Category: Government

Government is not the enemy.

Categories
Government People

In Defense of Few Words

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Michael Barrish wrote:

I’ve long believed that we each have a story, often unknown to us, that we try all our lives to prove true. As I see it, this is the key to understanding a lot of otherwise inexplicable behavior.

If I’m correct, what would your story be?

Note: It can usually be summarized in five words or less.

Note: This can be a scary question.

There is nothing new or magical about seeking truth within ourselves, or our interest in discovering why we do the things we do; self-help gurus have made towers of money understanding this drive for self awareness and capitalizing on it.

What does capture the interest and engage the mind with Michael’s posed question is trying to find a phrase of five words or less that can adequately describe something so complex. How can we sum up our lives in five words or less?

Easy. The answer is, we don’t.

Our lives are too rich and too varied to be easily summed up with so few words. However, we can seek to better understand what makes each of us “tick”, our underlying story as Michael describes it, and brevity strips away the non-essential verbage and forces us into a more honest assessment.

There is power in brevity.

Asked to tell a truth about ourselves we immediately seek to describe the causes of the truth and the core of the truth and we wrap it in apologies and explanations and regressions into our childhood, with many asides into events that have had impact on this truth. But we’re not describing the truth, only its environment. Stripping away the environment will either reveal the truth or…nothing.

Ultimately, if we can’t describe something of such profound importance in five words or less, perhaps we don’t truly understand what it is we’re describing.

We ask the thief: why do you steal?

The thief answers: I steal because in this society there are the rich and there are the poor, and the rich stay rich by keeping the poor, poor. I steal because I have basic human needs that aren’t met by a society that perpetuates a gap between those who have, and those who have not. I steal because I learned from watching my mother and watching my father that you have to steal and cheat and lie to make it in the world. I steal as a way of demanding my fair share in a society that prides itself on being rich.

We change our question but not our intent, and ask the thief: Why do you steal, in five words or less?

Thief: I steal to survive.

We ask the President, why should we invade Iraq?

The President answers: Because Saddam Hussein is an evil man who is an enemy of this country. He has weapons of mass destruction he’ll use against us direcctly, or give to terrorists to use against us. He terrorizes his own people and leads based on fear. He provides a haven and training camps for terrorits. He is a repressive dictator who must be stopped before he’s allowed to do more damage. We must stop him now before he has a chance to act against us in the future.

We then ask the President, why should we invade Iraq, in five words or less?

And the President answers: Because I can.

Categories
Government History Weblogging

Blast them all and let God sort them out

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I’ve been ignoring the whole ‘humiliation’ thing going on between Dave and Glenn Reynolds and Nick Denton. To me, it resembled the typical warblogger BS, and I’ve listened to this broken record one too many times.

What changed my opinion was when Doc joined the fray with a gentle admonishment to the warbies. What caught my attention in particular, was a quote from another weblogger, Eric Olsen, who wrote:

If the Armies of Allah are defeated, humiliated, crushed, scattered upon the four winds, then the whole philosophical house of cards collapses and you have a beaten, malleable people willing to accept a new way of life, such as Japan after WWII.

We can’t look at the puzzle piecemeal any longer: we can’t look at al Qaeda, Hamas, Saddam, wahabbism, Afghanistan, or militant Islam anywhere as separate entities. We must see the whole puzzle for what it is, and end the threat behind them all once and for all; this is exactly “inflicting a lesser misery to end a greater one.”

Eric bases his philosophical attitude about the importance of humiliation on his interpretation of Japan’s response to the atomic bombing, and how, in his opinion, they’ve become such good post-war partners because they believe that they deserved the atomic bomb. In reference to Hiroshima Peace Memorial Musem, he wrote:

The museum, the city, and the country emphasize peace and conflict resolution not because they don’t feel historical guilt for WWII, but because they do. The town and the museum almost revels in the details of the destruction wrought by the bomb, not out of self-pity, but out of a fundamental sense of sorrow and guilt FOR HAVING BROUGHT THIS DESTRUCTION UPON THEMSELVES.
…
The atomic bomb brought bitter remorse, not from those who dropped it, but from those whom it was dropped upon. Why remorse? Because they believe they deserved it.

I’m not going to respond to Eric’s assumptions about Japan, though I hope that Jonathon Delacour does. Jonathon, do you agree with this? Can this possibly be true?

What I am going to talk about is this widening circle of dispassionate hate against anything and all things Arab. Where once the warbloggers had focused on Al-Qaeda and the Palestinians, the focus is now extending in ever widening circles of inclusion — the enemy is not only Al-Qaeda and the Palestinians, but is also Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and we can only assume most if not all Arab countries at some point.

Eric’s opinion is echoed by Martin Devon, who wrote today:

Perhaps Iraq was really behind the Sept. 11th attack. Perhaps Iraq actually had nothing to do with it. The question of what role, if any, Iraq really played in the attack isn’t relevant. The reason that the U.S. should go to war against Iraq (and Iran, ‘Saudi’ Arabia and Syria) is simple. The advanced state of technology today is such that the world can no longer afford to allow a country to be run by an irrational actor. A world leader who cannot be rationally deterred from using weapons of mass destruction cannot be permitted to control them.

(Of course, reviewing George Bush’s past actions, his dubious corporate accountability, and his willingness to instigate warfare for no other reason then to increase ratings points, his inexperience, and to be blunt, his lack of intelligence — one could apply the same to our own leader. I do not sleep easy knowing that Bush has a finger on our nuclear button.)

Months ago I asked where we draw the line. At what point is the destruction we’re willing to contemplate no longer justified by the WTC attacks? At what point is the destruction we’re willing to contemplate no longer justified by those killed in suicide bombings? What’s the ratio of acceptable death and destruction?

What will finally sate the US and Israel?

It seems as that I’m finally getting an answer, and this time without the pretty varnish of “selective warfare” and “purely defensive combat”. The answer is: bomb them all and let God sort them out. (God, of course, being the God of the Jews and the God of the Christians.)

<edit >Most people, including many Arabs, would rather die than suffer such extreme humiliation. In this country, we refer to this willingness to die to prevent the humiliation of defeat, “patriotism”. By saying we must humiliate the Arab people — the ‘Armies of Allah’ — in effect we’re saying that Arabs who refuse to be humiliated in this way must die.</edit>

And what’s truly scary is not knowing if Eric or Marvin are examples of extremist warbloggers, or are representative of a people of a country I no longer recognize.

Categories
Government

Comments on the Communications Decency Act

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

My first real experience with the Internet was subscribing to a Usenet on a symbolic modeling language. I remember reading a response from a researcher in Switzerland and deciding to write my first entry into the thread. Every time someone would write from a different country I was awed. Where else and in what other circumstance could people from different countries and different cultures converse in such a way that the topic at hand becomes the focal point, not the differences of those speaking.

Where governments have trodden through the front door with fanfare and progressed with little steps, or failed, the Internet has moved quietly through the back door and succeeded. Until now.

While the Internet was nothing more than an insider’s tool, it was for the most part unconstrained and relatively open. Now that the access to the Internet is open “to the masses” we seek to impose constraints and limitations. Worse, where before each country’s boundaries were transparent, they now seek to make them not only opaque but a virtual brick wall. The main benefit of the Internet is taking down boundaries not putting them up. The Internet is owned by no Man, no Woman, and no Country.

I was following some forgotten path through the Web once when I stumbled on a letter from an Irish environmental terrorist. He wrote the letter in prison after he was captured while attempting to bomb a factory that he believed was damaging to the environment. This letter was fascinating. It was not an interview on some slick TV show, or in some slick magazine. It was an unsolicited recitation of facts and beliefs of a person that most of us would have an easy time dismissing as a nut after a two paragraph word byte in the press. Did I agree with the person? No, and I do consider myself an environmentalist. Bombs and bullets are never the way folks, nor are bricks and bats. However, the letter did give me a perspective that I would never have had if I had not read it. I cannot as easily dismiss an act of terrorism as an act of a mad person, which in a way makes the act even more frightening. Would this letter be considered “excessively violent”? Would the group that posted it be in violation of the law?

Could something like this be considered obscene? In some countries and in sometimes it could be. In certain countries, a picture of a woman bare faced and holding a career would probably be considered obscene. Full frontal nudity is considered by many in the United States as obscene but is probably considered perfectly normal in other countries. The very thing that makes the Internet great, the absence of borders, makes it virtually impossible to determine a common point of obscenity or a common point of decency.

We in the United States cannot agree within our own borders what is ‘decent’. One person believes in allowing free choice for women, and another would consider this indecent and obscene. Would information on the Internet on abortions then be considered illegal? If your child read this material, and it was presented in a scientific manner and presented only facts, would the originators of the material be in violation of the law?

If all we read in books, or all we see on TV, or all we hear on the radio, and all we can discuss on the Internet is material suitable for small children neither they nor we will ever and can ever grow, and we as a society will never mature.

Perhaps that’s what some people, including Congress, really want.

That’s it, folks.