When I was an Army officer we would go through training exercises on the rule of law in warfare. We would get in little groups and talk through various scenarios: you have only x hours to discover y, would you torture someone to get the information, etc. I was taught by the Army that it was my personal responsibility to uphold the rule of law: what would you do. We would talk and talk about it, trying to decide to my mind what was worse than dying for a cause: what would we be willing to do to someone else for a cause? The consensus we would arrive at would be that we were officers in the United States Army, and that there were some things we could just never do; that to do some things was to become the enemy we were fighting against. Now even in that group there was those that called us naive idealists, so I understand where you are coming from. But it really seems to me, shooter, that some things are more important than mere survival; that the most important thing we have is our integrity; that when my moment comes to die all I will have is my "soul", for want of a better word: my conscience, my integrity: that even if there is no life after death that in my last moments I would to be aware of having lived with integrity. And I think I speak not from the position of an ivory tower idealit: I have been in my life a private and then a lt. and then a capt. in the Army Reserve; a prison guard; and a few other things in my varied career. My real world experiences have only made it clearer to me that integrity and yes, justice, are too important to be ignored, in the small things as well as the large. I was trained to lead a combat mp company, and could do it well: I think I know something about reality. I was a prison guard in a diagnostic reception center, where we taught new prisoners how to act in prison (now there's a job for you!); and in all those cases I found it essential to my functioning in reality to be as honest and as just as I could. So I would treat these prisoners like human beings and be as honest with them as I could: and I found that it seemed to work best when I did so; that they would respect me when I had to discipline them because I did so for upfront reasons in terms of the rules and regs which I would never break. And the higher the stakes it seemed to me it became even more important to hew to my principles: in the real world.

I don't know, shooter: I understand where you are coming from. I can only assume that for your position survival is the intrinsic value: from that point of view all kinds of things make sense. But my basis premiss is that mere survival is not the intrinsic value: that there are things worth more than that. Also, strangely enough, I have found that acting as if there is something more valuable than living makes living all the more precious and worth fighting for: in the right way. And that somehow living this way makes it all practically work out better. For example, some of the fellow guards I had who would break the rules, even for good reasons, would often be set up or compromised by the prisoners sooner or later; the only practically safe way to interact with them was by keeping my integrity. It is precisely my real world experience that tells me that as far as I can see you are wrong.

I know people like to bash you on these boards and that is not my aim here. I am just telling you how I would respond to you if we were face to face. I sure hope many of these democrats and republicans did at least do what they did in the hope of helping save lives: that would just mean they are too inexperienced in negotiating reality to see what a profound mistake they have made; that they have begun to destroy the country to save it.

Alas, I am a student of Socrates, and so am compelled to take each interlocuter at face value; and also a student of Kant, who taught us to respect the humanity that even the strangest and most wrong humans represent. It is a kind of discipline I refuse to give up.

the people on this board are just flat out interesting.

And Anonymous of the Solution: thank you for your thoughtful post. It was interesting to see the thinking of someone more on the "inside". Thank you for taking the time to write all that out.

My education continues.