -- we practice the Golden Rule to a greater practical extent.
Amazing how you willfuly choose to ignore or overlook any factor in the equation of US vs. Al Queda morality that might favor the USA.
You haven't -made- any except to assert as axiom that we're superior because we're a democracy.
Hey, it was you who presented the equation, and chose to focus on what you did. It wasn't my job to fix your equation. I entered the discussion only because I found the equation to be morally idiotic, and asked for an explanation -- which you apparently have tried to give, but I fail to see how you can justify it still, and you appear to be resorting to dredging up all sorts of stuff that wasn't present in your original equation.
As far as I can see, your equation really is: "since the USA has a history of being really evil, it doesn't matter what anyone else does to it -- they'll be no less moral than the USA".
Is that correct, or not? It certainly is consistent with what lots of elites (including Bill Clinton) have said about our "culpability" since 9/11.
The whole point wasn't to say we weren't going to sacrifice lives... It was to show what they would lose if they didn't surrender. "We won't surrender" isn't a way to make the enemy surrender.
I presented that aspect only to illustrate that it was a choice we could have made. A moral person, faced with possibly accidentally killing innocents in defending himself, must consider surrendering. On the other hand, many people consider a strong person surrendering to a bully to be immoral, because it allows the bully to continue, even expand, his behavior. In that sense, the strong person cannot win on moral grounds (and that's true of the USA today, and throughout the 20th century): he's wrong if he defends himself and/or his friends, because he's "projecting his strength", and he's wrong if he surrenders, because he's "failing to act".
Anyway, I find it somewhat disturbing that you can justify to yourself wiping out 100,000 civilians for any reason.
I didn't justify it at all. I pointed out that it could be seen as somewhat preferable to killing even more American citizens in further conventional warfare, and even to surrendering, since the US represented, compared to WWII Japan, a somewhat less aggressive nation. And, by winning that war (against Japan and Germany), the world became a bit more moral because the surviving power was more interested in practical peace than waging war, even if just by a few degrees.
And that, to me, is the whole mystery of morality: at the extreme, it's easy to argue that any killing is simply wrong, therefore all killing is equally wrong. Which appears to be an element of your logic.
But, in practice, morality on earth is practiced by people, who are the only visible representatives of morality, and, on the whole, that means that if, say, 100 serial killers are killed in an act that prevents 100 innocent people from being killed, the world enjoys a corresponding degree of extra morality, on the whole.
Most people instinctively recognize this. That's why, e.g., they tend to mourn the death of a minister, priest, preacher, etc., even of another faith, moreso than that of a prostitute, drug dealer, or homeless person. Not that they necessarily value the life of the latter type of person less (though in many cases some probably do), but because they value the positive moral impulse given to society by the former, who had already decided to live their lives in that manner (something the prostitute, dealer, or homeless person might have gotten around to had they lived).
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.
Oh, this should be interesting.
Turns out, it was not, because you misinterpreted what I was getting at.
I was not saying "right makes might", nor "might makes right", though the former is a bit closer to what I mean.
When I say "morally superior", I mean that, in this discussion, in strict contrast to your argument for moral equivalence -- nothing more.
Nothing I said implied that nation X winning a victory over nation Y meant it was morally superior.
What I was getting at was, why is it that al Queda, which believes Allah is on its side, can't call on Allah to do the battles for it -- especially, kill the innocents, only as He sees fit, while preserving the victory?
History shows plenty of examples of "moral" cultures where this is precisely what has been done. (Whether these examples are all historically accurate is another issue -- that's what history, e.g. the Bible, teaches its adherents -- "the battle is God's", that sort of thing.)
Western cultures generally, since early in the 20th century especially, have come to believe that their morality allows, or possibly enables, them to win victories against great enemies without willfully killing civilians.
That belief is not uniform across these cultures, of course, but it better represents how the nations governed by these cultures behave in wartime compared to nations governed by other cultures, which don't (yet) hold to that belief.
And, history suggests that belief is not entirely without merit; after all, the nations that best represent that belief are largely free to direct their own way in the world, compared to those who are less so-representative.
So let me ask you -- what was it about us that made us morally superior to the Native Americans and let us win?
I didn't claim that we did win because of moral superiority. Though there certainly were elements of that that helped -- for example, we allow individual ownership of land, which gave individuals plenty of incentive to defend, as well as cultivate for maximum benefit to fellow peoples, that land -- something the previous inhabitants (not "natives" exactly, since it's likely the case their ancestors invaded and basically wiped out the indigenous Americans) did not have a great track record on.
Whether individual land ownership is a moral thing, I'm not sure, frankly, but it's probably a little bit more moral than a collective, run by an elite, owning the land on which, basically, serfs live and have to work as directed by that elite.
(I use "we" in the cultural sense here; it's entirely possible I'm part "native", though it seems the region of my ancestry from which that information comes is prone to those sorts of claims, even when they're not at all supported by the evidence. Previously, I'd assumed that the racism of European Americans was too uniform to allow the possibility of any to make up stories of being partly descended from "Indians", which was a somewhat simplistic assumption, I admit.)
Never have I heard "right makes might"!
So, you don't believe Moses, Elijah, Jesus, Paul, Gandhi, MLKJr, etc., achieved their great works due to any moral superiority over their peers?
In other words, you believe they could have just as easily lived their lives raping, killing, pillaging, stealing, lying, cheating, and so on, and still parted the Red Sea, ascended to Heaven, raised the dead, sent the British packing, and so on?
Do you therefore believe they "just happened" to be the ones who did these works, so we needlessly celebrate their characters when they were merely the lucky recipients of fate?
But in all seriousness... At this point I'm actually pissed that you had the gall to call me a moral idiot. I've had this discussion before with smart people who disagreed with me, and they could bring up good points. But you... You have the moral sense of a six-year-old schoolyard bully... You probably -were- one, and never grew out of it. Too bad those you terrorized weren't 'righteous' enough to teach you a lesson. Well, stay in your sandbox little boy, and let people with fully developed minds debate about things in the real world, where life is more complicated than "I can bea you up, so I'm right".
I'd let this stand as a testament to your willingness and ability to comprehend simple English (since what I wrote couldn't possibly be intelligently interpreted the way you take it), but, since you appear to be interested...
...actually, I was the sort of kid who was sometimes picked on by bullies, and sometimes stood up against them, for himself, and sometimes for a friend. I have a pretty-vivid memory of putting myself in between a friend, who was the oft-picked-on boy in school, and pretty much the whole rest of the class at recess, swinging my jacket at them to make sure they knew that if they tried to approach him and do whatever it is they were doing (which I can't recall), they'd get the business end of the jacket's zipper. (Sounds pretty trivial, I know, but for a 4th-grader, that was a pretty scary moment.)
And those are moments I'm proud of, compared to moments of cowardice, when I avoided helping a friend, or gave in to being bullied.
What I've learned through life is that the problem with the world is not that there are too many evil people, because there are not actually that many willing to act on it, or that there are too few good people willing to act on their goodness.
The problem is, there are too many people "in the middle" who'll constantly find excuses to not act, to not make practical choices between good and evil. They'll advocate "peace" only when it doesn't involve a commitment on their own part to the success of the peace process ("commitment" meaning: they and their families die if it fails). When somebody like me stands up for what's right, they won't stand with me, waiting to see "what happens", though they might come to me later in private and say "thanks for standing up", to which all I can say is, "gee, thanks", and wonder why they didn't have the guts, the spine, the courage, etc. to stand with me when it counted.
And there are people like you, or are motivated by people like you, who say "the US is the moral equivalent of Al Queda" and thus discourage the middle-grounders from fighting on behalf of what is clearly the morally superior, though clearly not the morally perfect, entity.
So, in my experience, you are the sort of person who, upon observing the schoolyard bully Howard beating the crap out of little Jimmy, constantly explains to everyone that Jimmy should have done
Howard's homework like he asked; that Jimmy's parents make more money than Howard's; that Howard doesn't get as much attention from the teachers as Jimmy; therefore that Howard can't be expected to do anything else, and so it's Jimmy's own fault he's getting the crap kicked out of him.
As a result, too many observers are convinced, by your rhetoric, to not intervene to prevent Jimmy from being pummelled, possibly killed, or probably turning into a bully himself down the road, and that sometimes bullying is just to be expected, not stood up against, since nobody who would stand up against it is himself perfect.
Could you please identify where that assertion was made? I must have missed it; I saw an assertion of saving lives generally (e.g. of US citizens), and plenty of morally idiotic assertions on your part, but I didn't see that.
Look it up yourself. In the parent the the post where you quoted me, the poster was attempting to suggest that the harm done by the dead civilians was outweighed by the "estimated 100K" lives saved.
Hmm, I didn't read that as meaning "estimated 100K lives of those living under Taliban rule saved", which is what I thought you claimed had been said.
BTW, it's becoming increasingly obvious that "moraly idiotic" to you means "not asserting that the US is Good by Divine Right", and i'm starting to take pride in the moniker.
No, that's not what it means to me at all.
For instance, the USA (in the form of its President) willfully murdered innocent African Muslims in a cruise-missile attack on a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan. I believe there was no moral justification for an attack so sudden that it couldn't be preceded by just the sort of on-the-ground verification that it wasn't a chem-weapons plant, and that there was probably no practical justification (based on threat assessment) either.
So, I conclude that it was highly likely the attack was made at that time not because of an actual perceived threat to the USA's safety but rather to the President's personal power -- it was timed to coincide with, and thus draw attention away from, certain grand-jury testimony scheduled to be given involving some stuff the President had lied about to the American people earlier that year.
Further, Americans had plenty of opportunity to discover the lie, figure out the timing, and yet chose to not remove that President from office, despite the fact that the whole point of having "offices" in that sense of the word is to ensure that people place their duty to them above their own personal desires. (I.e. we elect someone President not because they will go to war to save their own butts, but because they won't, and much of what goes into laws about how and when people are forcibly removed from office is the importance of the detection and prevention of selfish behavior on the part of officeholders.)
I said then, and believe it's been reasonably borne out by events since, that we would pay a very steep price for our amoral, as well as immoral, behavior in that whole episode ("we" being the USA) -- willingly letting a criminal off the hook because we didn't want to "shake up our economy", while allowing that criminal and his cohorts to trash the reputations of people like Ken Starr, making them out to be the source of all the evil, when they were, largely, just doing the job they were appointed to do (though perhaps sometimes overzealously).
So, no, I don't buy the Divine Right argument.
Neither do I buy your argument that the USA is as evil as any terrorist organization out there.
I was questioning the assertion that our campaign has anything to do with "saving lives" of those who suffer under the Taliban.
Could you please identify where that assertion was made? I must have missed it; I saw an assertion of saving lives generally (e.g. of US citizens), and plenty of morally idiotic assertions on your part, but I didn't see that.
Meanwhile, I don't even see the point of your question if you did raise it. What if our campaign had nothing to do with saving lives of Afghans living under the Taliban? Does that make us as morally repugnant as the 9/11 terrorists, as you seem to claim?
Maybe, just maybe, we're conducting a campaign that we're happy to see has a side effect of saving the lives of Afghans, rather than simply wiping them all out for our own convenience (the sad "turn Afghanistan into a lake" cartoon that went around the 'net shortly after 9/11).
No, we'll still be militarily indomitable. Clearly, military might is not feasible. Thus other methods become necessary.
Necessary to do what, pray tell?
Seems to me you keep willfully omitting that tiny little item that might break down your whole argument that the USA is in no way morally superior, or at least behaving in a morally superior way, to Al Queda.
Seems to me that waging a war to, e.g. in just one dimension, ensure the freedom of peoples (especially US citizen) to practice the religion they individually choose is morally superior to Al Queda's waging war (I'll call it that, since you try to equate their terrorism to our war) to impose their religion throughout the world.
So, please, either own up to that, or explain just why it is "necessary" for Al Queda to murder thousands of innocent US citizens. "Achieve their aims" ain't the answer: WHAT ARE THEIR AIMS, in your words? What are the corresponding aims of the US government?
First, I'm not claiming moral neutrality with respect to the US government. I'm clamining equivalency, a lack of superiority. Neither actions are morally "neutral".
Sorry, that's what I meant by "morally neutral... with respect to...": moral equivalency.
You are claiming that since we accidentally killed some civilians while trying to get at known mass-murderers, we're morally no better than the mass-murderers who willingly murdered many civilians.
You try to support their claim by presenting some kind of "cosmic fairness" argument: "Al Queda has a weaker military, therefore it is necessary for them to murder civilians".
But you consistently ignore one of my points, which is: the US has an imperfect military, therefore it is impossible for it to exist, especially be deployed in any useful fashion, without accidentally taking innocent human life.
You equate the two situations morally. In my opinion, that makes you a moral idiot, just as someone would be a mathematical idiot if they equated two expressions that were clearly not identical by simply renaming two independent variables to the same name and then canceling them -- regardless of how much pseudo-intellectual hand-waving they engaged in to justify their results.
Second, I'm not claiming justification. I was very explicit about that, so I can't see how you missed it. I'm claiming not that murdering thousands of innocent civilians is justifiable, but that it isn't justifiable when we do it either.
I didn't think I was saying you were claiming justification -- just that you were, by trying to justify some degree of immorality by Al Queda, you were hoping to thereby convict the US as a whole of equivalent immorality, for doing what is clearly necessary for its defense, by most any rational person's assessment.
Third, the way in which what they did could have helped is to demonstrate the ability to hurt us despite lacking military strength. Since our military might can't be beaten, they tried to break the spirit behind it.
Again, WHY DO THEY NEED TO BEAT OUR MILITARY? It wasn't attacking them -- you even criticized it, implicitly, earlier by saying "if the Taliban was so evil, why didn't we go and root them out before 9/11".
Amazing how you willfuly choose to ignore or overlook any factor in the equation of US vs. Al Queda morality that might favor the USA.
It's the same reason we dropped a nuke on Hiroshima -- to say "look, if you don't give in, your people will die".
No, it's not the same reason. The nukes were dropped to say "look, we're not going to surrender unconditionally to your military, nor are we going to sacrifice another hundreds of thousands of American lives to defeat you conventionally, even though we believe it's sufficiently inevitable that you could see it if you were behaving rationally".
Since the Japanese behaved, as a warrior culture, less rationally vis-a-vis the morality of innocent life than the Germans, they ended up on the wrong end of two nukes.
