Letters to the Editor
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@Ondolette
Still think there's a situation for these things, L.W.M.? I bet even a situational ethicist has to draw this particular line (not being critical, I really do).
There is always a remote possibility of being confronted with unforeseen and extreme situations where unthinkable actions and behaviors become conceivable and possible. This isn't a justification for the current administration to make general policy on the basis of these specific and highly unlikely hypotheticals. I'm not even thinking of cases related to GWOT. It's simply recognition of the full range of possibilities. The 1976 Chowchilla school bus kidnapping comes to mind. If the kidnappers had buried the children so they hadn't managed to escape on their own, and you were a parent of one of those kids, you might be in there breaking fingers and toes with a hammer. You can't say until you are confronted with the situation.
The concept of justifiable homicide is found in the Laws of Solon. If your jet crashed in the Andes, you might eat the flesh of the dead to survive. Some people have done this to survive. It depends on the circumstances and situation and mitigating or aggravating factors. You are breaking laws or taboos and you may be called to answer for it. Situational ethics is a Christian ethical theory. I'm sure you will find it resonates with Thoreau and it wouldn't suprise me to find that Father Fletcher and others were influenced by Thoreau's Civil Disobedience in the development of the concept. It's a personal decision, not meant to be policy, and the individual has to be willing to face the consequences of his actions.
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From the Front Lines
Well, that's it, old sport. Best of luck. I'm off to the Madrid launch of my book in Spanish at a reception hosted by Jose Maria Aznar, the former prime minister here, followed by a delicious dinner. I anticipate no riots.
- National Review Editor John O'Sullivan
Godspeed, little green beret..(sniff).. Keep your head low..
Oh, and you must try the fromage frais they have for hors d'oeuvres! They're to die for, soldier!
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I refuse to comment intelligibly anymore on thee bubblesphere...
There will be No interrupting serious conversations on foggy mornings. A bumper sticker -- Wow-Woe unto the baloney politico's scribblers -- tho.
No answering of any nosey questions ref: Pedinska...okay?
She's got one of those indoor flush spring commodes.
The last I heard, but it's not likely true, she was slumped-over the white bowl gagging. My brains epiglottis is not working anyway today to dare tell anyone in much detail....
mjsphdrea @ 11:44...ondelette @ 11:46 rambles?
I love the 'rambling' man song and if I'm in a Lazy Dog Saloon, just outside Big Chimney, Kentucky, I'll bum some pocket change from some dame or madmen like madame Pedinska. Then if she too cheap, or vomiting @ a commode because her cheap white wine...did a job - yep, (how dare woeman blame men for all their precarious ways) and some critter-folk are whiners.
A truth passes through three stages:
1) It's ridiculed. 2) It's violently opposed.
3) It's accepted as self-evident.
Arthur Schopenhauer said that and others have said it here.
On the ride home from Kentucky (skip over this, please) via Ohio and Pa., I was wondering if the levees (Bob Dylan) are all gonna break? The homeless will be forced to leave the 'tent city' makeshift homes outside the government buildings by Dec. 21st (news).
Does any critter ever wonder if the rain in Spain falls mainly on the mountain range, and trickles down to make a moutain Compost Tea to fertilize the baby carrot patch?
Thank nature for rabbit, squirrel, groundhogs,
deer, etc., and skunk poop.
Thank somebody that those natural little critters (I talk to nobody at this early in the morn, and hopping like a bunny or tiptoeing around the tulip patch, and squatting over this doesn't matter) don't have a rabbit outhouses.
Some ladies drink and tinkle in the pants?
There are interesting human critters doing something.
Do something. Do something. The politicians are doing something? I'm wondering.
There are Neurophone inventions, orthomolecular psychiatrist, and even/ever hear of Gene Koonce, from Greeley, Colorado with his Vibe Machine? It is expensive piece of technology. O boy, never lose hope. People make me smile.
There are new human critters: Michael Riversong, legal mind Gandhi's, and many extraOridinary 'critters' who make ya's know the Meet The Press etc., "joes" are soon to be just calibrated compost!
Natures worms and tiny bug/mite, fungal, viral, and a endless microbiological domination of reality is doing something...A Tim Ventura put together an ambitious web site called www.americanantigravity.com. I only mention it because a commenter brought up the stimulating thoughts. I miss people here, but I do need to do something other than think it's possible to eat a keyboard when ya's run out of peanut butter, bread, and snacks that look like Pedinska Cat Food for guest? huh. No judge.
