So your view, Nathan, is that only rational acts are foreseeable? "He has has no children," as MacDuff says. Nathan, you are losing your usual good sense here. I'm probably the boggest fan of rational choice theory left on this list, now that Brad is gone, but even I think that irrational acts can be foreseeable in general. If you limit your goals to preventing only foreseeable in the sense of rational responses, your goals are too limited.
I find the middle paragraph below morally horrific, not only in its causual acceptance of killing without any semblance of due process, but in the easy identification of you-and me--with the policies that make bin Laden "our" tools to be used and, apparently, murdered afterwards. (In Polanski's film of MacBeth there's a nice non-Shakesparean bit where, having heard from the murderers ("There's blood upon thy face." "Tis BAnquo's, then." "Better thee without than he within."), MacBeth has them "paid" by being drwoned inthe moat. Polanski's point is that MacBeth is so crazed and corrupted at this point that he lacks even honor among murderers. Is that how you see us?
jks
this Sept 11 attack was irrational in serving almost any goal of
>counteracting US foreign policy and therefore was not a foreseeable result
>of that policy in any credible way.
>
>>
>You might think that if we prove that the US government had funded and
>promoted Bin Laden, people will see the obvious solution of not doing such
>things in the future. But an obvious alternative solution is to make sure
>we kill our tools when we are done with them. Just as rational. And has
>the advantage at the moment of being a solution to the problems we face
>NOW.
>
>As I've said, I find the causal explanations of Sept 11 pretty
>unpersuasive.
>I would prefer to concentrate on causal arguments of what we can do now to
>increase justice and prevent the FORESEEABLE events that may occur in the
>future. And convince the public that, for the unforeseeable events,
>sacrificing civil liberties won't help much on that score.
>
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