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>Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 12:22:42 -0400
> Mike Lorrey <mlorrey@datamann.com> extropians@extropy.org Re: An apology - Re: Singularity: Can't happen hereReply-To: extropians@extropy.org
>
>Technotranscendence wrote:
>>
>> On Tuesday, September 11, 2001 5:07 PM Mike Lorrey mlorrey@datamann.com
>> wrote:
>> > Well, so do I. However, I think that the idea that American military
>> > people would be so casual about firing on freinds, relatives, etc is at
>> > least as laughable. Being a veteran myself, I can pretty much say that
>> > outside of a few nuts and racists, 99% of military personnel would say
>> > that the idea of shooting at Americans is not what they signed up for,
>> > and would be considered to be illegal orders.
>>
>> What of Kent State?
>>
>> Anyhow, I hope you're right. Certainly, American law enforcement personel
>> have no restraint in this area, though it mainly seems to be a melanin thing
>> with them.
>>
>> > The only possible
>> > exceptions to this, I think, would be shooting at left wingers.... you
>> > might get more cooperation on that score (oh, and lawyers, too)....
>>
>> I hope you're not serious here.
>
>Generally I am not serious on this, to the extent protrayed, but, as you
>noted the exception of Kent State, military folks generally have the
>sentiment that left wingers think that you have to be a psychopathic
>baby killing murderer to want to serve your country in the military, and
>the fact that lefties are far more enthusiastic about identifying first
>with any group OTHER than Americans, whether it be elitist Franco-philic
>or Euro-philic quiche eating, or the more prevalent movements of
>'hyphenated americans', and are so ready to schuck their duty as
>citizens and dodge the draft, etc.
>
>By the eyes of many military people, since lefties generally don't
>consider themselves to be Americans first, they are expressly asking to
>be treated in a second class manner. More so, many consider the left
>wing demagogery of activists and a good chunk of the legal profession in
>general to be traitors to the Constitution, tearing it down while hiding
>behind it.
>
>It is good to see, though, in this instance that so many of those on the
>left are finally realizing what a bankrupt philosophy the concept of
>moral equivalence is. Not all are though. Listening to a call-in program
>on public radio yesterday, I was disgusted by the namby pamby BS coming
>from it seems every bleeding heart in the Twin State region calling in
>and yakking about 'not jumping to conclusions', of 'stepping back to
>take a breath', and realizing how 'oppressed' these terrorists have
>been. Osama bin Laden has never been 'oppressed', how 'violence isn't
>the answer'..... He's worth nearly a billion dollars, and his family
>continues to funnel money to him, and he and his followers certainly DO
>understand the value of violence to the exclusion of most everything
>else.
>
>I have often written here about how rebels, revolutionaries, and
>terrorists are not born, they are made. They do not act irrationally,
>they use violence in entirely rational ways that is consistent with the
>politics and security of their movement. They do have value systems
>entirely different from ours which permits them to act in ways
>consistent with their cultural paradigm.
>
>This does not mean that they are right, that they have a right to their
>opinion, or that they or their movements should be permitted to exist.
>There is no such thing as moral equivalence. This is a concept of the
>moral coward, who uses it to avoid making the difficult commitments
>required as a responsibility of citizenship in decent society. It is at
>best a lazy attitude, and at worst a bankrupt and traitorous one.
>
>The fact is that those on the left tend, to a far greater degree, nearly
>exclusively, to be moral cowards of this sort, and is why those of us
>who have served, and those who continue to serve, in defense of decent
>society, do not trust those on the left as full citizens: they refuse to
>act like full citizens.
>
>I can only hope that this episode in history serves as an educational
>one: there is objective right and wrong in the universe, and there comes
>a time where vaccillation on this is no longer acceptable to
>intelligent, sentient individual beings.
>
Mikey, on this note you are horribly, and I believe willfully, wrong. I, as a US citizen and military veteran, am adamantly convinced that we should invade and occupy Afghanistan whether or not they hand over the bastard, just to clean out the cesspool he has created there, and liquidate any other fundislamic terrorist cells we can find. Your facile and shallow equation of social liberalism (which is indeed libertarianism stripped of its magical thinking that tax-paid infrastructure and protection from corporate abuses appears out of thin costless air) with antiamericanism is simply a tired old retreading of demagogic McCarthyism by someone who doesn't seem to possess, or want, the native intelligence and discernment to be able to grok its flaws, or doesn't care if the bludgeon they employ is made of rotten wood. I would ask you that question that echoed in the congressional chambers those many years ago "do you have no decency?", but I know full well, from bitter experienc!
e, the sad answer to that question.
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