Al Queda did not come under any serious attack on their civilian population from the USA before the 9/11 attacks, and even since then, the USA has not engaged in a campaign to murder innocent civilians as a means to change the behavior of Al Queda.
And the reasoning for that isn't entirely "moral", at least not necessarily so: the Japanese circa WWII were much more culturally supportive of the war effort, from what I understand, than have been the civilian populations infiltrated by Al Queda, on the whole.
To the extent civilian populations oust or quash Al Queda themselves before the US gets around to it, they'll be able to control their own destiny.
They obviously failed in their gambit because 1) it turns out our 'spirit' is more likely to turn vengeful than be broken
Not vengeful; willing to act to defend innocent life against international terrorism. There's a difference between vengeance and justice, you know.
and 2) they didn't do nearly enough damage to cause us to fold like Japan did.
But if they had the weaponry (nukes), they would have, and, IMO, that's possible down the road anyway. They don't have the moral fibre in their culture to say "whoah, that'd be overkill", because 9/11 itself was overkill.
Look, you are really acting either out of complete ignorance or stupidity, because Al Queda spokesmen (including bin Laden) have been quite clear about their desires: to kill Americans, to taste American blood, blah blah blah.
This isn't the rhetoric of the underlings in a war effort geared up to defend territory or a way of life; it's the rhetoric of a leadership that is committed to murdering innocent Americans (and other Westerners) anywhere, anytime, because they believe Allah wills it.
But you don't need to be an expert to see that the odds of having an effect are better than trying to match our military muscle.
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.
The USA did not match the British on paper during the Revolution, or during the War of 1812. Yet it won. Israel was sure-dead in the various campaigns conducted against it over the past various decades. Yet it won.
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.
It also shows that a nation-state unwilling to use military might (including the inevitable collateral damage that goes with it) to defend itself will, very likely, go extinct.
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.
If it was morally equivalent to the USA, why wouldn't people like you help it out?
But when he'd made that choice, and the sanctions were demonstrably not working for what we had hoped, then wouldn't continuing them be considered fscked?
By that reasoning, boycotts against Nike, Nestle, and so on, were fscked for as long as they didn't immediately achieve their objective, since they inevitably (though indirectly, like US sanctions against Iraq), caused innocent people to suffer.
Of course, that's not to make the situations morally equivalent. If, instead of the boycotts, people concerned about poorly paid workers and such bought more, the end result would not clearly have been that the corporations involved would end up with weapons of mass destruction and the means to use them.
I'm sure I'm not the only one to wonder, so I'll ask: to who or what do you owe your education in moral issues, teaching you to reason (if I may use that word loosely) the way you do?
why didn't we root out the Taliban before they attacked us?
Because, if we had, moral idiots (to borrow a phrase from an anonymous coward) like yourself would then claim that the collateral damage inevitably suffered as a result of a "needless campaign" against the Taliban proved that the USA is evil.
If the world's leadership had a moral spine and an adequate degree of moral understanding, organizations like Al Queda, the PLO, and so on, would never be able to flourish like they do in the first place.
That a comparatively few innocents get dusted in the efforts needed to slap down those committed to mass-murder to promote their agenda is a sad, sad result of moral idiocy on the part of the world's (primarily left-wing) elite leadership, which generally prefers buying off and appeasing terrorists (like one who won the Nobel Peace Prize a short while ago).
Even obliterating an air force as large as Nellis isn't going to change that in the slightest.
But obliterating four civilian aircraft full of innocents, two office buildings full of innocents, and so on, is going to change that?
So, please, tell us all how Al Queda bettered their prospects by carefully calculating that 2001-09-11 would achieve their objectives (which you appear to be claiming are morally neutral with respect to those of the US government) with sufficiently greater likelihood than attacking Nellis instead to justify the willful murder of thousands of innocent civilians.
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.
Let me get this straight: you believe that since what the USA wants to achieve with its attacks and Al Queda wanted to achieve with its attacks can both be described as "goals", that you can therefore treat those two "goals" as if it were an identity variable, divide it out of the equation, leaving only differences in budget and capabilities, and thus prove no moral distinction between the US government and Al Queda?
How interesting.
Thankfully, most rational people recognize that the goals of the respective organizations are exactly what make one more moral and ethical than the other.
Which is why vastly more rational people strive to leave the domain of one for that of the other than the other way around -- even before 2001-09-11.
Here, try this example out, so you don't get so confused by your anti-American hate.
Marsha and Billy live in the same town. Billy kicks cats, molests children, rapes women, steals money, and so on.
Marsha tells people Billy is a bad person and should be resisted, but too many townsfolk practice "tolerance" by trying various tactics like buying Billy off, setting him up with sisters and daughters (who he then rapes), and so on.
Finally Billy decides he's not getting whatever he wants out of life because Marsha says such bad things about him, but thinks nobody's going to stand up to him, so to teach Marsha a lesson, since he can't kill her because of her strength, skill, etc., he kills her mother, father, sister, and two of her friends.
The townsfolk, "up in arms" but not really prepared to do battle themselves (having accepted the dogma that buying off evil-doers turns them into good-doers so long that they've neglected to arm themselves adequately against evil), come out in support for Marsha and accept that she's gonna have to do some serious butt-kicking, though some express "concern" that she not be too "violent".
Marsha, knowing that killing Billy is necessary (there being no practical law-enforcement system in town, equivalent to the present international situation), she undertakes to kill him herself, rather than let him kill even more people.
But Billy, being somewhat clever, disguises himself, hides himself, does whatever it takes to escape Marsha, who he recognizes as being fully capable of killing him were he to be out in the open, doing battle on a "fair" basis.
Marsha discovers he's hiding in an orphanage, has a gun, and has killed a few kids there to gain control of the local "authorities" (those in charge of the orphanage).
So she arms herself, goes in, guns ablaze, and kills Billy as well as two kids.
The "compassionate" townsfolk express alarm at Marsha's killing of the two kids.
But most of Marsha' supporters just grit their teeth and say "she done what had to be done".
Then Chris Burke comes along and says "since both Marsha and Billy killed innocents, and since Marsha plainly knew she might accidentally do so by going after Billy but still put her goals over the lives of those kids, the only difference between Marsha and Billy is that Marsha is stronger, bigger, and smarter -- but not the least more moral, compassionate, or ethical. After all, Marsha and her supporters didn't express sufficient 'concern' over the two kids she killed."
Now, since Chris Burke can't possibly miss the fact that Marsha has been openly participating in fairly rational discussions about how to resist evil, whereas Billy has actively practiced evil and tended to avoid any rational, open discussion of his acts; and the fact that Marsha acts out of self-sacrificing risk-taking to save the lives of others; Chris Burke clearly understands that the only thing achievable by speaking out against the killing of innocents generally, such as by practicing the moral calculus he proposes, is the shutting down of people like Marsha, but not people like Billy, who are unmoved by any verbeage not backed up by force of the sort Marsha brings to the table.
Conclusion? Chris Burke wishes for the world to have no Marshas in it whatsoever, but is unwilling to do anything practical or effective about the Billys of the world.
Lesson for today: those who refuse to reason clearly about, and then resist, evil, ultimately bear responsibility for the "collateral damage" that occurs when someone else has to do it for them. They may then cry "evil" over the collateral damage; since they didn't resist it previously, the time to avoid it subsequently has passed, and their rhetoric rings hollow.
Not to belittle GNU -- but if the Kernel doesn't matter, then why is Stallman so desperate to take credit for / redirect credit away from Linux? And if the Kernel doesn't matter, then I guess HURD doesn't matter, either.
Sheesh, do we have to go through this AGAIN??
First, just where has RMS written that "the Kernel doesn't matter"?
Second, just where is he "so desperate to take credit for" the Linux kernel?
Please. Post links. I want to see where exactly he tries to convince people that the kernel doesn't matter, or that the Linux kernel should be credited to GNU and not to Linus and his team. Please. Even just one link, to something that needs no "explanation" by you of what he "really means".
Meanwhile, the fact remains that Linux does not and, for all practical purposes, cannot exist without GNU. (At least, last I checked, there exists no system on which the Linux kernel runs and can compile itself that is 100% GNU-free. This, despite years now of some people ranting about how they hate RMS and GNU so much that they'll go off and write a GNU replacement so they can use and develop Linux without it.)
However, GNU systems exist, and can compile themselves, without Linux.
This does not mean the kernel "doesn't matter", or that we shouldn't call the Linux kernel "the Linux kernel".
Because, the fact also remains that a huge portion of GNU systems out there are running the Linux kernel. (Maybe most; maybe more than 90%; I don't know. I do know I run it.)
And the fact also remains that, without the unique contributions of the Linux developers and community, GNU would be much more accurately described as a "niche OS" than GNU/Linux could possibly be today.
No question RMS tries (and perhaps too persistently) to help people understand that, just because the whole OS became known as "Linux" does not mean it consists 95% of the kernel, 5% of other stuff that happens to include a bit of GNU.
But while it can certainly be said that, without GNU, Linux itself would have been unlikely, it's also quite clear (to me, anyway) that Linus choosing not only GNU software but the GNU GPL for his kernel brought worldwide use of, and fame regarding, GNU that it would not have achieved, even if the Hurd had come out "on time" according to the original schedule.
Correcting people's misperceptions of these issues does not necessarily constitute disrespecting Linus or Linux, so you'll have to point to quotes by RMS that actually contain such disrespect to convince me.
Absent that, please stop wasting everyone's time and energy making claims you can't back up as a means to attack someone like RMS. There are plenty of other ways to attack him, if you like, using stuff he actually has written, I'm sure.
I gather that's the question Microsoft has been asking itself for a few years now, and its answers have included jumping into new markets (X-Box, for example).
A saving grace of having GNU, Linux, BSD, and other free-source-software systems with adequate desktop capabilities will become evident if Microsoft ever abandons that market in its quest for higher profits in another market sector.
At that point, sure, lots of people might not care about the inability to continue using state-of-the-art desktop computer systems, but those who do will, finally, choose free software, because there won't be enough $$$ in selling licenses for the propriety-software market.
(Replace "desktop computer" with "Fortran 77 compiler" and you can put most of the above in the past tense; Microsoft stopped developing its F77 compiler many years ago.)
As the "end of the line" becomes more evident on the horizon, more and more people who do wish to use desktop systems on modern hardware will decide to jump off the MS/proprietary ship, so they can do it on their schedule, not someone else's.
And it's probably the case that this process (of moving off proprietary platforms, even for desktop computing) has already started, even if as a trickle, for exactly these reasons: better to take a small initial re-training cost now than a much-larger cost that inevitably lies somewhere down the road.
You're right, his reaction is childish. But it's a reaction to deceptive advertising and product design. Broadband providers continue to promise 24/7, full bandwith, "It's DSL, not a shared line!", enjoy videostreaming, etc. If THEY were decent, good or moral, they would just say what the limits are. Or they could charge extra for the traffic. Either way people wouldn't be so excited about broadband and the provider would lose business. As long as they stick to deceptive advertising, the only moral way to treat bandwith hogs is to write them off as advertising costs.
I won't disagree with your analysis.
But the problems we have in the world are almost never because of immoral actions; rather, because of immoral reactions.
The deaths of 70-plus people (including children) at Waco, the Oklahoma City bombing, the 2001-09-11 attacks -- all were reactions to immoral actions or other reactions, as perceived by the players involved.
If somebody else's immorality were such an easy excuse for one's own immoral behavior, then we needn't ever again consider moral issues at all, since everyone will always have an excuse.
So, you're right, his childish reaction is a reaction.
But it's not a response, and it's definitely an attack on his neighbors, upon whom he wishes to impose misery, presumably to try and win them over to his "cause".
(I wonder if he's "man enough" to have leafletted his neighbors explaining his position, e.g. that he's gratuitously sucking up their shared Broadband to try to convince some corporation to change its ways? Or does he just expect his neighbors to suffer poor throughput, without understanding the reasons why?)
I'd counter that it's the corps that cause the world to suck.
No, he's right, it's people like you. Corporations are, fundamentally, groups of people, and the more they are like you, the worse they behave.
If I could get decent up- *and* down-stream speeds, I'd behave in a heartbeat.
Or, if you were a decent, good, or moral person, you'd behave.
Instead, you willfully and intentionally choose to directly disrupt your neighbor's Broadband access by sucking up all the shared resources they, as well as you, pay for under an arrangement that assumes (without being able to easily enforce it) that such abuse will be rare.
Further, you willfully and intentionally choose to indirectly increase the costs borne by all your fellow users of the service -- even those not directly impacted by your bandwidth-burning escapades -- in a quixotic attempt to change the practices of a corporation.
You could just terminate your service. Or just use what you need, not abuse it and your neighbors, and find another approach to changing the global corporate ethic.
The problem is that they don't offer it and thereby cripple us otherwise non abusive subscribers.
But you're an abusive subscriber.
As a fellow Broadband user, be assured that you are acting as my enemy.
I stand by my protest.
It's not a protest. It's a petulant, childish, act of vandalism.
It's nothing more ethical nor moral than expressing your frustration at a lack of proper environmental oversight by the US Government by burning large tracts of old-growth forests.
Of course, I can understand how you came to believe you were acting appropriately. Techno-nerds seem prone to believe their ability to do something technically "elite" trumps any straightforward moral code that would rebuke their behavior. That's why, for example, people can't make moral distinctions between a DDOS attack and a "slashdotting" -- they look only at the effects, ignoring the motives of those contacting the server.
So you probably think you're some kind of technically elite uberhacker and therefore privileged to attack your neighbors in ways they cannot possibly defend themselves against, short of disconnecting themselves from Broadband in favor of some other less-featureful and/or more-expensive solution (something you yourself plainly refuse to do, so you decide to punish others for your own decisions, and blame "The Man").
Now, if one or two of your neighbors decided to suck up all your fresh air by setting fires all around your house, maybe then you'd begin to rise above your own moral idiocy and see such behavior as generally immoral -- because you won't be quite so impressed with the technology at that point?
In short: when you were taught to share with your neighbors in kindergarten, that wasn't meant to include sharing your misery. Grow up and start behaving like a responsible adult. I'm sure you have it in you somewhere.
Someone should make a movie about a bunch of Open Genome zealots using personal computers with huge hard-drive arrays to store and experiment with DNA sequences.
Maybe that's a good thing, since this is more likely a trademark issue than a copyright one anyway...
Indeed, the incorrect terminology in that post isn't the only source of confusion on the overall issue.
But I keep hearing people (specifically, those who I assume know more about the legal issues than I) refer to such issues as copyright ones, that I'm not sure either way.
Seems to me trademark law would apply when the labeling might mislead the public, which seems highly unlikely in this case. (Besides, I thought it was generally acceptable to re-use movie names, i.e. they aren't themselves trademarked.)
For all I know, maybe there is substantial precedent or even law that applies the standard the poster was claiming (level to which the IP was zealously protected in previous cases) in the narrow sort of situation that this case falls under when it comes to copyright law.
But the fairly-cogent posts I read (yesterday) here seemed to not mention such a standard, and seemed quite insistent on not only using the phrase "copyright law", but on point-by-point highlighting elements of the law that I'm quite sure are consistent with copyright law, yet inconsistent with trademark law.
(By now, it should be clear that IANAL.)
So I focused primarily on something I'm pretty darn sure of: copyright law does not mandate that a plaintiff demonstrate a history of not ignoring other potential infringements to nearly the same extent that trademark law does.
Absent some pretty compelling references to actual law and/or precedent, I found, and still find, the original post to which I responded to be insufficient in its attempt to persuade by pronouncement.
GCC only compiles code, it does not check for quality or if it breaks anything. Does this mean we should stop using GCC as well?
Actually, GCC does perform some checks for quality and whether code it's compiling might break. Which is why lots of people choose to compile with it rather than a (hypothetical) stripped-down compiler.
And nobody here, that I've seen, has argued that people should "stop using [CVS]".
GCC, CVS, etc., are tools, not software development processes.
When the discussion revolves around, as it apparently does in this case, the question of how best to design a development process to suit the needs of Linux developers, those who say "why not use CVS?" are about as clueless as someone who interjects, in the midst of a discussion regarding how best to site, design, and build a bridge across a body of water, "why not use a Craftsman hammer?".
I'm curious -- could you explain how, exactly, some random non-MS user (who I don't recall hearing of before) actually is able to make you stick with buggy software (which he's exploiting), when MS itself wilfully engages in the same tactics on a global scale so as to literally force millions of people to use MS software instead of reasonable alternatives?
I don't mean to be funny here, but I can't help saying it:
If you let people like Nick Moffett "make" you use Windows, then the e-terrorists have already won.
Seriously, as a longtime GNU/Linux user, it's possibly the case that I've had more emails sent to me that were partially or completely, yet unnecessarily, unreadable due to MS software being used to author them than you've had total emails sent to you your entire life.
But do I call MS's behavior childish and stubbornly refuse to use it as a result?
Okay, well, maybe I do, but more because I don't want to run software that is, literally, hostile to its end users (including those receiving email from me).
But there's no way I'm going to let someone like Nick Moffett chase me off GNU/Linux, since his actions in no way affect the readability of email I write to my friends -- unlike what happens when I try to use MS software and have to accept, or work around, the childish (greediness, short-sightedness, whatever) way in which MS software is put together.
That being said, I don't cotton to the idea of joining the MS campaign of turning what should and easily could be a shared space of interoperable protocols into a battlefield fought over by camps engaged in a constantly-escalating arms race.
So while this "trick" looks like something worth knowing about and deploying once in a while to make a point, it's not something I'd recommend as a wise practice on the part of free-software enthusiasts.
Your point about wanting to control other people being "evil" is well taken. I don't think that I ever said that individuals must submit themselves to any particular order, though.
Okay, I understand that, and it seems you don't intend to imply individuals must submit themselves to any particular disorder either, eh?;-)
When I see a term like "anarchism", or "anarchy" used in the context implying a system of governance (or degree thereof), I usually treat it as an outlining of a system to be adopted by enough people to make it ubiquitous in a population. But, of course, the very word "anarchy", treated as a description of the behavior of a collection of agents, denies that interpretation; hence my confusion, which I have yet to thoroughly research, over the use of the term "anarchy" to describe what amounts to a low-overhead form of collectivism, or to justify extremist violence.
I choose to think of the world as fundamentally anarchic, and any social systems we build on top of that are nevertheless rooted in it.
You make a key distinction between "fundamentally anarchic" and "systemically anarchic", if I'm using those terms right.
"Fundamentally anarchic", if it means what I think you mean by it, is true at least in the sense that it cannot not be true. In that sense, our own brains and bodies, even our molecules, are "fundamentally anarchic", and any behaviors we think we observe, and to which we attach labels, are merely emergent behaviors, arising from the constant interactions of bazillions of tiny particles and energies.
Is there another sense in which you use that phrase that distinguishes our society from, say, a colony of ants?
"Systemically anarchic" is, I hope, a good term to more precisely describe a system intentionally designed to function well (however that's defined) with minimized need for heirarchical command-and-control systems. It seems to me that most "anarchists" are advocating this, rather than simply observing that, from a biological, chemical, physical, and quantum-mechanics level, everything's just bits of matter floating around.
So, my question about anarchy, as well as about Christianity, boils down to this: is it necessary to reserve some degree of force, or tyrannical control, for use in defining and defending the boundaries of the system being advocated, and/or to enable the conversion of some society from its present form to the desired form?
In both cases, "yes" suggests that the system being advocated, itself, is not the perfect form for all interaction that it might be advertised as. In that case, it amounts to little more than a Really Great Idea that some number of people impose on another (hoping they "get with the program") rather than a Universal Truth to be revealed to all of us. (At least with Christianity, you get a God, one divine Mind, to tell us all about it for free.;-)
And, in both cases, "no" allows room for society to come to grips with the proposed system slowly, over time. Again, this suggests that merely proposing the system isn't enough (in Christianity, this is called "preaching the gospel"), therefore, the system isn't "perfect" in the abstract sense that everyone immediately "gets" it, but what system is, besides the universe itself?
And that "no" answer denies what seems to be actions by "extremist" anarchists and Christians, which is not always a politically wise thing to say to those who commit their lives to promote the idea (based on identity of label, at least) you or I wish to promote.
You can't get away from the fact that once everything falls apart, all you're left with is the basic respect people have (or don't have) for each other.
When I read this in your comment yesterday morning (and was too busy to respond until now), it just put a big smile on my face, because you nailed what I've come to believe, and have been telling certain friends and acquaintances recently.
Specifically, all human organization -- government, church, corporation, family -- is built on a fabric, or network, of trust relationships between the humans inside, as well as outside, the organization. These relationships are not necessarily 100% "I trust you" ones, rather, they're characterized by statements such as "I trust that you'll learn to not put your hand on a hot stove, between my saying 'no' and your trying it anyway" and "I trust that my passing a law making something illegal will help you understand that you can either obey it or risk my doing violence to you directly or via some other trust-relationships I happen to have".
Everything else -- laws, procedures, traditions, discussions around the dinner table -- augment, but never can replace, those trust-relationships.
So, the beauty of "anarchy", or, the turning away from heirarchical command-and-control systems, is that it makes more efficient use of trust-relationships, allowing for better overall coordination even in the face of failures in the relationships.
E.g. I'd rather trust you to contribute, as your resources allow, to those having needs in your community, as you see fit, than trust a vast array of legislators, judges, executives, tax collectors, police, and prison guards to make sure that you will contribute a certain percentage of your income to a common pool from which a specific amount will be deducted and, in turn, contributed to someone in your community that I (indirectly via this beauracracy) have decided needs your money.
It's not that Anarchism is always better than another *ism, but I think it has a greater potential to serve the needs of "the many and the one".
I still hesitate about going too far down that road, perhaps because of my exploration of my Christian faith.
As I see it, anarchy, as a turning away from heirarchical command-and-control, is indeed similar to what Christ preached.
But as an "ism" -- avoiding heirarchies and/or command-and-control systems as a goal in itself -- I don't see it. At least not yet.
So, I think you're right, it's "better".
But, I think what's "best" might involve more of a focus on getting away from tyranny -- the imposition of one's will on another -- than on the org-chart-style perception of the system.
Consider flocking behavior (birds, fish, etc.). The system appears heirarchical, at least to the casual observer -- a leader or several, a bunch of followers, some more exposed to dangers (predators) and advantages (a fresh environment and other resources) by virtue of being on the outside edges, the rest "safely" in the middle of the pack.
But flocks rarely involve command-and-control, or explicit heirarchical, structures.
Are they therefore "anarchy" in the simplest sense of the word? Clearly not, since they're quite well-ordered to our eyes. But do they meet a typical anarchist's definition of a "better" society, I wonder?
I'd tend to think so, but haven't been able to tell for sure.
What I do know is that flocking requires no tyranny -- components, or individuals, that decide to leave the flock are not punished by the flock for doing so. (The hawk or shark might punish them; the eligible mate or rare scrap of food might reward them; but the flock apparently has no need for its own reward/punishment system.)
Raised to the much-higher level of intelligence implied by substituting humans for birds and fish, does the ideal system involve some heirarchical organization, at least on an ad-hoc, per-project basis?
I suspect it does, but, as long as the tyrannical element is missing, I think it fits the Christian ideal (on earth anyway), and yet am not sure to what extent it fits any particular anarchic ideal.
(Of course, there are plenty of practical problems to solve to reach this ideal. Concentrating resources in the hands of a few is an efficient way of ensuring the survival of the many in lots of situations, from the mother who takes the family water buckets to the river to the military that controls all the nation's nuclear weapons. So how does the collective ensure that the individual doesn't abscond with, or abuse or destroy, those precious resources -- that the mother doesn't take the water to another family with a more attractive, single father, better-behaved children; that the military doesn't fire or destroy its missiles improperly? Without traditions, laws, and procedures that either force correct behavior or enforce it by punishing, down the road, incorrect behavior, the group must either have a viable answer or be prepared to, on occasion, suffer the consequences.)
I would say that the quality of Anarchy in any society reflects the values of the society. That is, when The Man isn't watching, how closely do people follow the unwritten rules of society? Are you gonna loot that store down the road? Are you gonna kill your neighbour's yappy dog? Are you gonna help that old lady to cross the street? If you need constant threats to keep people in line, there is a real problem with your society. A lack of ethics in day-to-day interaction is not diminished by invoking "democracy" and "freedom" as if it were a mantra.
I'm not quite sure I understand that last sentence (did you really mean the lack of ethics is not so diminished?), but the rest of it, 100% right, in my humble opinion. As you probably expected, once you saw the network-of-trust-relationships stuff I wrote above, inspired by having already read your comments yesterday.
Of course, in the West, we are much more sophisticated these days. Instead of beating our people, we con them with marketing and scare them with The News. It amounts to the same thing.
I disagree. There are similarities of motive -- of directing the behavior of others -- but vast differences in amount and effectiveness of control.
By putting less direct stress on other humans (not no stress, I stress;-), using techniques such as advertising instead of direct "persuasion" like beatings, you leave those humans with more opportunity to thoughtfully consider your "pitch" and, perhaps more importantly, take responsibility for their actions or inactions.
I'm not the one seeking control. I don't care if others call themselves Anarchists and smash shit in the name of Anti-Globalism. That's not me.
Hallelujah and Amen!
(Sorry, that got away from me there.;-)
I think the real Anarchists (both Left and Right) need to work together to figure out the mechanics of a Principled Anarchy.
That's a worthy research topic from an academic point of view.
I'm more interested in their answer to this question: "What are you doing in your life, today, that demonstrates, even in small ways, your desire to live the lifestyle you profess will work for others, and what are you learning from those attempted demonstrations?"
Me, I'm learning a lot by taking the small steps in my own life of trying to follow Christ, rather than jumping up on a pedestal (directly or by proxy) and telling everyone to do things My Way. And by "learning" I mean, learning what does and doesn't work, etc.
In the meantime, the only thing I do wish people would do is ask themselves "who benefits in a nation of politically passive consumers?"
Well, I'd suggest "politically active producers", which, in some ways, amounts to a large portion of the population.
But that doesn't concern me much. Our relationships (in the US anyway) are so variegated; the woman who cleans my house buys products designed by people who buy software written by companies who pay my consulting fees. Is she a "politically passive consumer" of my software, by not understanding the full ramifications on my profession and freedom of the DMCA or SSSCA? Okay, maybe yes, but she's hardly politically passive as a producer -- of my nicely cleaned house, once a week anyway -- who has to deal directly with all the legislated annoyances of being her own boss, for just one example.
And not only are people simultaneously politically passive consumers and, often, producers, they tend to grow into more politically astute, whether passive or active, citizens, over time.
So, aside from "preaching the gospel", to help people avoid the pitfalls (say, higher credit-card debt) of being politically passive consumers, I see little need to worry about The System That Supports Or Maybe Produces Them.
But then, that's partly because I have bigger fish to fry -- my own mindset about other humans, which still has got to evolve, and is, in my world, much more important than collective behavior of humans as viewed by me through that very prism in my thinking.
I like the idea of thinking of "group mind" strategies leading to coordinating laws and a procedural(managerial?) mindset.
Yeah, it seems to me that where nature has many examples of such laws and procedures as the result of emergent behavior due to genetics and natural selection, primates and especially humans exhibit individual awareness of the need to adapt such laws to the necessities of the environment, so as to improve the "thinking process" of the group. (While most primates presumably consider the group to extend no further than its own species, if beyond its own tribe, humans seem fully able to explicitly define their "group mind" to include members of other species.)
The difference now is that there is the potential for groups to make better decisions faster, due to increased access to information, lower transmission latency, and higher bandwidth. If we work to incorporate this improved information technology into the culture of decision-making, we can revolutionize all aspect of the human condition.
Indeed, and I believe (based mostly on speculation, guesswork, and, okay, some observation and historical awareness;-) that what you identify as "now" applies to the last several centuries, if not millenia, on -- nearly in the West, anyway -- a continuum.
After all, we already see evidence, even pre-Internet, of the worldwide communications infrastructure -- which, in this sense, necessarily includes the willingness of the components of the mind as a collective to communicate with distant components -- becoming faster, wider, and quicker, and of the resulting benefits, including increased caloric intake among the world's poor, for example.
And what seems to be missing, as a component of this general improvement long claimed to be necessary, is a strong, heirarchical, command-and-control structure -- a world government, for example -- to ensure that the right people benefit from the proper resources at the proper time.
