Kill em all

[Luke Weiger]

Justin wrote:
> If you believe that you'll fall or anything. I mean,
> do we have to start with lessons in imperialisma nd US
> foreign policy 101? There are no threats posed by Irq
> or any other strate to the security of the US,a nd
> never have been. Insosofar as the US cares about
> whether Iraq invades anyone else, it's because of oil,
> namely, the US wants to make sure that it retains
> indirect control over the oil fields in Saudi, Kuwait,
> etc., and indeed regains them wrt to Irq, so it has
> leverage over the EU and Japan,w hich (unlike the US)
> depend on Middle Eastern Oil. The US does not care
> about state sovereignty, human rights, freedom,
> justice, or democracy, It cares about money and power.
> This should be so obvious here as not to have to be
> said.

You see the US government as a fixed entity that doesn't change over time.
I think it's fluid enough to allow for the possibility that the Bush and
Clinton administrations had different aims in the region.  Maybe Brad can
tell me about all of the oil-hungry players in the Cliton administration,
because I haven't heard of them.

 > I love utilitarianism. It's based on a lie: people are
> required to believe something that it holds to be
> false.

You should've said that "I love your variant of utilitarianism," because
there are consequentialists who believe in desserts.  Singer is one.  Parfit
is an agnostic.  However, even my moral-responsibility denying
utilitarianism doesn't instrumentally require that people believe in
desserts on an intellectual level.  I certainly don't.  However, that
doesn't stop us from taking pride in our "good" actions and being ashamed of
our "bad" actions on a more visceral level.  We're even hardwired to feel
responsible for not only our actions but our attributes as well.  Where I
depart from you is that I think this hardwiring is merely a result of
natural selection and not a reflection of some underlying metaphysical
reality.


> You haven't even tried to show that this is one of
> these.

I think it's evident enough that the attacks were designed to a) destroy
landmarks of symbolic importance and b) kill a hell of a lot of people in
the process.


> But suppose that al Q had killed 50,000 people
> on Sept 11. Why does thats how that it would be
> efficious or wise, given the other costs in tersm of
> freedom and money, to go to war with -- whom, Iraq? --
> to combat this menace?

The war against terror is over.  All that's left now, I think, is
intelligence and police work.


> The embedded question shows
> that war is, as usual, not thea nswer. Here we don't
> even have a real target.

Because, for the most part, it's already been so riddled with bullets that
what's left has been dispersed and is difficult to see.

-- Luke


> jks
>
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