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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
I also appreciate your request of adnoto, as I am interested as well in new ideas.
I shall attempt to muffle my pratfalls in the meantime... ;-}
hrh - be my guest, but be prepared for a lot of head scratching because the ones who use it aren't usually quick enough on the uptake to understand why it might be offensive to women in the first place. 'Course you prolly already figured that out. :-)
And I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I went reading through your previous posts and when I made it to about 101 I just ran out of time/patience... -- Jkalos
Well if you read that far then you must have seen this.
http://tinyurl.com/5k5nve
I have to be going now but thanks for your sincerity. No, I do not have all the answers. But I do know what has not worked. Everyone with a brain should by now. Others need to accept certain truths and make the decision to change tactics before any direct action plan can even be discussed. As I think you can see from this thread alone that is not going to happen. I didn't even read DCLaw's plan. I will do so tomorrow if I have time but if it entails working within the system then it is not a plan with any legitimate hope of success.
The simple truth is that without them -- without the relatively intelligent, well informed and well intentioned "liberal" middle class -- no plan, even a well thought out direct action plan, has a chance of being successful. They have chosen their plan and all evidence points to our nation suffering a longer, drawn out death as a result.
The passage that caught my eye in the entry you linked to was this:
“marching on and sitting in the local offices of our respective congresspersons would be very effective IMO.”
So I see you are thinking of forms of direct action in a Gandhian sense/MLK sense, perhaps. I immediately think of the civil rights movement when I think of real social change. But it is hard to see how that could be ignited in a specific way in our current circumstances. That makes me think of what DCLaw said in this thread, that I was referring to:
“The anger - personalized, direct, concrete, and intolerable - is nowhere near approaching the level required for a sufficiently potent and widespread campaign of civil disobedience.The last major example I can think of - opposition to the Vietnam War, which had mixed, delayed results - was undeniably in large part a product of the terrible draft that was sending so many young men off to actually die for the government's policies.A bit before that, the civil rights movement had an overwhelmingly compelling moral message, and opposed clearly, blatant injustices and the vilest political adversaries. Even then, its success was far from certain and - Clinton had a point - did require federal political and judicial action as well. Also, the initial political avenues were not working, adding pressure, popular outrage, urgency, and increased moral intensity to the movement until it reached a tipping point.Today, although we cannot predict the outcome, we have had significant electoral changes come about in 2006 and of course 2008 - the latter historically unprecedented - and this has rendered notions of effective civil disobedience on a massive enough scale implausible, barring added injustices and conditions so grotesque as to defy current description.In such a state, the inch-by-inch efforts of petition, scrutiny, and targeted political action are the tools of the trade.”
To that you say if any purported plan "entails working within the system then it is not a plan with any legitimate hope of success.”
So my question is: how do you define success? Again, a real question. I find myself sometimes thinking if I can't change things fundamentally, then what is the point? And then I despair. But then I think of the civil rights movement, and I feel some hope. I remember now some old exchanges you had with others over incrementalism, and I certainly do not mean to rehash that: I am merely wondering what you mean by sucess in your statement there.
It is the big sleeves on my clown shirt: they slide down over my wrists and mess up my typing skills.
Clowns scare me.
Are the friends of all good children.
the kind of clown I hope I might aspire to be is a figure of the fool. I am an old fan of Erasmus and his "Praise of Folly." I love Ermasmus so much I even learned to pronounce classical Greek just like he did. That's how I earned my first clown nose.
It's so dark.
You must not have seen this commercial:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJqnitjqpuM
I posed 3 hypotheticals and only one of you even had the courage to simply say: No, I would not torture regardless of the consequences. Everyone else quibbles about the implausibility of the scenarios. That is disingenuous. Surely, each of you can imagine a situation where you would do something you otherwise wouldn't to protect yourself or people you love. If you are truly interested in considering the question, then do this: Construct such a hypothetical for yourself, where the people you love are in mortal danger, and where some other person knows but won't say where they are. What would you do?
I'll be the second to simply say: "No, I would not torture regardless of the consequences." Partially, this is out of principle, and partially because, as countless others have pointed out to you, very convincing evidence exists that torture is ineffective at achieving the goal of obtaining real and useful information.
However, I'll also be about the 100th person to "quibble about the implausibility of the scenarios." It's absolutely not disingenuous to call them for the B.S. they are (see Timothy3's post on teleological arguments if you'd like a more refined and academic term than B.S. and ask ethics_professor or check some references for further detail about why teleological arguments equate to B.S. if you need to).
Finally, in principle, I am a non-violent person who would hate to resort to violence for any reason. However, in the event that I needed to defend myself or those I love from a direct threat, I would do so if I could. If you had a knife to my brother's throat and I had a gun, I would absolutely without a doubt at least ATTEMPT to shoot you. I would do so knowing that you could reflexively slit his throat anyway, thwarting my attempt to save his life, and knowing absolutely that I would never be able to erase the memory of shooting you from my non-violent brain and would thus personally suffer for it even if I saved his life. I would also doing so knowing that I might not be able to prove self-defense in a court of law and thus might serve out the rest of my natural life behind bars or face lethal injection or whatever they do in the state in which I currently reside.
This is different from what you are advocating for two reasons. First, in my implausible scenario, I'd know you intented my brother harm because I would be able to see it with my own eyes rather than needing to assume you held the key to a magical ticking time bomb locked in your head. Second, and more importantly, I'm not advocating that the laws against shooting you be changed to cover the 20% possibility of being convicted for the act of self-defense in my implausible scenario at the very real expense of weakening our ability to prosecute the 80% of shootings that are not done in self-defense (note that I'm referencing the 80/20 rule here and not attempting to use actual case statistics to illustrate my point).
Like the other 99 who have gone before me in this thread, I hold little hope that my version of calling B.S. on the ticking time bomb theory argument will hold any water with you, but after reading your 99th seeming failure to register what they have been saying, I felt compelled to post it anyway. FWIW.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