Why? Because intelligent/appropriate choices require two things: situational awareness and clear goals.
EXACTLY!! And what that translates into, for others who might be reading, is "on-the-street perspective" and "simpler and open, rather than more complicated and obscure, governance".
That is, situational awareness means that a component of a collective mind -- an individual human or ant -- has a unique perspective of its environment. To the extent it is free to act however it wants, it might be said to not be acting in harmony with the collective mind; but, overly constrained, it can respond to local needs and opportunities no faster than the mind as a whole can process whatever sensory information its "allowed" to transmit (which suggests the importance of the First Amendment to the US Constitution), and that mind is, of course, itself constrained, by the laws of nature, to act no faster than its interconnecting infrastructure allows it.
(This suggests that there might be a strong temptation, as our technological and communications infrastructure improves, for some to say "now we can successfully impose a very strong central government, because we've solved the problems that plagued previous experiments, such as the Soviet Union".)
And while "clear goals" applies to the mind as a collective, to the extent those goals can be understood by components of that mind, the need for constant command-and-control interaction between governing and sensing/acting components (interaction that is necessarily high-latency, low-bandwidth, and low-reliability compared to the internal processing of an individual component) is lessened.
Both of these things CAN be improved if we break away from the old procedures and laws. That is to say, we can make a better game by adapting or ignoring the rules of the old game.
I think there's a lot of truth to that, but I believe it will be, generally, better to more fully understand the bases of those procedures and laws before throwing them out entirely. Of course, it's always tempting to start with a blank slate, but since we're not about to make a complete transition from one (old) communications infrastructure to another at a higher quantum level across the board, it's probably unwise to cast off, unilaterally, the traditions and protections we have, in forms such as procedures and laws, without careful consideration.
Two things nearly convince me of that, besides what I say above.
For one, history tends to show that successful transitions from old to new technologies rarely include complete and sudden dismissals of the old. Instead, they typically coexist for a time, as users transition, each on their own schedule, from the old to the new. This happens even in places where it is tremendously expensive to accommodate the old and new simultaneously, such as cities (NYC having both rail-transit and street systems comes to mind).
And in my own industry (computer software), attempts to deliver new technologies from "on high" -- which is pretty much how any new technology must be delivered, if it is to replace the old overnight, rather than being gradually deployed -- tend to fail spectacularly. For examples, the fact that most general-purpose computing involves languages like C and Fortran rather than PL/I and Ada, and operating systems like Unix and Windows rather than Multics, reveals, I believe, serious problems in the wipe-away-the-past approach to new designs. (The new designs -- PL/I, Ada, and Multics in these examples -- being "demonstrably superior" and nearly "legacy-free" to the technologies that displaced, and in some cases predated, them!)
The other thing that tells me that we should be careful about dismissing old procedures and laws is that they were produced by components of our collective mind separated from the current mind, viewed as a "snapshot", only by time, some space, and incomplete memories. Yet, from a larger perspective, the people who contributed to those procedures and laws are a present part of our collective mind, though not active components -- more like bone cells than neurons, perhaps. (I.e. they're pushing up daisies.)
So, while we can't simply ask them how or whether certain procedures and laws would apply today, it seems worth considering what we can learn about them, their environment, and so on, that might help us better understand just what is worth chucking and what is worth keeping for a time.
(That's not to say we treat traditions as untouchable; I hope that's clear!)
And while incremental improvements in the clarity and simplicity of our society as a whole don't seem as "sexy" as a wholesale revolution, my guess is that the very things contributing to the "simplifiability" -- the "de-archicalization", if you will -- of our society will also speed such incremental progress, to the point where, after a short time, each generation will have reason to believe it has just undergone a powerful, peaceful, positive revolution in the previous decade, or year, or month.
(P.S. In the/. "quote" at the bottom of my preview screen for this comment appeared this: "FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed -- it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer. -- A.J. Perlis".)
(P.P.S. Speaking of Fortran, I was amused to see an example of it on a recent episode of Nova on gamma-ray bursts from distant galaxies. Looks like the model, or software simulation, one researcher wrote, which was shown late in the episode, was in Fortran, and it looked like he was editing using GNU Emacs. Gotta love it.;-)
I stand by my view of Jesus as an Anarchist. Obviously, the term didn't exist then, so really he wasn't. But he was subversive. He taught people to question authority, to seek their connection to the divine outside of the shallow formalism of the Temple. He advised people to render unto Caesar (don't act bad), but retain their integrity of character (thoughtCrime!).
It's irrelevant (to me, anyway) whether the term existed then, and my reading of the NT agrees with most of your points.
But one distinction I make between what Jesus preached and what you preach is that he didn't in any way advocate tearing down power-structures, nor did he give much in the way of lip-service to the idea that, if only we all gave up our obediance to the ideal of heirarchical rule, we'd have a better world.
Instead, Jesus (and, IMO, the entire Holy Bible, viewed not literally but spiritually) preached the "utopia", or kingdom of heaven on earth, of each (not necessarily every) person completely and utterly bowing to God's law, God's judgement, and God's care.
Further, he made it clear that someone following his path would experience not a worldly utopia, but severe resistance -- a prediction you correctly identify as applying to himself, as well as other Christians to come.
As the other poster points out, your concept -- that we'd all be better off in an anarchy, that it's going to happen, etc. -- is not exactly strongly backed up by history. And, as I understand it, it wasn't preached by Jesus. His (immediate) followers didn't try to convert the governments of the day to anarchy, something that would best be done from within the system, nor did they act overtly against the system (as you point out, they were directed to pay taxes -- no "boycotting" in that group!). At least one of them (Saul, who became Paul) actually gave up positions of power when they accepted Jesus as Christ, positions they might have effectively used to push an anarchist agenda. (Jesus himself, tempted to simply take over world government, a position from which he presumably could safely, easily, and widely publish his views, responded to that temptation with "Get thee behind me, Satan". I believe he identifies as "Satan" not only the kind of thinking to which anarchism theoretically objects, but the kind that holds that reconfiguring human governments or even human minds is a valid path to utopia. That his, he seemed to identify the mere desire to direct the lives of others -- under any guise, for any reason -- as a kind of "Satanic" temptation. And that's a temptation evidently indulged in by many anarchists -- that some human minds have enough of a better idea of how to reach utopia, or some ideal state of society, that they have the right or duty to impose that idea on others via some means -- beyond preaching, which Jesus clearly did endorse.)
In a way, it sounds harsh to say, because it sounds like I'm saying "there's no way Anarchy is going to take over, deal with it".
But I think what Jesus was really saying is "you don't need to wait one moment for a Better Way to come to your world -- the Lord God Almighty is already here, simply accept him, by (e.g.) throwing off your worship of human heirarchy, and you'll find that kingdom of heaven that is already within you, now". Anarchists should have a head-start in that direction -- at least, the ones who don't dress up in black hoods and destroy other people's property to promote their agenda.
And that makes sense to me. I think it's perfectly reasonable for anarchists to generally promote the idea that human heirarchies are not as sound a path to utopia as certain ideologies (including communism, socialism, republicanism, etc.) appear to claim. Yet I think I see why, for very practical reasons, an individual demonstrating his willingness to bow to only God's rule can and must start out with little things (outside the reach of the typical group or government) before progressing to the point of claiming he's able to completely reorganize society for the better. (I think that might be a lesson behind the parable of the talents loaned to the three: that, rather than await humanity's discovering and proving these ideas, we're each to start proving them on our own, in our own lives, so as to be sure of what we're preaching and believing.)
Anyway, this is the second thread discussing anarchy as a system (another occurred a few weeks ago here on/.) that I've found highly pertinent to my ongoing inquiries into Christianity and governance, and that has been so lucidly (and calmly) able to expound on various aspects of these issues. Thanks!
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Huh, then I've probably misunderstood what you were writing somehow. So you meant to morally equate, or perhaps even weight in al Queda's favor, the short-term strategic goals of the corresponding war efforts, rather than indict the US generally as being morally equivalent to al Queda?
Assuming by "best people" you mean something consistent with what you were talking about when morally equating the US with al Queda...
I'll take it on faith, but it's extremely difficult to discern that based on your other posts -- though, to be fair, that seems to be primarily the result of your assuming my concerns over your moral-equivalence equation was based entirely on the belief that the US had done, and could do, no moral wrong.
But it wasn't intended to be analogous to reality -- it was a scientific attempt to find an emotionally neutral means to figure out your moral equation.
I was specifically not trying to make it particularly analogous to the present situation, except to the degree necessary to highlight your equation.
(For example, Marsha indeed kills innocent children, despite being, analogously, the USA. I'd hardly do that if I was trying to be faithful to a "reality" I was promoting in which the US could do no wrong.)
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?
In reality, Billy, like most boys, learn how to kill and rape because that's pretty much human nature when not limited by societal pressures, such as civilization. Marsha didn't teach him that -- she taught him how to better protect himself against external aggression, even those with overwhelming superiority, by using the sort of tactics he later employed to avoid being caught by her when she finally decided he was too dangerous to continue to live.
And many of Tina's friends constitute those who later promote resentment of Marsha, always dredging up history of anything Marsha has done wrong, as if Marsha is incapable of (or not worthy of being morally judged in light of) learning from her mistakes and becoming a better person -- something Marsha herself has tended to allow for in others, including Billy.
Yes, back in her wild teen years, when pretty much everyone else was doing the same thing, and when she, like Billy vis-a-vis Tina, was under direct assault by superior forces.
She's since learned the error of her ways, though occasionally flashes of her temper and even misbehavior can be discerned -- something her enemies, mostly Tina's supporters, constantly call attention to. (I think Marsha is probably a lot like Xena on that syndicated show, or Angel on the show of that name, in this sense: it's not always crystal-clear that she's going to be morally perfect in any instance, but she's clearly fighting more on the side of "what's right" than Tina earlier, Billy later.)
Also, they're too dependent on her to defend them against the Tinas and Billys of the world, partly because Marsha sometimes tended to keep them disarmed (the "superhero syndrome", I call it), mostly because they're too prone to believe Tina's cadre of naysayers, who look forward to the day Tina can return to power and enslave anyone, murdering those who resist (e.g. intellectuals, Jews, priests, anyone who can read a book...).
Well, what choice did they have, as long as she generally behaved herself well? How are they being "taken in", when they a) refuse to take up her cause of fighting against evil-doers like Tina and, later, Billy and b) aren't willing to endure the result of eliminating Marsha, their only practical protector?
Seems to me they're doing what's practical under the (cowardly) circumstances they find themselves in.
For myself, I'm prepared to take out a leader only when I'm prepared to lead myself, or prepared to accept the leadership of whoever takes over.
Perhaps that's how the townsfolk reason among themselves.
Well, that's only if by "meanest" you mean "meanest in a fight", since, if she's not fighting evil -- whatever the townsfolk find unacceptable -- they would have no sense of safety.
Indeed, since Billy offers little in the way of protection of their way of life to the townspeople, they find little reason to tolerate him.
But since they're too cowardly to fight him, partly because Tina's supporters keep reminding them that Billy can't really be that bad, since it's Marsha who represents his "opposite", and she's no saint, they don't really do much to stand against him.
Which leaves the problem to fester, until it draws Marsha's attention, as per my original story.
If the townsfolk had stood firm against Billy, being willing to make the kind of personal sacrifices Marsha had made before and would make again, Billy might have learned much earlier that he could not expect to get away with his acts, and maybe even "converted" to the right way, as Marsha had years ago.
But they concerned themselves primarily with living their own lives, thinking Billy was a sleeping dog they could just let lie.
No, what he wants in life is for Marsha to leave his town -- his entire world -- and he uses as an excuse some strange notion that he has preexisting rights to her house as a pretext to gain popular support for his long-term goal. (Specifically, once he destabilizes Marsha by getting the townsfolk to assail her for "occupying" his house, it'll be easier to dispense with her entirely. The townsfolk might not go along with that, but they'll be unwilling, or unable, to stop him.)
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.
And, sure, Billy had long tried to kill that homeless chum -- call him "Jacob" -- of Marsha's, and constantly preached the idea that his death was God's will, so it's not unreasonable that some community effort be made to ensure that the poor guy had some place to call home, a place where Jacob could defend himself from the likes of Billy, as well as Tina and her friends, all of whom resent Jacob, because he doesn't agree with Tina's approach to running things -- he's much more supportive of Marsha's stated approach, and he's pretty persuasive for a homeless guy, having become a sort of mascot for the downtrodden. (He's never had a problem making a living -- he keeps getting kicked out of his own house by people making him a scapegoat for their own problems.)
But taking part of Billy's house and giving it to someone Billy hated was probably not the brightest move, even though it was what Jacob said he wanted more than anyplace else in town, because of the sentimental value it held (his ancestors lived there, some of them driven away by aggressors, though originally they took it by force themselves once or twice).
What some people can't help noticing, though, is how the Jacob's part of Billy's home is the best-maintained, best-looking, most orderly, and so on. People who want to visit Billy's home usually prefer to stay in Jacob's area, though they visit Billy's too.
However, Billy, resentful of Jacob's evident success at organizing and cleaning his little area of the house, instead of just doing better himself, takes to attacking Jacob in his area -- just as so many have attacked Jacob in his home in the past -- and even attacks people who just visit Jacob!
Sadly, the townsfolk, still caught up in the "moral dilemma" of having to choose between Marsha and Tina, Marsha and Billy, and so on, end up thinking that it's not worth defending Jacob.
After all, just as some of them resent Marsha's standing up to Tina and even Billy, they're easily made to resent Jacob's standing up to Billy -- refusing to be driven from the home, defending himself against Billy's attacks, even occasionally going outside his own little area of the house to destroy weapons Billy continually tries to build to eliminate Jacob.
Why Billy can't just learn to get along with less-than-ideal circumstances like Jacob has learned to do over the years, some people wonder, but they figure "peace" is worth achieving, even if it means coming at the cost of Billy killing Jacob, Jacob no longer being around to support Marsha's ideas that townsfolk be generally able to live as they choose, and, ultimately, people like Tina and Billy running everything.
