Well, I defend these scumbags too. Though at my level I don't talk to them, the partners do. I think they don't think about what they do, they couldn't do that and live with themselves.
And most rightwingers do not think of themserlves as doiung evil for their own good. I know that Judge Posner genuinely thinks that more or less unbridled free markets are really better for everyone, and that inequality is not a problem because it mostly reflects personal inadequacies of the less well off. He really thinks that. I'm not speculating, I know Judge Posner and he's told me these things, and I have no reason to think he's lying to me about what he thinks.
Hell, even the commandants of the Nazi death camps -- and I don't put Judge Posner, whom I like and respect, into that lot, just to be clear -- even they were mostly not gleeful about what they did. There's a great but horrifying book called Into That Darkness by a Hungarian-English journalist named Gitta Serelny, interviewed Franz Stangel, who was commandant of Treblinka, Sobibor, and before that head of the t-4 euthansia program. He did'd cackle manically as he had Jews and the disabled shuffled off to the gas chambers, he viewed it as sort of a job, something necessary but distasteful.
There were a few cartoon Nazis with shrieky voices and psychopathic sadistic (sorry, Brian) mentalities, but as Hannah Arendt emphasized, most of those people were fairly dull. Corporate execs and big time law partbers may be assholes, but they don't mainly exult in evil.
So, you and I just disagree. But I think Chomsky agrees with me. Anyway, this has probably played its course.
jks
--- Michael Dawson <mdawson at pdx.edu> wrote:
> He just misreads you as saying that you
> think that capitalists rub their hands together and
> laugh with glee when babies are bayoneted, as long
> as
> the balance sheet is positive. I'd be pretty
> skeptical
> of that idea too. Like I said, I think they really
> think their interests coincide with the interests of
> the human race. That's the way ideology works. I'd
> also be reluctant to attribute the view Luke
> attributes to you to anyone, but internet
> discussions
> can back people into corners.
>
> jks
>
> I actually do believe that capitalists are happy
> when babies are bayoneted,
> if and when that's necessary to protect their bottom
> line. And I don't
> think capitalists and people like Nixon and
> Kissinger believe what they say
> in public, except perhaps at the most abstract
> political level. I think
> General Motors executives are deathly afraid that
> some major news outlet
> will start reporting the daily number of deaths in
> car crashes. I'm not
> saying they think it will happen, but they worry
> about it, and actively try
> to suppress such leakages. They know damned well
> that they're profiting
> from waste and death, whatever they say in public.
>
> In our law practice, we had a client who sued the
> world's largest
> manufacturer of nails. That same corporation also
> happened to have been the
> manufacturer of the nail gun that double-fired and
> planted a 4-inch nail in
> our client brain. During discovery, we found
> records showing that from the
> moment they began selling them in the 1960s the
> corporation knew its nail
> guns would double fire and injure and kill people
> using them. They also
> knew from before they started selling them that they
> could place a 25-cent
> part in their guns to ensure they would never
> double-fire. The documents
> revealed that they chose to not place the part in
> the guns, because doing so
> would stop the guns from wasting every 7th or 8th
> nail, which would reduce
> nail sales but 1/7 or 1/8. They established a slush
> fund out of their
> profits to pay off the maimed. That was more
> profitable. That's what they
> did.
>
> As somebody once observed: Apres moi, les deluge!
>
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail