Sorry J, that may be true in the abstract, but not for human beings in realtime. Can you claim truly understanding responsibility for 300 million?

Can you demonstrate any credible threat in realtime reality that endangers 300 million Americans. No. You can't. Not even in 2001,2 3 or 4. Not even today. Probably not even during the Cold War.

Shooter now:

Universal condition? The only universal conditions that immediately come to mind are death and taxes.

Before:

This is what seperates you from most people. You have carefully weighed, and accepted, death as part of your life. Brutally put, your fundamental job was to kill or be killed. Until that is ingrained, judging HOW to use that power can't happen.

Civilians have not gone through that process, most avoid it like the plague. Facing death is the most horrible aspect of existence for the average person. Huge institutions (religion) have been erected to deal with just that fear.

Which one is it? It's universal but unthinkable? Shooter is contradictable and usually does it to himself. He's full of shit and lacks any internal logical consistency. There is a good reason Glenn has advised us all to ignore Shooter on at least one occasion, but....

About 20 years ago, most cops put in their 20 years without ever having to pull their guns. That number has probably changed a bit. Blackwater syndrome. Any logistician can tell you that for every combat soldier on the front line, there are ten behind him in logistics and support. Many of those functions are now performed by private contractors but they rarely get any trigger time, either.

Jkalos... Torture is simply wrong.

So is homicide. It's even illegal. Yet we do have a class of homicide called "justified".

HOMICIDE, n.

The slaying of one human being by another. There are four kinds of homocide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy, but it makes no great difference to the person slain whether he fell by one kind or another -- the classification is for advantage of the lawyers.

A.B.

Devil's Dictionary

Better to just say it's completely and totally ineffective as a general policy. Than you can just ignore Shooter and his Jack Bauer fantasies.

Beautiful comment - this seems to me to get to the core of it:

And the higher the stakes it seemed to me it became even more important to hew to my principles: in the real world.

If principles mean anything at all, this *must* be true. Again, I applaud and thank you for the entire comment.

Adorno thought it was ineffective.

The anti-war movement also despised the highly educated and objective Washington technocrat, epitomized by Robert McNamara, who was not moved by subjective, irrational emotions. McNamara was alleged to make decisions solely on numbers and probabilities and could not see individual lives or deaths as anything but statistics. The Vietnam body count was offered as an example of this objectivity.

Theodor Adorno, himself a Marxist, sharply criticised this trend in the 60's Left, which he called "actionism," defined as the belief that actions such as protests and strikes could change the political structure by themselves without being supported by solid theory and an organized program or party.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectual#Left-wing_currents

Brian Wilson made some sacrifices:

In 1987, while engaged in a protest of U.S. weapons to Central America, an action publicized in advance, Willson and other members of a Veterans Peace Action Team were blocking the train tracks at the Concord, California Naval Weapons Station. Due to a government policy decision, the train refused to stop, and the veterans were injured when the train did not slow down as they expected. Willson was hit, run over, and nearly died. Ultimately, he survived but lost both legs below the knee while suffering a severe skull fracture with loss of his right frontal lobe, among other injuries. Subsequently, he discovered that he had been identified for more than a year as an FBI domestic "terrorist" suspect under President Reagan's anti-terrorist task force provisions and that the train crew that day had been ordered to not stop the train to prevent any Hijacking attempts. Willson filed a law suit contending that the Navy and individual supervisors were given ample warning of their plan to nonviolently remain on the tracks, and that the crew had plenty of time to stop--which the subsequent official Navy report confirmed. Surprisingly, the train crew filed a law suit against Willson, requesting punitive damages for the "humiliation, mental anguish, and physical stress" they suffered as a result of the incident. Their suit was dismissed. Willson later agreed to settle his lawsuit against the Government and train crew for $920,000. He now walks with prostheses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._Brian_Willson

Even Thoreau wasn't opposed to violent action and the spilling of blood in some instances.

http://thoreau.eserver.org/theory.html

I just realized that I misunderstood your notion of the strike from your earlier post. The recent one emphasizes a more focused strike by the professional campaign workers. That certainly does seem to have the potential to be more effective as you describe it.

The mischievous part of me wonders if that mightn't be the key to a Democratic landslide, since the consultants would be less able to "handle" the candidates when they should be calling the shots themselves. ;~)

When I said wrong I meant unjust i.e. not in accord with reality. I am that rarest of modern birds, a Platonist. I pledge intellectual fidelity to the good.

And shooter: arguments are a hard thing to have correctly (I define "argument" as a joint attempt to arrive at the truth of the situation, no matter which side of the exchange is validated; thus an argument is not a debate, etc). In that sense it is darn hard to have an argument in a medium where we have to by necessity state a lot of conclusions while only telegraphing the premises. Your statement that you are a relativist on justice highlights our central disagreement and enables us to at least be clear on why we think the other mistaken. If I were to give you my full argument for justice, I would ask you to take a class with me that I regularly teach. In it we spend the whole fourteen weeks reading the Plato's Republic, talking through it, writing about it (me reading their writing and responding) and talking and talking and talking. At the end of that course I tell them: now you are in a position to know who you are, what you think, and to give reasons for it. If you think justice is a relative notion, then now you know what that means. I tell them I am not certain (for Socrates himself was not certain, even about life after death right before he drank the hemlock), but that it seemed to me not improbable that justice is a constituent of reality, and so I would bet my life on that; because the alternative, that it is relative, would lead to a kind of hell--and since it has not been proven or shown certain, I would not go to hell before I was certain I needed to (thus I am not saying that we cannot believe it is relative because it would lead to hell, because if you could show me clearly that it was relative then I would go to hell: I am not giving an argument from disastrous consequences, natch?). For those who are convinced it is relative, I recommend unto them Sartre, who seems to me in Being and Nothingness to give a kind of guide to life in Hell: but I'm not so sure I have to go there yet.

So ends our interchange. It seems pointless to go back and forth in such a limited medium when our basic starting points are so divergent and there is no real context to develop it into a real argument. But I wish you well. I wish you could take my class so we could really talk (not so you would come to agree with me but so that you could come to understand what you are really saying and what I am really saying. Know yourself, shooter242. Good luck.