Well, where could she go, but six feet under? Her enemies -- mostly Tina and her supporters -- had long been committed to killing her outright. Having failed to do so, they'd since undertaken a campaign to subvert whatever moral authority she seemed to have among the townsfolk, who weren't able to see that they were sewing the seeds of their own destruction by going along with the thesis that Marsha should be allowed to be destroyed because, in her vigorous defense of large-scale issues of freedom, she failed to be 100% perfectly morally correct by each townsperson's judgement.
And what's so sad is that each person has a different idea of what Marsha has done wrong. Because she's so "visible", due to being so strong, they all talk about her constantly, and few can agree on exactly what Marsha should have done to stop something really bad from happening in any instance.
But they're so convinced they're right about her being wrong, they overlook the fact that anyone acting successfully as Marsha had would also have lots of naysayers.
That is, after all, the penalty for acting to help others -- "no good deed goes unpunished", is what Marsha has learned.
Sure, they were "worried" -- but not enough to actually take care of the problem, Billy, so Marsha wouldn't have to.
That's the inevitable result of allowing evil to fester and spread in your local. At some point, someone else has to step in and fix it for you, and you have to accept whatever means they use to do it.
Blaming Marsha for how she solves the problem they allowed to fester is like Billy blaming Jacob for the poor condition of his house compared to the portion given for Jacob to live in -- they're merely shifting the blame to someone who acts, to draw attention away from the fact that they refused to act when given many opportunities to do so earlier, when dealing with the problem would have been much, much easier.
Yup, just as they were cowards in the face of tyrants like Tina and Billy, they'd have to accept pretty much whatever Marsha decided to do to set things right.
And, after Billy's dead, while some of them will thank Marsha, Tina's supporters will make sure that the story widely told is of Marsha going off half-cocked and killing innocent children, as if Billy, and especially the cowardly townsfolk, had nothing to do with it.
They didn't "realize" that, they chose to believe that, ignoring, as you did, the fact that Marsha had already lost her family and some of her friends to Billy, thanks to the inaction of the townsfolk, and their constantly discouraging Marsha from doing anything substantial to curb Billy's ever-growing appetite for violence in the past.
That and all the apologists for Tina and Billy who helped make it a war between Billy and Marsha, rather than Billy and a law-abiding, rights-defending townsfolk.
That's another of the pro-Tina sort of "half-lie" that's so widely told.
After all, we're to believe it's so bad to be "branded" something, which really means "someone said something I didn't like" (as in Chris Burke branding me as a "bully", an "idiot", and so on in another post).
But, somehow, that's "just as bad" as the things Tina and Billy have done, ranging from theft, lying, cheating, raping, to mass murder.
Meanwhile, while Marsha indeed did have "open" dialogs, Tina and Billy never allowed anyone any real opportunity to guide how they did things.
If the townsfolk wanted Marsha to not do something about Billy, she listened to them and, probably too often, heeded their advice. If Marsha thought somebody should give some of their money to the poor, and they disagreed, Marsha wouldn't do anything to force the issue.
Billy and Tina, of course, operated quite differently. Billy would just steal the money, or injure or kill someone he didn't like. Tina would steal the money, give it to the poor, and call it "compassion"; or systematically imprison, torture, and kill people who disagreed with her and call it "reeducation".
Sadly, too many townsfolk couldn't make such crucial moral distinctions between Tina and Marsha, so, to them, they were merely offering two morally equivalent choices regarding how to live. That's somewhat understandable, since, in the end, they could both be said to "rule by force", when given the opportunity.
Yet perspective also served as the only defense against the kind of moral equivalencing done by Tina and her supporters to discourage Marsha, and anyone else who would truly stand up against Billy, from taking action.
Tina, in failing to take over the town earlier, secretly wanted the whole town to fall under the criminal governance of Billy, because that would set the stage for the townsfolk to finally welcome Tina's Ultimate Solution -- the "utopia" of her governance -- and hand all their freedoms over to her.
After all, Tina knew just which townsfolk should be doctors, which should be lawyers, which should be farmers, which should drive cars, which should ride bikes, which should walk, and so on, so she had a vision of order, which included everyone helping everyone else, either voluntarily or because Tina and her supporters forced them to.
No, of course not, just a couple of kids, but she'll get blamed for all the deaths Tina's supporters can possibly attribute to her.
(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.)
Of course, some of them recognized that, by allowing Billy to commit violence unchecked by themselves, they were virtually condoning it. Still, instead of blaming themselves, it was so easy to blame Marsha for the ill effects of having Billy around, free to do what he wants.
Yes, having left it to Marsha to dispose of Billy, they then threw in their lot with Tina, helpepd her kill Marsha, Jacob, and all supporters of the Marsha/Jacob ideology of individual choice and freedom, and spent the rest of their days being virtual slaves to Tina. Any desire some might have had to rise up and overthrow her was quelched by killing the only real, practical defender of their freedoms they ever had -- Marsha, who they had killed for daring to take practical action in response to Billy's demonstrated desire for blood.
Pretty much.
Yup.
And it now seems quite clear what side of history you're on.
Uhhhhh, hmmm, okay, so you can't see that killing people who are committed to killing anyone who doesn't willingly live under an incredibly narrow interpretation of Islam is a means to ensure the freedom of people who would rather not live under that interpretation?
So you're convinced that Ashcroft is the reason 2,000+ people were killed on 9/11?
I'll be interested in hearing how relatives of the victims of that day's events react to your telling them that Al Queda, bin Laden, extremist Islam, etc., pose no threat to the US whatsoever.
More to the point, I'd say that oil is presently a critical component in the defense of my freedom.
Without oil at prices reasonably reflecting the market (I'm not arguing it's at that level, just vastly closer to it thanks to Operation Desert Storm), the US economy is able to continue pumping along quite smoothly.
So, not only does our military find itself more easily able to afford to continue training, even going into action to defend our interests (not that every military action truly does, but that's not my point here), our economic success, contrasted to that of nations that are even more restrictive of their citizen's freedoms, offers useful evidence of the dangers of going down the route of socialism, which is, in my book, anti-freedom.
Since I'd like to be free to choose how and when I work, and for what fee, and leave it to the market, rather than the heavy hand of government, to decide whether to take me up on my choice or leave me unemployed, I consider the preservation of the free operation of the market to be an important component in the practicalities needed to preserve my freedom.
And note the symmetry -- the following of the Golden Rule -- of my concern here: I wish Saddam Hussein the same freedom to choose for himself the price at which he'll buy (or, in his specific case, sell) oil, because I believe everyone else's freedom to participate in this market is as important as my own.
That's why I don't consider "it was just about oil" to be an emotional hot-button when it comes to Desert Storm. Am I justifying that operation on moral grounds per se? No, though I don't exactly reject it morally either (beyond the simple "it's a use of force rather than a turning of the cheek" moral reasoning of Christ Jesus, which I try to follow but cannot say I do fully).
So, what I am saying is that, relative to certain other acts of aggression, the USA, often enough, acts to preserve important, practical, freedoms for all people, beyond just US citizens, certainly beyond just preserving the iron hand of governmental control.
(It's possible Bush41 was considering only that last aspect when he initially was of the mind that the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait wasn't worth bothering about -- that was before Margaret Thatcher "set him straight", as I recall.)
Oh, they make that quite clear.
And, for a nation that "controls local governments", we sure manage to control them to do lots of things not in our own short-term interest, don't we? Hmm.
Frankly, that is my hope as well -- that, if we did stop "meddling" in their affairs, they'd get tired of bashing us and move on to live their lives.
I see too much evidence to the contrary. For one thing, there's plenty of reason to believe that if we removed ourselves wholesale from the region, it would end up a nuclear wasteland pretty quickly (Israel would perhaps not simply allow itself to be forced into the Mediterranean without an endgame-style fight). In my experience, people blame America not just for America's meddling, but for America's failure to meddle.
For another, it's clear that the USA gets little or no "cred" from Islam for its efforts on the part of Muslims to defend themselves from external attack, just as it gets no cred from you when it comes to things like that.
So, we can't participate in their markets (that's part of what you call "meddling" in their books, though you may well dispute whether it is meddling -- see, too many of their children buy our blue jeans, listen to our music, etc., and it's our fault, at least party, for offering it in their markets), we can't risk our own lives helping them out, we can't even meddle in the affairs of their enemies even to stay the hand of said enemies (we get no cred for keeping Israel from going even further, when it could have, in seizing and holding land, killing Arafat in the '80s, etc.).
The upshot is: complete and utter withdrawal from all Islamic territories.
And since many such territories have a proven record of being a breeding-ground for those committed to mass murder of Americans, we simply sit back and hope that doesn't happen.
Since that won't happen -- Americans would not choose to simply curl up and die, which is the upshot of your recommendation as I see it -- it's reasonable to expect all Islamic territories to be nuked in the near future, since we can't go in and meddle, yet must prevent them massacring us by the hundreds of thousands, millions, etc., which enough of them fully intend to do.
If you disagree, perhaps you could explain just what you do expect the US to do to protect itself against what is already a demonstrated threat as far as most Americans are concerned (i.e. no point saying Iraq wouldn't have ever had nukes even without Desert Shield/Storm; most Americans believe the risk was high enough, so go with what would be likely based on what Americans believe and how they act).
Agreed.
Hmm, seeing as the US is the world's sole superpower and has now demonstrated that we are easily capable of quite literally ruling the world by merely threatening any combination of nuke attack, large-scale conventional warfare, all the way down to pinprick, special-ops-type stuff, limited only by our own tendency to keep our military budget comparatively small, I'd say expansionism is extremely low on our list of things to do -- especially compared to historical superpowers.
Okay, you're right, you weren't ignoring it.
So you are, indeed, arguing that it is exactly as immoral to defend oneself against attack as it is to be an Al-Queda-style terrorist, simply because the former has a risk of killing innocents, just as the latter has, as its tactical goal the killing of innocents?
Well, that's what I thought you might be saying at one point yesterday, but decided you couldn't possibly mean that, and that you must instead think we're immoral because we aren't conducting this war more perfectly.
So, in your view, self-defense itself is immoral, because of the risks to innocents?
Well, under similar circumstances, the US, and Western nations in particular, have shown a tendency to simply give up, i.e. surrender. Why couldn't al Queda simply say "hey, we're outmatched, and what we're doing isn't important enough to engage in a likely-fruitless campaign to murder innocent people"?
I mean, if I take myself as an example, I could say that I'm pretty powerless. So does that mean I can go around killing innocent people to get attention for whatever cause I consider just?
Put another way: do you believe Timothy McVeigh was morally equivalent to Al Queda and the US government?
And, by extension, do you believe advocates of gun control are morally equivalent to Timothy McVeigh?
After all, McVeigh had basically no power -- certainly less than al Queda -- and he murdered fewer innocents than they (presumably) did on 9/11.
Further, he did it (if we can believe the evil US government ;-) to call attention to the lack of constitutional and political safeguards surrounding the Waco debacle. I.e. not only did laws he considered trumped by the 2nd amendment get passed and brutally enforced, the woman who ordered the tanks in, precipitating (if not directly causing) the obliteration of an obscure right-wing Christian sect was allowed to remain in office, relatively unscathed by presiding over such a severe act.
Further, since things like the Waco debacle are clearly risks that anyone takes when they pass laws -- which are enforced by imperfect (albeit generally well-intentioned) law-enforcement agencies and agents (like Janet Reno) -- then those who push to pass gun-control laws, who do (clearly) have the power to affect others, are just as immoral as McVeigh.
Correct by your reasoning, or no?
Well, your earlier posts seemed to be saying that because al Queda had to use willful mass-murder of innocents to achieve its goals, while the USA need use only direct attacks on military combatants with inevitable, and intentionally small numbers of, collateral damage to achieve its goals, the two sides are morally equivalent.
That's an equation, right? I mean, arguing for equivalency amounts to an equation?
Now, it seems reasonable that accidentally killing someone isn't as morally repugnant as willfully doing so, and that the US killing innocents in the "War On Terror" is somewhere between those two extremes (closer to the former in any specific instance, closer to the latter overall), while al Queda is full-tilt on the latter extreme (they consider failure to murder innocents equivalent to failure regarding their mission).
Therefore, one must conclude that, to achieve "equivalence", you've either canceled out the "goals" entirely, as if al Queda's and the USA's are morally equivalent (which you appear to argue elsewhere), or that you see al Queda's goals as morally superior to the USA's goals.
If that's the case, you haven't done a good job making it.
For example, the USA's goals do not include preventing Arab Muslims from "meddling" in its affairs to anywhere near the same extent as vice versa.
I.e. the US has no problem with them moving here, living here, participating in our sorta-free markets here, voting here, running for office here, recruiting people to Islam here, preaching in mosques here, and so on.
I mean, sure, we're in the process of negotiating just how permissive we'll be on many of these fronts: is preaching mass murder of Americans in mosques going to still be allowed, for example? (That's been going on in Britain, at least, and they're reconsidering their permissiveness as well.)
But, on the whole, the US is much more willing to allow Muslims to live freely here than vice versa.
In my book, that's exactly the sort of thing that makes the USA's goals morally superior to those of al Queda (and many other Muslim organizations) -- we practice the Golden Rule to a greater practical extent.
Hey, it was you who presented the equation, and chose to focus on what you did. It wasn't my job to fix your equation. I entered the discussion only because I found the equation to be morally idiotic, and asked for an explanation -- which you apparently have tried to give, but I fail to see how you can justify it still, and you appear to be resorting to dredging up all sorts of stuff that wasn't present in your original equation.
As far as I can see, your equation really is: "since the USA has a history of being really evil, it doesn't matter what anyone else does to it -- they'll be no less moral than the USA".
Is that correct, or not? It certainly is consistent with what lots of elites (including Bill Clinton) have said about our "culpability" since 9/11.
I presented that aspect only to illustrate that it was a choice we could have made. A moral person, faced with possibly accidentally killing innocents in defending himself, must consider surrendering. On the other hand, many people consider a strong person surrendering to a bully to be immoral, because it allows the bully to continue, even expand, his behavior. In that sense, the strong person cannot win on moral grounds (and that's true of the USA today, and throughout the 20th century): he's wrong if he defends himself and/or his friends, because he's "projecting his strength", and he's wrong if he surrenders, because he's "failing to act".
