Morris Dovey wrote:
Tim Daneliuk (in ) said:
| Morris Dovey wrote:
|| Tim Daneliuk (in ) said:
||
||| wrote:
||||
|||| False. Not only can we win without abandoning our principles, we
|||| cannot win if we do.
||||
|||| Abandonment of our principles is suicide.
|||
||| So is clinging to them to the point where we are annihilated.
||| Survival comes before legal nuance notwithstanding the fantasyland
||| inhabited by a good many of the war critics.
||
|| It would seem that you've not noticed the rather large number of
|| men and women who valued our principles more highly than their
|| personal survival - and the lesser (but still awesomely large)
|| number who did not, in fact, survive - all so that you and I might
|| live in what you so casually refer to as "fantasyland".
||
|| If you choose to discard our fundamental principles in favor of
|| some hoped-for longevity; most will understand - and I would guess
|| that most will also be ashamed for you.
|
|
| It is not a "fundamental principle" that we roll over and play dead
| for combatants hiding behind civilian garb. It is not a
| "fundamental principle" that such individuals be extended the
| benefits of our social contract. It is not a "fundamental
| principle" that such individuals should be entirely free of duress,
| discomfort, and even intimidation. Only in the degenerate lexicon
| of the New Intellectual are these "principles" of any sort. And
| *I* and thoroughly ashamed of *them* - the people that insist I
| commit suicide and then try to hide behind some perverse and
| malignant reinterpretation of Liberty to suit their ideological
| stupidities. You do not negotiate with Evil, you crush it to death
| with extreme violence so that the crushing is quick and complete.
| But our fine New Intellectual degenerates cannot even utter the
| notion that Evil even exists. They're too busy trying to
| rehabilitate child predators, terrorist, despots, and fools.
|
| Your premises are lousy and your conclusions correspondingly worse.
Then we have irreconcilable differences of opinion. My first principle
was aptly set forth by Jefferson when he wrote: "We hold these truths
to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, ..." In my mind
and heart, I broaden "men" to "persons"; and I add emphasis to "all."
I concur without reservation.
I believe that every person is accountable for what they do. I believe
that within the purview of the USA, all persons should be subject to
the same legal standards. If (for example) within our purview, the
crime is murder - then the offender should be tried for that crime;
and if found guilty, punished in the same manner as other murderers. I
do not find it appropriate to maintain different systems or standards
of justice for arbitrary groupings of persons.
Again, complete agreement.
I understand your desire for retribution for wrongs; as well as your
loathing of evil and your desire to eliminate it. I also understand
that you would impose your own personal notion of justice (and perhaps
your own personal definition of evil) on all the rest of the world.
Not the case, or at least not as you frame it. The only "evil" for which
I see redress is that "evil" which causes harm to others. For instance,
I think drug abuse is "evil" in that is causes great harm to the
individual abusing the drug. But until/unless their drug abuse causes
harm to others, I seek no legal (i.e., forceful) remediation. In the
matter of geopolitics, I similarly do not see it as our (the democratic
West) job to intervene until/unless the actions of other people or
nations jeopardizes that democratic West.
The thing that makes the current situation difficult is that the threat
is a gathering and growing one with very real potential for global
nuclear holocaust. The moral question is analogous to this: If you're in
a bar and someone threatens you, just *when* do you have the right to
act forcefully? Assuming they have the means to carry out their threat
("threat" is only meaningful if the capacity to deliver the promise
exists), do you wait until you've actually been struck by the beer
bottle or can you act during the backswing? What is distressing about
this entire debate is that the political Right wants to use this as an
excuse to "deliver" the enemy into democracy, which clearly does not
work. By contrast, the Left seems to want to wait until we're actually
bleeding on the bar counter before acting, and in the mean time have
some silly nuanced discussion about whether our domestic legal
protections ought to be invoked. What is rarely discussed is the
dimension of the asymmetric threat in a nuclear world connected by
travel, transportation, and techology. In this case, the "beer bottle"
once delivered will be devastating.
Like you, I dislike much of what is going on at the moment, but what
choice do we realistically have? Do we wait for an apocalyptic culture
of suicidal maniacs to be armed to the point that we have no choice but
to respond with nuclear weapons? In the real world the choice is not the
Sunday School choice of simple Good vs. Bad. It is the choice between
Bad and Worse.
The thing that makes this discussion so perverse is that the neo-cons
have conflated defense and "bringing stability and democracy to the
region". No wonder their critics shake their heads in dismay. But,
that said, no matter how lousy the rationale', the general trajectory
of stopping the disease before it is an epidemic is a sound one. Given
any realistic and possible alternative, I'd support it, but I just don't
see one. Lockeian/Jeffersonian Liberty is and always should be our
inarguable guiding principle. But, it's not a suicide pact and ugly
conditions demand ugly responses.
I've seen this before - and don't need more.
I understand and share your angst for exactly the same reasons, I
suspect. But I find it telling that the relatively minor sins of the
West in these matters get magnified out of all proportion but the very
real and far more serious abuses of the asymmetric warriors get's only a
brief glance in the popular debate. As I've said previously, one of the
(many) reasons I've become so completely disaffected with the political
Left is that they have utterly failed in their role as the "loyal
opposition". Instead of dissecting every small failing of the Bush
administration, the US Left should have been acting quietly and
diplomatically within the halls of power to steer a course everyone
could live with. They haven't. They've taken the stance that *anything*
W and his crew does is wrong with hope against hope they can regain
majority power. Their political ambition trumps the good of
democracy.They are contemptible for this. (N.B. That the neo-cons,
however wrong you think they are, have *not* done this. They have taken
a position and stuck to it in the face of great political pressure and
possible loss of power.) Unfortunately, this means that, at least for
now, the neo-cons get it all their way. I find this chilling, but not as
chilling as doing nothing while we argue about whether US Code applies
to Jamal The Suicide Bomber ...
--
Morris Dovey
DeSoto Solar
DeSoto, Iowa USA
http://www.iedu.com/DeSoto
--
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Tim Daneliuk
PGP Key: http://www.tundraware.com/PGP/