If you say to a Cheeseloveakin, "Great Coffee!" The poor tortured human critter is so generous he gives a whole can of Trader Joe's organic, fair trade, shade grown, Ethiopian coffee from the Yirgacheffe region -- the birthplace of coffee.
Say No more. If I told the whole truth a certain reader here would want to cremate me right on those Ohio campus grounds. I'll plead a want a fifth?
Yep. A jug of Highland Park Scotch if Pedinksa's partner ever comes east, please leave Pedinkska home? Or she can muck the barn stalls. (So- hopscotch out here or skip over this. no bad feelings, ever. What Check-Hospitality!) Pedinska has a front door mat that reads: No knock -- Leave.
I tease.
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"Drives people crazy just administering or watching it." --ondelette
Yes, well... if the ABC interview with this CIA mook is any indication, it works. He seems pretty whack to me, and I wouldn't doubt it was because of what he witnessed.
And then we get into the excuses regime, much like that of excusing what soldiers do in Iraq because it's "war" and shit happens, and all that.
Obviously, the Nation is going to have to come to grips with this monstrosity. We know our current leadership is not about to do it, and any potential leadership on the horizon (realistically) isn't going to do it either.
They will be just as likely to keep the Wars going as the current regime, and nothing we say or do about it will make any difference to them. They keep it going in part to ensure that the reckoning never comes. As long as the Nation's Power is supreme, no one can touch the perpetrators -- and continuers -- of wars of aggression, torture, and who knows what all.
As for the rest of the world, they don't seem to be all that interested in intervention. Back in the Olden Days, c. 20th Century, intervention may have been delayed in some cases, but boy, when it came, it came with a vengeance. Oceans of blood and towers of destruction as far as the eye could see, all, they said, to "end war" in our lifetimes.
The America Firsters may have believed we were intervening on the wrong side, but nonetheless, the US did intervene to stop the aggressors. And won a glorious victory, and the aftermath was nearly as bad in the short run as the struggle itself.
Now the US is the aggressor state, and the World, for the most part, is content with the occasional tut-tut and tsk-tsk, muted, behind the scenes, offered with a heavy sigh, a pat on the back, a knowing glance. "We'll get through this together."
They know, as Americans apparently no longer do, that wars of aggression and torture regimes are wrong, even if they are sometimes convenient, and they're saddened, of course, to see America fall into the patterns they (at least in Europe and Japan) long ago abandoned (or at least said they did...), but what can you do? One has to learn one's lessons on one's own.
In fact, in the immediate aftermath of WWII, fought to end war (again), the Western Powers went on a frenzy of wars of suppression to subdue natives in many lands and restore Western Colonial Empires. The Natives demanding independence from their European Masters were -- it was stated over and over again -- nothing but the Tools of Communists, Nazis, and Imperial Japan. In 1945, it was believed in all the halls of the Western Powers that the former Imperial Regimes should by rights be restored, forthwith, and any Native resistance was to be righteously crushed. The bloodbath did not end, and in some respects it has not ended to this day.
If it hadn't been for the countervailing moral force of the Soviet Union and the rise of an independent and reconstituted Communist China, would there ever have been de-colonialization by the Western Powers? Not likely. And with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the transformation of China (and even our erstwhile enemy Vietnam) into a Capitalist free-for-all, there is now no moral force in the world to prevent re-colonialization. The ideology that might stand in the way is all but extinct. Nothing new has arisen in its place.
In fact, it should be clear that Re-Colonization of troublesome Native lands is the whole point of the various wars and warlettes under way on the Busheviks' watch, and this objective exists independently of the Bushevik paper warriors themselves. The torture and plunder that goes along with it are simply accessories, just as they were in the prior Colonial Order of Things. The point is to reconstitute an Western Imperial Regime over as much of the globe as is necessary and possible, in order that these uppity Natives -- no matter who or where -- be forced to yield to their Superiors.
Libertarians may argue against it, but they are not going to DO anything about it. But we see it's not just the Libertarian arguers who talk a line of bullshit but enter not into the fray, the Dems are equally reluctant to intervene. In fact, many support the objective of Re-Colonization, and apparently believe they can do it a whole lot better than the Busheviks. Rs, of course, salivate at all the plunder, all the torture, all the warriorism and bloodshed involved. It gives them meaning. So while some Dems may argue against it like Libertarians, but be absolutely unwilling to intervene in any way that might stop it, Rs are genuinely thrilled and delighted that the Nation is getting back on the Path of Righteous Imperialism where it belongs. If that means we must submit to Autocracy in order to accomplish this objective, oh well. So did Rome.
The Soviets kept us (relatively) sane. Now... reality itself is enough to drive us crazy.