I didn't justify it at all. I pointed out that it could be seen as somewhat preferable to killing even more American citizens in further conventional warfare, and even to surrendering, since the US represented, compared to WWII Japan, a somewhat less aggressive nation. And, by winning that war (against Japan and Germany), the world became a bit more moral because the surviving power was more interested in practical peace than waging war, even if just by a few degrees.
And that, to me, is the whole mystery of morality: at the extreme, it's easy to argue that any killing is simply wrong, therefore all killing is equally wrong. Which appears to be an element of your logic.
But, in practice, morality on earth is practiced by people, who are the only visible representatives of morality, and, on the whole, that means that if, say, 100 serial killers are killed in an act that prevents 100 innocent people from being killed, the world enjoys a corresponding degree of extra morality, on the whole.
Most people instinctively recognize this. That's why, e.g., they tend to mourn the death of a minister, priest, preacher, etc., even of another faith, moreso than that of a prostitute, drug dealer, or homeless person. Not that they necessarily value the life of the latter type of person less (though in many cases some probably do), but because they value the positive moral impulse given to society by the former, who had already decided to live their lives in that manner (something the prostitute, dealer, or homeless person might have gotten around to had they lived).
Turns out, it was not, because you misinterpreted what I was getting at.I was not saying "right makes might", nor "might makes right", though the former is a bit closer to what I mean.
When I say "morally superior", I mean that, in this discussion, in strict contrast to your argument for moral equivalence -- nothing more.
Nothing I said implied that nation X winning a victory over nation Y meant it was morally superior.
What I was getting at was, why is it that al Queda, which believes Allah is on its side, can't call on Allah to do the battles for it -- especially, kill the innocents, only as He sees fit, while preserving the victory?
History shows plenty of examples of "moral" cultures where this is precisely what has been done. (Whether these examples are all historically accurate is another issue -- that's what history, e.g. the Bible, teaches its adherents -- "the battle is God's", that sort of thing.)
Western cultures generally, since early in the 20th century especially, have come to believe that their morality allows, or possibly enables, them to win victories against great enemies without willfully killing civilians.
That belief is not uniform across these cultures, of course, but it better represents how the nations governed by these cultures behave in wartime compared to nations governed by other cultures, which don't (yet) hold to that belief.
And, history suggests that belief is not entirely without merit; after all, the nations that best represent that belief are largely free to direct their own way in the world, compared to those who are less so-representative.
I didn't claim that we did win because of moral superiority. Though there certainly were elements of that that helped -- for example, we allow individual ownership of land, which gave individuals plenty of incentive to defend, as well as cultivate for maximum benefit to fellow peoples, that land -- something the previous inhabitants (not "natives" exactly, since it's likely the case their ancestors invaded and basically wiped out the indigenous Americans) did not have a great track record on.
Whether individual land ownership is a moral thing, I'm not sure, frankly, but it's probably a little bit more moral than a collective, run by an elite, owning the land on which, basically, serfs live and have to work as directed by that elite.
(I use "we" in the cultural sense here; it's entirely possible I'm part "native", though it seems the region of my ancestry from which that information comes is prone to those sorts of claims, even when they're not at all supported by the evidence. Previously, I'd assumed that the racism of European Americans was too uniform to allow the possibility of any to make up stories of being partly descended from "Indians", which was a somewhat simplistic assumption, I admit.)
So, you don't believe Moses, Elijah, Jesus, Paul, Gandhi, MLKJr, etc., achieved their great works due to any moral superiority over their peers?
In other words, you believe they could have just as easily lived their lives raping, killing, pillaging, stealing, lying, cheating, and so on, and still parted the Red Sea, ascended to Heaven, raised the dead, sent the British packing, and so on?
Do you therefore believe they "just happened" to be the ones who did these works, so we needlessly celebrate their characters when they were merely the lucky recipients of fate?
I'd let this stand as a testament to your willingness and ability to comprehend simple English (since what I wrote couldn't possibly be intelligently interpreted the way you take it), but, since you appear to be interested...
And those are moments I'm proud of, compared to moments of cowardice, when I avoided helping a friend, or gave in to being bullied.
What I've learned through life is that the problem with the world is not that there are too many evil people, because there are not actually that many willing to act on it, or that there are too few good people willing to act on their goodness.
The problem is, there are too many people "in the middle" who'll constantly find excuses to not act, to not make practical choices between good and evil. They'll advocate "peace" only when it doesn't involve a commitment on their own part to the success of the peace process ("commitment" meaning: they and their families die if it fails). When somebody like me stands up for what's right, they won't stand with me, waiting to see "what happens", though they might come to me later in private and say "thanks for standing up", to which all I can say is, "gee, thanks", and wonder why they didn't have the guts, the spine, the courage, etc. to stand with me when it counted.
And there are people like you, or are motivated by people like you, who say "the US is the moral equivalent of Al Queda" and thus discourage the middle-grounders from fighting on behalf of what is clearly the morally superior, though clearly not the morally perfect, entity.
So, in my experience, you are the sort of person who, upon observing the schoolyard bully Howard beating the crap out of little Jimmy, constantly explains to everyone that Jimmy should have done Howard's homework like he asked; that Jimmy's parents make more money than Howard's; that Howard doesn't get as much attention from the teachers as Jimmy; therefore that Howard can't be expected to do anything else, and so it's Jimmy's own fault he's getting the crap kicked out of him.
As a result, too many observers are convinced, by your rhetoric, to not intervene to prevent Jimmy from being pummelled, possibly killed, or probably turning into a bully himself down the road, and that sometimes bullying is just to be expected, not stood up against, since nobody who would stand up against it is himself perfect.
That's moral idiocy in action.
Hmm, I didn't read that as meaning "estimated 100K lives of those living under Taliban rule saved", which is what I thought you claimed had been said.
No, that's not what it means to me at all.
For instance, the USA (in the form of its President) willfully murdered innocent African Muslims in a cruise-missile attack on a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan. I believe there was no moral justification for an attack so sudden that it couldn't be preceded by just the sort of on-the-ground verification that it wasn't a chem-weapons plant, and that there was probably no practical justification (based on threat assessment) either.
So, I conclude that it was highly likely the attack was made at that time not because of an actual perceived threat to the USA's safety but rather to the President's personal power -- it was timed to coincide with, and thus draw attention away from, certain grand-jury testimony scheduled to be given involving some stuff the President had lied about to the American people earlier that year.
Further, Americans had plenty of opportunity to discover the lie, figure out the timing, and yet chose to not remove that President from office, despite the fact that the whole point of having "offices" in that sense of the word is to ensure that people place their duty to them above their own personal desires. (I.e. we elect someone President not because they will go to war to save their own butts, but because they won't, and much of what goes into laws about how and when people are forcibly removed from office is the importance of the detection and prevention of selfish behavior on the part of officeholders.)
I said then, and believe it's been reasonably borne out by events since, that we would pay a very steep price for our amoral, as well as immoral, behavior in that whole episode ("we" being the USA) -- willingly letting a criminal off the hook because we didn't want to "shake up our economy", while allowing that criminal and his cohorts to trash the reputations of people like Ken Starr, making them out to be the source of all the evil, when they were, largely, just doing the job they were appointed to do (though perhaps sometimes overzealously).
So, no, I don't buy the Divine Right argument.
Neither do I buy your argument that the USA is as evil as any terrorist organization out there.
Could you please identify where that assertion was made? I must have missed it; I saw an assertion of saving lives generally (e.g. of US citizens), and plenty of morally idiotic assertions on your part, but I didn't see that.
Meanwhile, I don't even see the point of your question if you did raise it. What if our campaign had nothing to do with saving lives of Afghans living under the Taliban? Does that make us as morally repugnant as the 9/11 terrorists, as you seem to claim?
Maybe, just maybe, we're conducting a campaign that we're happy to see has a side effect of saving the lives of Afghans, rather than simply wiping them all out for our own convenience (the sad "turn Afghanistan into a lake" cartoon that went around the 'net shortly after 9/11).
Necessary to do what, pray tell?
Seems to me you keep willfully omitting that tiny little item that might break down your whole argument that the USA is in no way morally superior, or at least behaving in a morally superior way, to Al Queda.
Seems to me that waging a war to, e.g. in just one dimension, ensure the freedom of peoples (especially US citizen) to practice the religion they individually choose is morally superior to Al Queda's waging war (I'll call it that, since you try to equate their terrorism to our war) to impose their religion throughout the world.
So, please, either own up to that, or explain just why it is "necessary" for Al Queda to murder thousands of innocent US citizens. "Achieve their aims" ain't the answer: WHAT ARE THEIR AIMS, in your words? What are the corresponding aims of the US government?
Sorry, that's what I meant by "morally neutral... with respect to...": moral equivalency.
You are claiming that since we accidentally killed some civilians while trying to get at known mass-murderers, we're morally no better than the mass-murderers who willingly murdered many civilians.
You try to support their claim by presenting some kind of "cosmic fairness" argument: "Al Queda has a weaker military, therefore it is necessary for them to murder civilians".
But you consistently ignore one of my points, which is: the US has an imperfect military, therefore it is impossible for it to exist, especially be deployed in any useful fashion, without accidentally taking innocent human life.
You equate the two situations morally. In my opinion, that makes you a moral idiot, just as someone would be a mathematical idiot if they equated two expressions that were clearly not identical by simply renaming two independent variables to the same name and then canceling them -- regardless of how much pseudo-intellectual hand-waving they engaged in to justify their results.
I didn't think I was saying you were claiming justification -- just that you were, by trying to justify some degree of immorality by Al Queda, you were hoping to thereby convict the US as a whole of equivalent immorality, for doing what is clearly necessary for its defense, by most any rational person's assessment.
Again, WHY DO THEY NEED TO BEAT OUR MILITARY? It wasn't attacking them -- you even criticized it, implicitly, earlier by saying "if the Taliban was so evil, why didn't we go and root them out before 9/11".
Amazing how you willfuly choose to ignore or overlook any factor in the equation of US vs. Al Queda morality that might favor the USA.
No, it's not the same reason. The nukes were dropped to say "look, we're not going to surrender unconditionally to your military, nor are we going to sacrifice another hundreds of thousands of American lives to defeat you conventionally, even though we believe it's sufficiently inevitable that you could see it if you were behaving rationally".
Since the Japanese behaved, as a warrior culture, less rationally vis-a-vis the morality of innocent life than the Germans, they ended up on the wrong end of two nukes.
Al Queda did not come under any serious attack on their civilian population from the USA before the 9/11 attacks, and even since then, the USA has not engaged in a campaign to murder innocent civilians as a means to change the behavior of Al Queda.
And the reasoning for that isn't entirely "moral", at least not necessarily so: the Japanese circa WWII were much more culturally supportive of the war effort, from what I understand, than have been the civilian populations infiltrated by Al Queda, on the whole.
To the extent civilian populations oust or quash Al Queda themselves before the US gets around to it, they'll be able to control their own destiny.
Not vengeful; willing to act to defend innocent life against international terrorism. There's a difference between vengeance and justice, you know.
But if they had the weaponry (nukes), they would have, and, IMO, that's possible down the road anyway. They don't have the moral fibre in their culture to say "whoah, that'd be overkill", because 9/11 itself was overkill.
Look, you are really acting either out of complete ignorance or stupidity, because Al Queda spokesmen (including bin Laden) have been quite clear about their desires: to kill Americans, to taste American blood, blah blah blah.
This isn't the rhetoric of the underlings in a war effort geared up to defend territory or a way of life; it's the rhetoric of a leadership that is committed to murdering innocent Americans (and other Westerners) anywhere, anytime, because they believe Allah wills it.
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.
The USA did not match the British on paper during the Revolution, or during the War of 1812. Yet it won. Israel was sure-dead in the various campaigns conducted against it over the past various decades. Yet it won.
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.
It also shows that a nation-state unwilling to use military might (including the inevitable collateral damage that goes with it) to defend itself will, very likely, go extinct.
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.
If it was morally equivalent to the USA, why wouldn't people like you help it out?
By that reasoning, boycotts against Nike, Nestle, and so on, were fscked for as long as they didn't immediately achieve their objective, since they inevitably (though indirectly, like US sanctions against Iraq), caused innocent people to suffer.
Of course, that's not to make the situations morally equivalent. If, instead of the boycotts, people concerned about poorly paid workers and such bought more, the end result would not clearly have been that the corporations involved would end up with weapons of mass destruction and the means to use them.
I'm sure I'm not the only one to wonder, so I'll ask: to who or what do you owe your education in moral issues, teaching you to reason (if I may use that word loosely) the way you do?
Because, if we had, moral idiots (to borrow a phrase from an anonymous coward) like yourself would then claim that the collateral damage inevitably suffered as a result of a "needless campaign" against the Taliban proved that the USA is evil.
If the world's leadership had a moral spine and an adequate degree of moral understanding, organizations like Al Queda, the PLO, and so on, would never be able to flourish like they do in the first place.
That a comparatively few innocents get dusted in the efforts needed to slap down those committed to mass-murder to promote their agenda is a sad, sad result of moral idiocy on the part of the world's (primarily left-wing) elite leadership, which generally prefers buying off and appeasing terrorists (like one who won the Nobel Peace Prize a short while ago).
But obliterating four civilian aircraft full of innocents, two office buildings full of innocents, and so on, is going to change that?
So, please, tell us all how Al Queda bettered their prospects by carefully calculating that 2001-09-11 would achieve their objectives (which you appear to be claiming are morally neutral with respect to those of the US government) with sufficiently greater likelihood than attacking Nellis instead to justify the willful murder of thousands of innocent civilians.
Let me get this straight: you believe that since what the USA wants to achieve with its attacks and Al Queda wanted to achieve with its attacks can both be described as "goals", that you can therefore treat those two "goals" as if it were an identity variable, divide it out of the equation, leaving only differences in budget and capabilities, and thus prove no moral distinction between the US government and Al Queda?
How interesting.
Thankfully, most rational people recognize that the goals of the respective organizations are exactly what make one more moral and ethical than the other.
Which is why vastly more rational people strive to leave the domain of one for that of the other than the other way around -- even before 2001-09-11.
Here, try this example out, so you don't get so confused by your anti-American hate.
Marsha and Billy live in the same town. Billy kicks cats, molests children, rapes women, steals money, and so on.
Marsha tells people Billy is a bad person and should be resisted, but too many townsfolk practice "tolerance" by trying various tactics like buying Billy off, setting him up with sisters and daughters (who he then rapes), and so on.
Finally Billy decides he's not getting whatever he wants out of life because Marsha says such bad things about him, but thinks nobody's going to stand up to him, so to teach Marsha a lesson, since he can't kill her because of her strength, skill, etc., he kills her mother, father, sister, and two of her friends.
The townsfolk, "up in arms" but not really prepared to do battle themselves (having accepted the dogma that buying off evil-doers turns them into good-doers so long that they've neglected to arm themselves adequately against evil), come out in support for Marsha and accept that she's gonna have to do some serious butt-kicking, though some express "concern" that she not be too "violent".
Marsha, knowing that killing Billy is necessary (there being no practical law-enforcement system in town, equivalent to the present international situation), she undertakes to kill him herself, rather than let him kill even more people.
But Billy, being somewhat clever, disguises himself, hides himself, does whatever it takes to escape Marsha, who he recognizes as being fully capable of killing him were he to be out in the open, doing battle on a "fair" basis.
Marsha discovers he's hiding in an orphanage, has a gun, and has killed a few kids there to gain control of the local "authorities" (those in charge of the orphanage).
So she arms herself, goes in, guns ablaze, and kills Billy as well as two kids.
The "compassionate" townsfolk express alarm at Marsha's killing of the two kids.
But most of Marsha' supporters just grit their teeth and say "she done what had to be done".
Then Chris Burke comes along and says "since both Marsha and Billy killed innocents, and since Marsha plainly knew she might accidentally do so by going after Billy but still put her goals over the lives of those kids, the only difference between Marsha and Billy is that Marsha is stronger, bigger, and smarter -- but not the least more moral, compassionate, or ethical. After all, Marsha and her supporters didn't express sufficient 'concern' over the two kids she killed."
Now, since Chris Burke can't possibly miss the fact that Marsha has been openly participating in fairly rational discussions about how to resist evil, whereas Billy has actively practiced evil and tended to avoid any rational, open discussion of his acts; and the fact that Marsha acts out of self-sacrificing risk-taking to save the lives of others; Chris Burke clearly understands that the only thing achievable by speaking out against the killing of innocents generally, such as by practicing the moral calculus he proposes, is the shutting down of people like Marsha, but not people like Billy, who are unmoved by any verbeage not backed up by force of the sort Marsha brings to the table.
Conclusion? Chris Burke wishes for the world to have no Marshas in it whatsoever, but is unwilling to do anything practical or effective about the Billys of the world.
Lesson for today: those who refuse to reason clearly about, and then resist, evil, ultimately bear responsibility for the "collateral damage" that occurs when someone else has to do it for them. They may then cry "evil" over the collateral damage; since they didn't resist it previously, the time to avoid it subsequently has passed, and their rhetoric rings hollow.
Sheesh, do we have to go through this AGAIN??
First, just where has RMS written that "the Kernel doesn't matter"?
Second, just where is he "so desperate to take credit for" the Linux kernel?
Please. Post links. I want to see where exactly he tries to convince people that the kernel doesn't matter, or that the Linux kernel should be credited to GNU and not to Linus and his team. Please. Even just one link, to something that needs no "explanation" by you of what he "really means".
Meanwhile, the fact remains that Linux does not and, for all practical purposes, cannot exist without GNU. (At least, last I checked, there exists no system on which the Linux kernel runs and can compile itself that is 100% GNU-free. This, despite years now of some people ranting about how they hate RMS and GNU so much that they'll go off and write a GNU replacement so they can use and develop Linux without it.)
However, GNU systems exist, and can compile themselves, without Linux.
This does not mean the kernel "doesn't matter", or that we shouldn't call the Linux kernel "the Linux kernel".
Because, the fact also remains that a huge portion of GNU systems out there are running the Linux kernel. (Maybe most; maybe more than 90%; I don't know. I do know I run it.)
And the fact also remains that, without the unique contributions of the Linux developers and community, GNU would be much more accurately described as a "niche OS" than GNU/Linux could possibly be today.
No question RMS tries (and perhaps too persistently) to help people understand that, just because the whole OS became known as "Linux" does not mean it consists 95% of the kernel, 5% of other stuff that happens to include a bit of GNU.
But while it can certainly be said that, without GNU, Linux itself would have been unlikely, it's also quite clear (to me, anyway) that Linus choosing not only GNU software but the GNU GPL for his kernel brought worldwide use of, and fame regarding, GNU that it would not have achieved, even if the Hurd had come out "on time" according to the original schedule.
Correcting people's misperceptions of these issues does not necessarily constitute disrespecting Linus or Linux, so you'll have to point to quotes by RMS that actually contain such disrespect to convince me.
Absent that, please stop wasting everyone's time and energy making claims you can't back up as a means to attack someone like RMS. There are plenty of other ways to attack him, if you like, using stuff he actually has written, I'm sure.
A saving grace of having GNU, Linux, BSD, and other free-source-software systems with adequate desktop capabilities will become evident if Microsoft ever abandons that market in its quest for higher profits in another market sector.
At that point, sure, lots of people might not care about the inability to continue using state-of-the-art desktop computer systems, but those who do will, finally, choose free software, because there won't be enough $$$ in selling licenses for the propriety-software market.
(Replace "desktop computer" with "Fortran 77 compiler" and you can put most of the above in the past tense; Microsoft stopped developing its F77 compiler many years ago.)
As the "end of the line" becomes more evident on the horizon, more and more people who do wish to use desktop systems on modern hardware will decide to jump off the MS/proprietary ship, so they can do it on their schedule, not someone else's.
And it's probably the case that this process (of moving off proprietary platforms, even for desktop computing) has already started, even if as a trickle, for exactly these reasons: better to take a small initial re-training cost now than a much-larger cost that inevitably lies somewhere down the road.
I won't disagree with your analysis.
But the problems we have in the world are almost never because of immoral actions; rather, because of immoral reactions.
The deaths of 70-plus people (including children) at Waco, the Oklahoma City bombing, the 2001-09-11 attacks -- all were reactions to immoral actions or other reactions, as perceived by the players involved.
If somebody else's immorality were such an easy excuse for one's own immoral behavior, then we needn't ever again consider moral issues at all, since everyone will always have an excuse.
So, you're right, his childish reaction is a reaction.
But it's not a response, and it's definitely an attack on his neighbors, upon whom he wishes to impose misery, presumably to try and win them over to his "cause".
(I wonder if he's "man enough" to have leafletted his neighbors explaining his position, e.g. that he's gratuitously sucking up their shared Broadband to try to convince some corporation to change its ways? Or does he just expect his neighbors to suffer poor throughput, without understanding the reasons why?)
No, he's right, it's people like you. Corporations are, fundamentally, groups of people, and the more they are like you, the worse they behave.
Or, if you were a decent, good, or moral person, you'd behave.
Instead, you willfully and intentionally choose to directly disrupt your neighbor's Broadband access by sucking up all the shared resources they, as well as you, pay for under an arrangement that assumes (without being able to easily enforce it) that such abuse will be rare.
Further, you willfully and intentionally choose to indirectly increase the costs borne by all your fellow users of the service -- even those not directly impacted by your bandwidth-burning escapades -- in a quixotic attempt to change the practices of a corporation.
You could just terminate your service. Or just use what you need, not abuse it and your neighbors, and find another approach to changing the global corporate ethic.
But you're an abusive subscriber.
As a fellow Broadband user, be assured that you are acting as my enemy.
It's not a protest. It's a petulant, childish, act of vandalism.
It's nothing more ethical nor moral than expressing your frustration at a lack of proper environmental oversight by the US Government by burning large tracts of old-growth forests.
Of course, I can understand how you came to believe you were acting appropriately. Techno-nerds seem prone to believe their ability to do something technically "elite" trumps any straightforward moral code that would rebuke their behavior. That's why, for example, people can't make moral distinctions between a DDOS attack and a "slashdotting" -- they look only at the effects, ignoring the motives of those contacting the server.
So you probably think you're some kind of technically elite uberhacker and therefore privileged to attack your neighbors in ways they cannot possibly defend themselves against, short of disconnecting themselves from Broadband in favor of some other less-featureful and/or more-expensive solution (something you yourself plainly refuse to do, so you decide to punish others for your own decisions, and blame "The Man").
Now, if one or two of your neighbors decided to suck up all your fresh air by setting fires all around your house, maybe then you'd begin to rise above your own moral idiocy and see such behavior as generally immoral -- because you won't be quite so impressed with the technology at that point?
In short: when you were taught to share with your neighbors in kindergarten, that wasn't meant to include sharing your misery. Grow up and start behaving like a responsible adult. I'm sure you have it in you somewhere.
Let's teach him a lesson and start an Open Captioning Foundation.
That's a poor example, because, in space, no-one can hear ice cream.
Someone should make a movie about a bunch of Open Genome zealots using personal computers with huge hard-drive arrays to store and experiment with DNA sequences.
To play the genome-equivalent of RMS, I nominate:
(Think about it. ;-)
Indeed, the incorrect terminology in that post isn't the only source of confusion on the overall issue.
But I keep hearing people (specifically, those who I assume know more about the legal issues than I) refer to such issues as copyright ones, that I'm not sure either way.
Seems to me trademark law would apply when the labeling might mislead the public, which seems highly unlikely in this case. (Besides, I thought it was generally acceptable to re-use movie names, i.e. they aren't themselves trademarked.)
For all I know, maybe there is substantial precedent or even law that applies the standard the poster was claiming (level to which the IP was zealously protected in previous cases) in the narrow sort of situation that this case falls under when it comes to copyright law.
But the fairly-cogent posts I read (yesterday) here seemed to not mention such a standard, and seemed quite insistent on not only using the phrase "copyright law", but on point-by-point highlighting elements of the law that I'm quite sure are consistent with copyright law, yet inconsistent with trademark law.
(By now, it should be clear that IANAL.)
So I focused primarily on something I'm pretty darn sure of: copyright law does not mandate that a plaintiff demonstrate a history of not ignoring other potential infringements to nearly the same extent that trademark law does.
Absent some pretty compelling references to actual law and/or precedent, I found, and still find, the original post to which I responded to be insufficient in its attempt to persuade by pronouncement.
Or, maybe you're confusing copyright law with trademark law?
Actually, GCC does perform some checks for quality and whether code it's compiling might break. Which is why lots of people choose to compile with it rather than a (hypothetical) stripped-down compiler.
And nobody here, that I've seen, has argued that people should "stop using [CVS]".
GCC, CVS, etc., are tools, not software development processes.
When the discussion revolves around, as it apparently does in this case, the question of how best to design a development process to suit the needs of Linux developers, those who say "why not use CVS?" are about as clueless as someone who interjects, in the midst of a discussion regarding how best to site, design, and build a bridge across a body of water, "why not use a Craftsman hammer?".
I'm curious -- could you explain how, exactly, some random non-MS user (who I don't recall hearing of before) actually is able to make you stick with buggy software (which he's exploiting), when MS itself wilfully engages in the same tactics on a global scale so as to literally force millions of people to use MS software instead of reasonable alternatives?
I don't mean to be funny here, but I can't help saying it:
Seriously, as a longtime GNU/Linux user, it's possibly the case that I've had more emails sent to me that were partially or completely, yet unnecessarily, unreadable due to MS software being used to author them than you've had total emails sent to you your entire life.
But do I call MS's behavior childish and stubbornly refuse to use it as a result?
Okay, well, maybe I do, but more because I don't want to run software that is, literally, hostile to its end users (including those receiving email from me).
But there's no way I'm going to let someone like Nick Moffett chase me off GNU/Linux, since his actions in no way affect the readability of email I write to my friends -- unlike what happens when I try to use MS software and have to accept, or work around, the childish (greediness, short-sightedness, whatever) way in which MS software is put together.
That being said, I don't cotton to the idea of joining the MS campaign of turning what should and easily could be a shared space of interoperable protocols into a battlefield fought over by camps engaged in a constantly-escalating arms race.
So while this "trick" looks like something worth knowing about and deploying once in a while to make a point, it's not something I'd recommend as a wise practice on the part of free-software enthusiasts.
Okay, I understand that, and it seems you don't intend to imply individuals must submit themselves to any particular disorder either, eh? ;-)
When I see a term like "anarchism", or "anarchy" used in the context implying a system of governance (or degree thereof), I usually treat it as an outlining of a system to be adopted by enough people to make it ubiquitous in a population. But, of course, the very word "anarchy", treated as a description of the behavior of a collection of agents, denies that interpretation; hence my confusion, which I have yet to thoroughly research, over the use of the term "anarchy" to describe what amounts to a low-overhead form of collectivism, or to justify extremist violence.
You make a key distinction between "fundamentally anarchic" and "systemically anarchic", if I'm using those terms right.
"Fundamentally anarchic", if it means what I think you mean by it, is true at least in the sense that it cannot not be true. In that sense, our own brains and bodies, even our molecules, are "fundamentally anarchic", and any behaviors we think we observe, and to which we attach labels, are merely emergent behaviors, arising from the constant interactions of bazillions of tiny particles and energies.
Is there another sense in which you use that phrase that distinguishes our society from, say, a colony of ants?
"Systemically anarchic" is, I hope, a good term to more precisely describe a system intentionally designed to function well (however that's defined) with minimized need for heirarchical command-and-control systems. It seems to me that most "anarchists" are advocating this, rather than simply observing that, from a biological, chemical, physical, and quantum-mechanics level, everything's just bits of matter floating around.
So, my question about anarchy, as well as about Christianity, boils down to this: is it necessary to reserve some degree of force, or tyrannical control, for use in defining and defending the boundaries of the system being advocated, and/or to enable the conversion of some society from its present form to the desired form?
In both cases, "yes" suggests that the system being advocated, itself, is not the perfect form for all interaction that it might be advertised as. In that case, it amounts to little more than a Really Great Idea that some number of people impose on another (hoping they "get with the program") rather than a Universal Truth to be revealed to all of us. (At least with Christianity, you get a God, one divine Mind, to tell us all about it for free. ;-)
And, in both cases, "no" allows room for society to come to grips with the proposed system slowly, over time. Again, this suggests that merely proposing the system isn't enough (in Christianity, this is called "preaching the gospel"), therefore, the system isn't "perfect" in the abstract sense that everyone immediately "gets" it, but what system is, besides the universe itself?
And that "no" answer denies what seems to be actions by "extremist" anarchists and Christians, which is not always a politically wise thing to say to those who commit their lives to promote the idea (based on identity of label, at least) you or I wish to promote.
When I read this in your comment yesterday morning (and was too busy to respond until now), it just put a big smile on my face, because you nailed what I've come to believe, and have been telling certain friends and acquaintances recently.
Specifically, all human organization -- government, church, corporation, family -- is built on a fabric, or network, of trust relationships between the humans inside, as well as outside, the organization. These relationships are not necessarily 100% "I trust you" ones, rather, they're characterized by statements such as "I trust that you'll learn to not put your hand on a hot stove, between my saying 'no' and your trying it anyway" and "I trust that my passing a law making something illegal will help you understand that you can either obey it or risk my doing violence to you directly or via some other trust-relationships I happen to have".
Everything else -- laws, procedures, traditions, discussions around the dinner table -- augment, but never can replace, those trust-relationships.
So, the beauty of "anarchy", or, the turning away from heirarchical command-and-control systems, is that it makes more efficient use of trust-relationships, allowing for better overall coordination even in the face of failures in the relationships.
E.g. I'd rather trust you to contribute, as your resources allow, to those having needs in your community, as you see fit, than trust a vast array of legislators, judges, executives, tax collectors, police, and prison guards to make sure that you will contribute a certain percentage of your income to a common pool from which a specific amount will be deducted and, in turn, contributed to someone in your community that I (indirectly via this beauracracy) have decided needs your money.
I still hesitate about going too far down that road, perhaps because of my exploration of my Christian faith.
As I see it, anarchy, as a turning away from heirarchical command-and-control, is indeed similar to what Christ preached.
But as an "ism" -- avoiding heirarchies and/or command-and-control systems as a goal in itself -- I don't see it. At least not yet.
So, I think you're right, it's "better".
But, I think what's "best" might involve more of a focus on getting away from tyranny -- the imposition of one's will on another -- than on the org-chart-style perception of the system.
Consider flocking behavior (birds, fish, etc.). The system appears heirarchical, at least to the casual observer -- a leader or several, a bunch of followers, some more exposed to dangers (predators) and advantages (a fresh environment and other resources) by virtue of being on the outside edges, the rest "safely" in the middle of the pack.
But flocks rarely involve command-and-control, or explicit heirarchical, structures.
Are they therefore "anarchy" in the simplest sense of the word? Clearly not, since they're quite well-ordered to our eyes. But do they meet a typical anarchist's definition of a "better" society, I wonder?
I'd tend to think so, but haven't been able to tell for sure.
What I do know is that flocking requires no tyranny -- components, or individuals, that decide to leave the flock are not punished by the flock for doing so. (The hawk or shark might punish them; the eligible mate or rare scrap of food might reward them; but the flock apparently has no need for its own reward/punishment system.)
Raised to the much-higher level of intelligence implied by substituting humans for birds and fish, does the ideal system involve some heirarchical organization, at least on an ad-hoc, per-project basis?
I suspect it does, but, as long as the tyrannical element is missing, I think it fits the Christian ideal (on earth anyway), and yet am not sure to what extent it fits any particular anarchic ideal.
(Of course, there are plenty of practical problems to solve to reach this ideal. Concentrating resources in the hands of a few is an efficient way of ensuring the survival of the many in lots of situations, from the mother who takes the family water buckets to the river to the military that controls all the nation's nuclear weapons. So how does the collective ensure that the individual doesn't abscond with, or abuse or destroy, those precious resources -- that the mother doesn't take the water to another family with a more attractive, single father, better-behaved children; that the military doesn't fire or destroy its missiles improperly? Without traditions, laws, and procedures that either force correct behavior or enforce it by punishing, down the road, incorrect behavior, the group must either have a viable answer or be prepared to, on occasion, suffer the consequences.)
I'm not quite sure I understand that last sentence (did you really mean the lack of ethics is not so diminished?), but the rest of it, 100% right, in my humble opinion. As you probably expected, once you saw the network-of-trust-relationships stuff I wrote above, inspired by having already read your comments yesterday.
I disagree. There are similarities of motive -- of directing the behavior of others -- but vast differences in amount and effectiveness of control.
By putting less direct stress on other humans (not no stress, I stress ;-), using techniques such as advertising instead of direct "persuasion" like beatings, you leave those humans with more opportunity to thoughtfully consider your "pitch" and, perhaps more importantly, take responsibility for their actions or inactions.
Hallelujah and Amen!
(Sorry, that got away from me there. ;-)
That's a worthy research topic from an academic point of view.
I'm more interested in their answer to this question: "What are you doing in your life, today, that demonstrates, even in small ways, your desire to live the lifestyle you profess will work for others, and what are you learning from those attempted demonstrations?"
Me, I'm learning a lot by taking the small steps in my own life of trying to follow Christ, rather than jumping up on a pedestal (directly or by proxy) and telling everyone to do things My Way. And by "learning" I mean, learning what does and doesn't work, etc.
Well, I'd suggest "politically active producers", which, in some ways, amounts to a large portion of the population.
But that doesn't concern me much. Our relationships (in the US anyway) are so variegated; the woman who cleans my house buys products designed by people who buy software written by companies who pay my consulting fees. Is she a "politically passive consumer" of my software, by not understanding the full ramifications on my profession and freedom of the DMCA or SSSCA? Okay, maybe yes, but she's hardly politically passive as a producer -- of my nicely cleaned house, once a week anyway -- who has to deal directly with all the legislated annoyances of being her own boss, for just one example.
And not only are people simultaneously politically passive consumers and, often, producers, they tend to grow into more politically astute, whether passive or active, citizens, over time.
So, aside from "preaching the gospel", to help people avoid the pitfalls (say, higher credit-card debt) of being politically passive consumers, I see little need to worry about The System That Supports Or Maybe Produces Them.
But then, that's partly because I have bigger fish to fry -- my own mindset about other humans, which still has got to evolve, and is, in my world, much more important than collective behavior of humans as viewed by me through that very prism in my thinking.
Yeah, it seems to me that where nature has many examples of such laws and procedures as the result of emergent behavior due to genetics and natural selection, primates and especially humans exhibit individual awareness of the need to adapt such laws to the necessities of the environment, so as to improve the "thinking process" of the group. (While most primates presumably consider the group to extend no further than its own species, if beyond its own tribe, humans seem fully able to explicitly define their "group mind" to include members of other species.)
Indeed, and I believe (based mostly on speculation, guesswork, and, okay, some observation and historical awareness ;-) that what you identify as "now" applies to the last several centuries, if not millenia, on -- nearly in the West, anyway -- a continuum.
After all, we already see evidence, even pre-Internet, of the worldwide communications infrastructure -- which, in this sense, necessarily includes the willingness of the components of the mind as a collective to communicate with distant components -- becoming faster, wider, and quicker, and of the resulting benefits, including increased caloric intake among the world's poor, for example.
And what seems to be missing, as a component of this general improvement long claimed to be necessary, is a strong, heirarchical, command-and-control structure -- a world government, for example -- to ensure that the right people benefit from the proper resources at the proper time.
EXACTLY!! And what that translates into, for others who might be reading, is "on-the-street perspective" and "simpler and open, rather than more complicated and obscure, governance".
That is, situational awareness means that a component of a collective mind -- an individual human or ant -- has a unique perspective of its environment. To the extent it is free to act however it wants, it might be said to not be acting in harmony with the collective mind; but, overly constrained, it can respond to local needs and opportunities no faster than the mind as a whole can process whatever sensory information its "allowed" to transmit (which suggests the importance of the First Amendment to the US Constitution), and that mind is, of course, itself constrained, by the laws of nature, to act no faster than its interconnecting infrastructure allows it.
(This suggests that there might be a strong temptation, as our technological and communications infrastructure improves, for some to say "now we can successfully impose a very strong central government, because we've solved the problems that plagued previous experiments, such as the Soviet Union".)
And while "clear goals" applies to the mind as a collective, to the extent those goals can be understood by components of that mind, the need for constant command-and-control interaction between governing and sensing/acting components (interaction that is necessarily high-latency, low-bandwidth, and low-reliability compared to the internal processing of an individual component) is lessened.
I think there's a lot of truth to that, but I believe it will be, generally, better to more fully understand the bases of those procedures and laws before throwing them out entirely. Of course, it's always tempting to start with a blank slate, but since we're not about to make a complete transition from one (old) communications infrastructure to another at a higher quantum level across the board, it's probably unwise to cast off, unilaterally, the traditions and protections we have, in forms such as procedures and laws, without careful consideration.
Two things nearly convince me of that, besides what I say above.
For one, history tends to show that successful transitions from old to new technologies rarely include complete and sudden dismissals of the old. Instead, they typically coexist for a time, as users transition, each on their own schedule, from the old to the new. This happens even in places where it is tremendously expensive to accommodate the old and new simultaneously, such as cities (NYC having both rail-transit and street systems comes to mind).
And in my own industry (computer software), attempts to deliver new technologies from "on high" -- which is pretty much how any new technology must be delivered, if it is to replace the old overnight, rather than being gradually deployed -- tend to fail spectacularly. For examples, the fact that most general-purpose computing involves languages like C and Fortran rather than PL/I and Ada, and operating systems like Unix and Windows rather than Multics, reveals, I believe, serious problems in the wipe-away-the-past approach to new designs. (The new designs -- PL/I, Ada, and Multics in these examples -- being "demonstrably superior" and nearly "legacy-free" to the technologies that displaced, and in some cases predated, them!)
The other thing that tells me that we should be careful about dismissing old procedures and laws is that they were produced by components of our collective mind separated from the current mind, viewed as a "snapshot", only by time, some space, and incomplete memories. Yet, from a larger perspective, the people who contributed to those procedures and laws are a present part of our collective mind, though not active components -- more like bone cells than neurons, perhaps. (I.e. they're pushing up daisies.)
So, while we can't simply ask them how or whether certain procedures and laws would apply today, it seems worth considering what we can learn about them, their environment, and so on, that might help us better understand just what is worth chucking and what is worth keeping for a time.
(That's not to say we treat traditions as untouchable; I hope that's clear!)
And while incremental improvements in the clarity and simplicity of our society as a whole don't seem as "sexy" as a wholesale revolution, my guess is that the very things contributing to the "simplifiability" -- the "de-archicalization", if you will -- of our society will also speed such incremental progress, to the point where, after a short time, each generation will have reason to believe it has just undergone a powerful, peaceful, positive revolution in the previous decade, or year, or month.
(P.S. In the /. "quote" at the bottom of my preview screen for this comment appeared this: "FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed -- it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer. -- A.J. Perlis".)
(P.P.S. Speaking of Fortran, I was amused to see an example of it on a recent episode of Nova on gamma-ray bursts from distant galaxies. Looks like the model, or software simulation, one researcher wrote, which was shown late in the episode, was in Fortran, and it looked like he was editing using GNU Emacs. Gotta love it. ;-)
Why bother? They're already being punished -- by having to read this crap!
It's irrelevant (to me, anyway) whether the term existed then, and my reading of the NT agrees with most of your points.
But one distinction I make between what Jesus preached and what you preach is that he didn't in any way advocate tearing down power-structures, nor did he give much in the way of lip-service to the idea that, if only we all gave up our obediance to the ideal of heirarchical rule, we'd have a better world.
Instead, Jesus (and, IMO, the entire Holy Bible, viewed not literally but spiritually) preached the "utopia", or kingdom of heaven on earth, of each (not necessarily every) person completely and utterly bowing to God's law, God's judgement, and God's care.
Further, he made it clear that someone following his path would experience not a worldly utopia, but severe resistance -- a prediction you correctly identify as applying to himself, as well as other Christians to come.
As the other poster points out, your concept -- that we'd all be better off in an anarchy, that it's going to happen, etc. -- is not exactly strongly backed up by history. And, as I understand it, it wasn't preached by Jesus. His (immediate) followers didn't try to convert the governments of the day to anarchy, something that would best be done from within the system, nor did they act overtly against the system (as you point out, they were directed to pay taxes -- no "boycotting" in that group!). At least one of them (Saul, who became Paul) actually gave up positions of power when they accepted Jesus as Christ, positions they might have effectively used to push an anarchist agenda. (Jesus himself, tempted to simply take over world government, a position from which he presumably could safely, easily, and widely publish his views, responded to that temptation with "Get thee behind me, Satan". I believe he identifies as "Satan" not only the kind of thinking to which anarchism theoretically objects, but the kind that holds that reconfiguring human governments or even human minds is a valid path to utopia. That his, he seemed to identify the mere desire to direct the lives of others -- under any guise, for any reason -- as a kind of "Satanic" temptation. And that's a temptation evidently indulged in by many anarchists -- that some human minds have enough of a better idea of how to reach utopia, or some ideal state of society, that they have the right or duty to impose that idea on others via some means -- beyond preaching, which Jesus clearly did endorse.)
In a way, it sounds harsh to say, because it sounds like I'm saying "there's no way Anarchy is going to take over, deal with it".
But I think what Jesus was really saying is "you don't need to wait one moment for a Better Way to come to your world -- the Lord God Almighty is already here, simply accept him, by (e.g.) throwing off your worship of human heirarchy, and you'll find that kingdom of heaven that is already within you, now". Anarchists should have a head-start in that direction -- at least, the ones who don't dress up in black hoods and destroy other people's property to promote their agenda.
And that makes sense to me. I think it's perfectly reasonable for anarchists to generally promote the idea that human heirarchies are not as sound a path to utopia as certain ideologies (including communism, socialism, republicanism, etc.) appear to claim. Yet I think I see why, for very practical reasons, an individual demonstrating his willingness to bow to only God's rule can and must start out with little things (outside the reach of the typical group or government) before progressing to the point of claiming he's able to completely reorganize society for the better. (I think that might be a lesson behind the parable of the talents loaned to the three: that, rather than await humanity's discovering and proving these ideas, we're each to start proving them on our own, in our own lives, so as to be sure of what we're preaching and believing.)
Anyway, this is the second thread discussing anarchy as a system (another occurred a few weeks ago here on /.) that I've found highly pertinent to my ongoing inquiries into Christianity and governance, and that has been so lucidly (and calmly) able to expound on various aspects of these issues. Thanks!