|
| Wednesday, September 26, 2001 |
 |
Hey, it failed for Christ, Ghandi and Martin Luther King, right? 
| | Says here Pacifism is immoral. But the piece is so full of bile and crap that I hardly know where to begin with it. Hell, I don't have the time anyway. Besides, I'm in a good mood. So fuggit. Maybe later. |
| | Meanwhile, read this from David Scott Williams, who has been the source of much good 'n thoughtful stuff since 9-11. Best line: war breeds war. |
Civilization back off hold
Cell phones too?
| | Unauthorized photography of Ground Zero is prohibited, it says here. |
Mobilized & Scobleized
| | Sitting here in one of the 40 Starbucks that surround Yerba Buena Gardens atop the Moscone Center in San Francisco, on a perfect day, with Ev, Dave, Scoble, Steve Gillmor, Anthony Baker... Jacked into the air, blogging live. |
| | We're talking about all kinds of stuff here. Coffee does that. Right now the main topic is memory and reincarnation. What's the point of being reincarnated if you remember nothing of your former life? What's the leverage? Consciousness? What matters consciouosness if it doesn't spool into memory? |
| | Dave, who hastens to point out that he was a math major, says he has proof that memory has nothing to do with consciousness. Or vice versa. I forget. But I think I'm conscious of what he's talking about, though I probably won't remember what he says about it. If he says it, which he hasn't yet. |
| | Anyway I flunked math. Repeatedly. |
The right deaths
| | On the flight to San Francisco from Santa Barbara yesterday, I read last week's U.S. News & World Report between occasional chats with the flight attendants, who didn't have much to do since there were only about twenty people on the whole 737. I'm glad we talked because one of the flight attendants stopped my mind cold when she uttered a perfect metaphor for the September 11 events: |
| | It was like the whole country had a heart attack. Everything just stopped. |
| | Commercial aviation and transport systems — the blood vessels of the body commerce — were working again, but there weren't many red corpuscles. How long, we asked ourselves, before vital organs start taking serious damage? |
| | We already call Septeber 11th "Attack on America." With no dissent whatsoever, the major media all agree: that's the name of the story. |
| | But I think it's also the story of a heart attack, in a much deeper sense. Before we go off and Do What Needs to be Done, we need a heart check as well as a gut check. |
| | That's what came to me while reading John Leo's column in U.S. News, A War of Two Worlds. He says this: |
| | The mass murderers and their conspiracy must be rooted out and eliminatednot "brought to justice" in a series of leisurely trials at the Hague, but killed. We don't need to prove that bin Laden was directly responsible. This is war, not a courtroom proceeding. Terrorists are often recruited in one nation, trained in a second, and sent to a third. Proving who gave what order is hardly necessary. Everyone involved in the transnational conspiracy and its shifting networks will be targeted. |
| | By making Attack on America a war story, we give ourselves permission to kill the right people. Here's another way of putting it: If we kill the right people, everything will be okay again. Goodness will triumph over evil. Peace will be restored. |
| | But what goodness do we lose when we gain the death of other human beings? What if Thou shalt not kill and Love your enemies don't have conditional meanings? To what does the mathematics of vengeance add up? |
| | I'm putting this out there for your consideration with a fully conflicted heart. I don't feel diminished by the deaths of Mohammed Atta and the other creeps who killed thousands on September 11. Nor would I mourn the death of Osama bin Laden. I believe that makes me a shitty pacifist. |
| | In the frontier law of the Old West, it was often said that certain people "needed killin'." I believe that simple frontier ethic is what's at work with this new "war." That's what President Bush was all about when he said, "If they can't be brought to justice, justice will be brought to them." |
| | This war is not not one tribe, country or people against another. It's human society against the corrupted human elements that threaten its very life. |
| | Let's just remember that the elements are still human. And to ask ourselves what becomes of our own humanity when we make it right to kill them. |
| | And then let's think about what becomes of civilization when the only system of justice that works is one obsessed with hunting down and killing bad guys. |
Flogrolling
| | We roll blogs constantly because we regard each other with something that would be like suspicion if we could take it more seriously. |
| | We're also both comfortable with saying "fuck" a lot, even though only one of us is from New Jersey. |
| | He also seems to want a job. But if I was sure about that I wouldn't say so or he'd think I know something and that might be dangerous. |
| | Anyway, there's some kind of symmetry going on here. Here's what he says about it: |
| | Anyone searching for *philosophical* reasons as to why we should or should not undertake any actions against the terrorist networks, I would highly recommend a combined reading regimen of both my blog and Doc's blog (we tend to balance each other... |
| | Not that I'm feeling real balanced right now, sitting in a Marriott with a prison-like view of a wall out the window, craving sleep. |
Voice of Experience
| | Our experience with RFE/RL and especially Radio Marti shows that the stations tend to be captured by their expatriate community members for their own purposes, and don't necessarily serve wider US interests. Entire books have been written about the events at RFE during the Hungarian uprising of 1956 where the expat broadcasters arguably fed the uprising by claiming (falsely, as it turns out) that western troops would be on their way to Hungary, with tragic consequences for the people they were broadcasting to. |
| | The BBC World Service has announced that they've expanded their broadcasts to Afghanistan in Pashto, Urdu, Persian, and Arabic. Somehow, the British seem to understand something that we don't: our country's interests are better served by having a strong, independent, credible international broadcaster rather than a hodgepodge of loose cannons shooting holes in our credibility. |
| | You did it, Ralph. My mind is changed. Let's send mikes to the BBC. |
discuss
Copyright 2009 The Doc Searls Weblog
|
