quote:
Say you see someone speeding violently through a pedestrian zone or beating the fuck out of an old lady. No matter what the perpetrator's ostensible motives (getting to an important meeting, fighting terrorism, whatever), the idea of offering "viable alternatives" needn't enter into it.
"Stop beating that lady!"
"You got a better idea?"
I'm sorry, but that also was not what I meant by "kidnapping the moral high ground." I meant that knee-jerk liberalism is often as counter-productive as knee-jerk aggression. Also, that is a pretty lame analogy in view.
War is a historic fact that all prosperous nations have been trying to pull away from for years. You get fat and happy, things are good, you want peace. On the obverse of that oft-flipped coin: You get fat and happy, you become a target for nations that do not have what you have and they bloody well want it. Thus are the mechanics of secular war.
This is not a secular war. These people live in a cultural environment that they carry about with them like a tattered, wounded thing; regardless of their country of residence. It is one born of backwards, oppressive, religious dogma that clearly states that all non-radical Muslims are infidels and enemies of Allah and the Muslim Nation. That they should be eradicated en masse in any land, at any time, with extreme prejudice. Should it's faithful followers pish it in the process of carrying out this Fatwah of Jihad against the infidel, more is his glory for he shall be arsed and elbowed into Heaven straight into the bosom of Allah and, blah, blah, blah, yakkety shmacketty.
These are, in the context of any rational culture; madmen. And they are men. The women in this culture are relegated to the level of chattel, baby machines, and/or whores. For a woman to even entertain the notion that she has a say in her fate in this culture is to seal it with disastrous ends.
So: Our government hates bad publicity, raising the level of commerce and cultural awareness in backwards society is the answer, but no matter what; we should do no harm.
Harm, sir, was done to us in the form of an act of war that invoked wholesale murder and mayhem on an uncounted number of our citizens. They have decimated several blocks of non-military real estate, used US commercial aircraft to do it, and are in the process of introducing biological warfare upon our military, governmental and public organisations via the postal service.
What in God's name makes you think that if America had had a chance to deal sanely with the culture that perpetrated these acts that they would not have, I do not know; but to follow your analogy: If the guy beating the woman, or the man, or the child does NOT stop, it's probably best to break his fucking legs with something and THEN try and reason with him after he can no longer keep maiming his victim. Nobody likes war, but the reasons that this one has been enacted are more than just cause in the eyes of not only history, but of a common need for ANY land to defend it's borders. Let alone it's interests. I hope it is short and effective and leads to method of heading off terrorist acts before they happen in the future. London has been fighting this sort of thing on a smaller scale with the IRA for years. Lets hope that the freedoms that we are abdicating now will lead to a more free society in our country later. I have no sympathy for calculating madmen and religious zealots who commit wholesale murder. Let us hope that beneath the heel of the Taliban regime are a people that love their children, too.
I have no love of war. If your approach is a more viable one, it is my fondest wish that it becomes our national defense policy immediately.
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I wanted my half in the middle and I wound up on the edge.
