This was the RNC spin point from yesterday. I heard Novakula use it on Crossfire yesterday. This infuriates me because this kind of rhetoric is going to get people killed.

The thing that really disgusts me is that we're supposed to be showing these people a better way of conducting government. They're very familiar with Saddam's way, and some of them may think that that is the best they can hope for. A common excuse for authoritarianism is that no milder approach will work; sometimes even the regime's victims buy that argument. That's one of the things that leads to formerly oppressed people becoming oppressors (cough*Israel*cough). After all, most of the neighboring countries' governments also use torture and brutality to maintain their regimes.

So we go into Iraq to liberate them and give them the gift of democracy, a shining example to the region, and we end up showing them that democracy uses the very same brutal authoritarian means of control.

What Rumsfeld's torturers have done didn't just disgrace the US; it's a black mark on the name of Democracy.

Report and Recommendations on Iraqi Detainees
Christian Peacemaker Teams, Iraq January 2004
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The S&M War
Justin Raimundo
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Voices from Iraq
Letters and articles from people currently in Iraq
Spotlight Iraq
Voices in The Wilderness

Education of the US military in Human Rights seems called for. Starting at the very top.

But cut the size of the military down by 90% first or so.

Jeremy: the US is not universally regarded as a democracy. It's corrupted: where is universal health care, that I'm told the majority wants. Business rules. See also Bush's election itself, and the process of selection. Even the death penalty disqualifies it already with respect to the ideals of democracy.

I'm feeling extremely pessimistic today.

Outrage at their blatant lies isn't going to get us very far unless we can change the U.S. media propoganda machine that is all-pervasive in our culture.

I hear people who are reasonably intelligent, who I thought were reasonably well-read and well-informed, at my local bar -- people I've spoken to every evening for years now -- who spout just this sort of rhetoric as it it's God's Own Truth. Why? That's the wording used all over the news. RNC talking points turned to Truth.

Until we do something about turning that around, we're just beating our heads against a wall.

I've been out applying compost to the garden, so I don't feel pessimistic. The stuff that's in the compost is much higher grade than Sen. Inhofe's outburst.

Inhofe's feedback form is at
http://inhofe.senate.gov/contactus.htm

Not to put too fine a point on it, Senator Inhofe is a disgrace to the Senate, to his party, and to the United States of America.

Humanity, too.

But this is a very common, widespread reaction to torture, and abuse in general. Bad things happen to this people, they must have deserved it. Sometimes it's wilful ignorance, as seems the case in this case. Sometimes, especially when it comes from people who have not been exposed to a lot of this kind of news, it's a desperate effort to maintain what - I believe it was Jean Amery - called the Just World Fallacy.

We need to preserve some notion that the world is fair, that virtue is rewarded and vice punished, and especially when the punishment is so harsh, to think that it may befell people who are not particularly deserving of the treatment produces a strong anguish, so that the people at the receiving end of torture are believed the guiltier the stronger the horror at the treatment.

Torturers know this - they know that their impunity rests on the shame of the tortured - and so do the tortured, who are often locked in silence by shame.

This is not to say that guilty people deserve torture. But that's a different argument entirely.

I called Inhofe's office to tell him what I thought of his disgraceful spewing; the line was busy for several hours, and when I got through, they were only taking voicemail "because of the increased volume of calls."

Apparently John McCain got up and walked out during Inhofe's tirade, and told a reporter he just couldn't listen to it.

Part of the problem is the whole idea that we're supposed to show "these people" a better way of government. What pretentious bullcrap. It's the same kind of bullcrap that on the other side of the political aisle leads to an atmosphere in which we can dehumanize and act patronizingly toward those we wish to rule in such a way that we imply a willingness to allow torture as SOP.

We can hardly govern ourselves. What gives us the right to think we should be teaching others anything?

Humanity, too.

And the State of Oklahoma.

Makes me ashamed I moved to Oklahoma, on top of everything else. The man needs de-elected.

I can't find it now, but in a BBC story today, I read that according to one source 60-90% of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib had committed no crime at all.

We do know that one of the prisoners, the one whose crotch Cigarette Girl was pointing to with a grin on her face, was subsequently released without being charged with anything.

When you're faced with innocent people, interrogators have to work extra hard to get them to confess their crimes.

PNH: Not to put too fine a point on it, Senator Inhofe is a disgrace to the Senate, to his party, and to the United States of America.

I agree on the first and third points. On the second, I'm afraid that he's sadly representative of his party, or at least its leadership.

Nancy Hanger and Melanie are both dead-on. Far too many people soak up the RNC's poison from the media, which tacitly endorses it by passing it on unfiltered, or worse yet, spinning it as common wisdom.

How we fix this mess, I have no idea. But I'm afraid that the change has to come from within the GOP, not from outside. So far, McCain (whom I disagree with on virtually everything of importance) seems like the only nationally known Republican willing to stand up for what's right.

Is the enemy of my enemy my friend? Perhaps so, but that doesn't make me like it.

What I wrote to Inhofe (thanks to the link from Stephan above):

I have read of your statements in the Senate today.

Torture is not and NEVER CAN BE honorable or Christian. Neither is the defense of torture and torturers, no matter if they're on our side.

You should be ashamed of yourself, for you have shamed your church, your religion, and your country.

My entry to the scumbag's feedback form:

I have just heard about your comments on the maltreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison.

Even if we didn't know that most of the prisoners have committed no crime (the police in Baghdad run a protection racket), there is no excuse for the kind of comments you made.

You are a disgrace to the Senate, your state, and this great nation. If you have any honor at all you will apologize at once, in the humblest possible terms, for the outrage you have committed. It is statements like these that make the rest of the world believe that the horrors at Abu Ghraib are not an aberration, but US foreign policy. Therefore statements like yours put American lives, military and civilian, at additional risk.

I will be writing to my own senators to suggest that you be censured.

McCain's good, but Lindsey Graham has been good, too. He's a former JAG officer, so he knows the Geneva Conventions and the UCMJ backward and forward, and he's pissed.

McCain subtly handed Inhofe his ass by asking the three generals (one JAG, two Intel) if the Geneva Conventions were A Good Thing™, and why. He also made a snarky remark about "humanitarian do-gooders."

Warner was pretty right on this afternoon, too. He got pretty snippy with the three generals for weaseling about chain of command issues and the origin of the instructions to torture the prisoners.

The AP reported another lapse in Inhofe's memory:

Partisan politics flared during the Senate hearing. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., read aloud from an e-mail issued by the campaign of Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., that coupled a demand for Bush to fire Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld with a solicitation for campaign contributions. "I don't recall this ever having happened before in history," said Inhofe.

The idea that these prisoners, they’re not there for traffic violations. If they’re in cell block 1A or 1B, these prisoners, they’re murderers, they’re terrorists, they’re insurgents, and many of them probably have American blood probably on their hands

At least until they're proven innocent...

The good people of Oklahoma have elected Inhoffe as their senator 3 times. Before that he was a Congressional Representative. Presumably they have not yet found him disgraceful. Our genial host here at Electrolite once pointed out to me that I came back from visits to my relatives (in Oklahoma) filled with despair. Well, now you know why. And Oklahoma's other senator, Don Nickles, is worse. He's ranked as the most conservative Senator in the 108th Congress and he's dumber than Inhoffe.

MKK

I've posted an extended commentary regarding the actual military laws and regulations that cover the treatment of detainees at my blog here:

World on Fire

Most commentators have been focusing on the Geneva Conventions, but there are actually DoD regulations that are more pertinent, that every enlistee or reservist is supposed to have read, and that also define the responsibility up the chain. Read 'em and weep.

"Well, at least we don't have any mass graves." is not acceptable. Not, not, not. Nor is condoning the torture of innocents. Not, not, not.

We should expect the denunciations of Inhofe from the right-blogosphere any day now, I'm sure.

I've sent Inhofe the following note via his web site email form:

Sen. Inhofe,

I was disgusted, appalled and revolted by your comments regarding the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal. You clearly have no understanding of the Geneva Conventions, to which this country is a signatory, nor of the "Joint Regulations for the Treatment of Enemy Prisoners of War", Army Regulation 190–8, which clearly states that detainees, no matter what their status or alleged crimes, have the right to due process and to be protected from extra-judicial punishment. Your comments that these detainees are somehow to be presumed guilty are un-American, unpatriotic, and damaging in the extreme to our national honor and reputation.

I'm not sure if you're pandering to the worst instincts of your consituents or to the White House, or if you are truly as ignorant of the traditions and legal standards of our nation as you appear. In either case, your remarks deserve the censure of all patriotic Americans, democrat or republican. You,sir, are a disgrace to the Senate and to our great nation. Shame on you.

MKK is correct, after living in Okieland for some 24 years, I can say that Inhofe, Nickles along with most of the representatives are from the dumber than a brick wing of the Republican party.

With congressmen such as these, Okieland will never lose the bad rap it got in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. Time changes but the attitude of the people do not.

I cannot tell you how pleased I am to be retiring and moving away from this state of miscreants.

And just when you think it can't get worse:

A Senate hearing into the abuse of Iraqi prisoners was told on Tuesday that Lt. Gen. William Boykin, an evangelical Christian under review for saying his God was superior to that of the Muslims, briefed a top Pentagon (news - web sites) civilian official last summer on recommendations on ways military interrogators could gain more intelligence from Iraqi prisoners.

Critics have suggested those recommendations amounted to a senior-level go-ahead for the sexual and physical abuse of prisoners, possibly to "soften up" detainees before interrogation -- a charge the Pentagon denies.

Talk about Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all -- what's next, Grover Norquist holding a GOP fundraiser for the guards?

Whoops - the story above is here.

"...Inhofe is a disgrace to the Senate, to his party, and to the United States of America..."
-
To the United States as it was. Unless something changes real quick people like Inhofe are gonna own this place.
It seems urgent as hell that people not get seduced by cheap catharsis.
Rumsfeld, even Bush, those guys are fusible links; villains of complicity, and fundamental liars, but the evil isn't coming from them. They're midwives. Facilitators. Tools.
Yes, bad. Yes, make them go away. But don't stop there.
We need deep change. Now.

"We need deep change. Now."

"Deep change" happens one detail at a time. Truly transformative breaks with the status quo are rare, and generally don't work out the way you want them to.

See, e.g. Burke's _Reflections on the Revolutions in France_ (yeah, he got a lot wrong, but the core attacks on revolutionary rather than incremental change, and acting on abstract principle without regard to facts or circumstances are definitely worth considering).

I agree that "we need deep change." But where are the intelligent, responsible, compassionate people who are willing to step up to the plate?

Maybe it's because I live in Florida, but I've not heard a lot about that anywhere.

From today's Washington Post, an editorial.

THE BUSH administration still seeks to mislead Congress and the public about the policies that contributed to the criminal abuse of prisoners in Iraq. Yesterday's smoke screen was provided by Stephen A. Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence. Mr. Cambone assured the Senate Armed Services Committee that the administration's policy had always been to strictly observe the Geneva Conventions in Iraq; that all procedures for interrogations in Iraq were sanctioned under the conventions; and that the abuses of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison were consequently the isolated acts of individuals. These assertions are contradicted by International Red Cross and Army investigators, by U.S. generals overseeing the prisoners, and by Mr. Cambone himself.

...

Lance, it's not clear whether you're advocating "don't stop with the election" or "don't bother starting with the election".

You keep saying in various threads that the election won't help. That sounds to me (and probably others here) like you're trying to discourage people from putting any effort into the election.

If that's not your intention, you might want to think about how you can make your position more clear. You might also take a moment to consider that maybe some people here aren't planning to stop with the election, and assuming that they are is insulting condescension.

If telling people not to bother with the election is your intention, then what do you think we should be doing? It's fine to say "your course of action won't help", but if you're not going to propose something better, then we might as well keep going, on the off chance that you're wrong, and it actually does help.

" '...Inhofe is a disgrace to the Senate, to his party, and to the United States of America...'
-To the United States as it was. Unless something changes real quick people like Inhofe are gonna own this place.
It seems urgent as hell that people not get seduced by cheap catharsis.
Rumsfeld, even Bush, those guys are fusible links; villains of complicity, and fundamental liars, but the evil isn't coming from them. They're midwives. Facilitators. Tools.
Yes, bad. Yes, make them go away. But don't stop there.
We need deep change. Now."

Jeremy, I can't speak for Lance, nor am I going to disagree with Patrick when he makes the case that change happens one detail at a time. Still, I don't see the condescension that you're worried about. To my mind, Lance is saying something important here. You might look at it this way. The existence of our society, not to mention the rest of the world, is currently predicated on the availability of cheap energy, cheap natural resources, and the ability of the earth to accept and filter out the toxic byproducts of our materialistic, consumer driven way of life. In other words, humanity hasn't yet come to grips with the simple, yet vital, concept of sustainability.

I'm not much for doom & gloom predictions, but if we don't start to focus on the future, life in 10 to 20 years will likely be awful grim for everyone still around. Perhaps history will show that Bush's most egregious offense was pulling our attention back toward the past at a time when we desperately needed to be looking forward toward the future. In any regard, we need to break through this 50/ 50 political gridlock of the moment and start thinking in terms of the next decade or the next 50 years, not the next business cycle or the next quarter. Does this process start with getting Bush and his axis-of-evil satanic cult out of office? Absolutely. We need to do things one step at a time. Yet that doesn't mean we can be satisfied with band-aids when we really need more serious change.

I've been checking the online versions of the Tulsa and OKC newspapers. Finally the the Oklahoman, the main OKC newspaper has something. There's a video link on their front page, http://www.newsok.com/, to something billed as Inhofe explaining his remarks. Unfortunately, I can't view it. When I click on the link it tells me a I need a plug-in and to click here to get it. When I do, it tells me no plug-in was found. Sigh. I'd be interested to hear the explanation of anyone else can play it.

MKK

What made it more disgusting to me was Inhofe talking about his military service. Made me want to break things... it only got worse.

I'd like to get to sit in one of those chairs for about ten minutes, so I could do what none of the Senators I saw managed to do... ask a decent question.

I forget which of them asked Cambone a pair of bundled questions, to which Cambone did what I expected, answered the second, and ignored the first, which was far more relevant, and penetrating.

Stevens was even worse... He lied. Flat out. Well, ok, maybe he merely misunderstood, and misrepresented the facts (that blue suit means he's in the Air Force, and maybe an Army publication isn't comprehensible to him).

He said MG Miller's recommendations were to see to it that the observations of MPs are discovered by interrogators, they were to avoid a, "firewall."

Bullshit.

Doctrine is, and has been for at least the past 20 years, that the observations of MPs is critical to the process. In fact if the students fail to ask the MPs, "What can you relate concerning the attitude and behaviour of the source," they are likely to fail not only that section of the excercise/test they are likely to have a much harder time getting the instructor to break.

And it went on. I had to give up after about 40 minutes.

Terry

MKK, that is quite possibly the worst implementation of Real Player I've ever seen that didn't actually crash my browser.

I listened to it twice, the second time involuntarily, and it appears to be a dance remix of fluff reporting of Tagube's testimony interspersed with Inhofe's speech-masked-as-questions. The latter can be read in full from this link. Tag is "Transcript of Senator Inhofe’s Remarks..." and dated as from 11 May.

In the far ring of the circus, the editorial staff of the Oklahoman weighed in with this waste of newsprint. Random excerpts*:

Some will accuse Inhofe of trying to shift attention from the Americans who abused Iraqi prisoners.

No, really?

The behavior of the U.S. prison guards was terribly wrong, but so is the terrorism that continues to put our troops at risk in Iraq. An argument could be made, as Inhofe has done, that the outrage and concern expressed for the two is out of balance.

Dear lord, if you're still calling it "terrorism" then you have no idea what is going on, and if you don't know what's going on, you've no hope of fixing it.

Inhofe said that as more photographs of the abuses are released, they should be accompanied by photos of Saddam Hussein's mass graves. The point is to remember the overwhelming good being done by the United States in Iraq.

The quote from Ihnofe's own transcript is:

All the idea about these pictures. I would suggest to you any pictures -- and I think maybe we should get direction from this committee, Mr. Chairman, that if pictures are authorized to be disseminated among the public, that for every picture of abuse or alleged abuse of prisoners, we have pictures of mass graves, pictures of children being executed, pictures of the four Americans in Baghdad that were burned and their bodies were mutilated and dismembered in public. Let's get the whole picture.

The phrase, "authorized to be disseminated among the public" kind of sticks in my craw. Just a bit. I'm sensing a teeny-weeny lack of trust and faith in the American people to sift all this pictorial input and emerge with the correct attitude without help.

Thank goodness Crusader Inhofe is on the job and making sure the spin done gets spun right, and the Oklahoman is there to fasten on his spurs.

--
* I had to register for this. I had to provide a zip code and a State of Residence, among other things. The staff of the Oklahoman are no fools; they are well aware no one outside the immediate area would give a rat's ass what they thought. Happily, they believed everything I told them.

The previous commander of the MP company with the problems has written an article in the Washington Post. More details in my blog.

Pericat: You are a brave and worthy person. Should we ever be in the same place at the same time, I owe you a drink. Thank you. I've written at some length about this in my blog (http://marykay.typepad.com/gallimaufry) and I think I'll add that editorial. You know, the Oklahoman is a very conservative paper, even for OK, but there are lots of people who live there who think that way. How else do you suppose Nickles and Inhofe keep getting re-elected?

Thanks again.

MKK

I agree that "we need deep change." But where are the intelligent, responsible, compassionate people who are willing to step up to the plate?

Go for it.

Actually, Iain, I'm considering it. As an independent. Although I don't know for what office as of yet.

Actually, Iain, I'm considering it. As an independent. Although I don't know for what office as of yet.

That's great to hear. I wish you the best of luck.

Of course the latest news is that Ross Perot's old outfit has just given the thumbs up for Nader to be their spear carrier, to help him get on the ballots.

Can we say REPEAT folks?

Arrrrgh

Jane

My letter to Inhofe:

I am utterly appalled by your remarks concerning Abu Ghraib prison. America’s grasp of the moral high ground in this war has been shaky at best; abusing prisoners is against the tenets of just war, not to mention basic legal and human ethics. Condoning such abuse is beneath contempt. If America is to be able to make any claim to be conducting a just war in Iraq, all of its actions must be ethically above reproach. I fear that we will never be able to recover from this, even if the perpetrators are punished. I am ashamed to be represented by someone who approves of these actions, even while claiming to be a Christian.

Wow. Rumsfeld has secretly made a visit to Abu Ghraib.

Yes, and he announced that prisoners would be moved out of the Abu Ghraib building to a new complex just down the road.

Camp Redemption.

tost - Thanks
-
P.N.H.-
"...generally don't work out the way you want them to..."
The guillotine etc.
Or the American Revolution etc.
Yes. And? Compromise with evil is what got us here. The insistence on controlled predictable outcomes has put a scalpel to the neck of life itself. Anarchy that's still fossil-fuel driven is a marketing niche, but invoking chaos when control is dooming us, or worse, dooming us

Sorry.
________

tost - Thanks
-
P.N.H.-
"...generally don't work out the way you want them to..."
The guillotine etc.
Or the American Revolution etc.
Yes. And? Compromise with evil is what got us here. The insistence on controlled predictable outcomes has put a scalpel to the neck of life itself. Anarchy that's still fossil-fuel driven is a marketing niche, but invoking chaos when control is dooming us, or worse, dooming us and leaving a remnant of cunning manipulative bastards who rode the changes to triumph, well, gimme chaos.
Short-vision pay-offs, abject fear of death, and servile reverence for controlled outcome is what happened to make it like this. Positivist morality. "We are the champions".
Submission to the unknown and true balance are what's missing. The wilderness and its red-toothed chaos seem more and more like a warm embrace compared to this rigid discipline and omniscient technocracy.
-
Jeremy Leader-
"...you might want to think about how you can make your position more clear..."
Always good advice.
"Yes, bad. Yes, make them go away. But don't stop there."
That's pretty clear, I think.
For the rest of the equation, I'm not going to advocate armed insurrection in a thread on what is essentially a mild-mannered journalism analog. I'm urging the group mind toward the inevitable decision. Fight or flight. Submission or defiance.
Kerry is submission, Nader means Bush, Kucinich wouldn't survive the nomination without a bullet. That's the election I see.
So rather than wait until Kerry shows his true colors unmistakably -which would be what? next April? - I'm suggesting people stop pretending it's going to work. The knee-jerk trope of what-are-you-suggesting-we-do is not working like it used to. Telling people the building's on fire is not contingent on having an escape route to hand them right after.
I understand the theater's crowded, I'm not yelling at everyone.

Just out of curiosity, does anyone know exactly what the Senator was referring to when he referred to "cell blocks 1A and 1B"? I'm guessing you don't.

There's more to the prison than those two cellblocks and, believe it or not, the detainees are segregated by "those we're sure did something" and "those who might have done something" and "those whose crimes are strictly Iraqi and the military has little to do with them."

To wit, none of you know what you're talking about. The ICRC report says one thing about the type of people detained in the prison, and the Senator's remarks refer to a specific population within the prison. Check your facts, please, before you start calling people a disgrace to humanity.

There's more to the prison than those two cellblocks and, believe it or not, the detainees are segregated by "those we're sure did something" and "those who might have done something" and "those whose crimes are strictly Iraqi and the military has little to do with them."

To wit, none of you know what you're talking about. The ICRC report says one thing about the type of people detained in the prison, and the Senator's remarks refer to a specific population within the prison. Check your facts, please, before you start calling people a disgrace to humanity.

No doubt the reference is to a specific population within the prison. However, a detainee has come forward and stated that many of the photos were of him, and it turns out that he was released with no charges. So perhaps the divisions between "those we know did something" and the rest are not quite as clear and reliable as you would like to believe.

Let's see.

WWII. A US bomber, returning from a mission over Berlin.

It's shot down, the crew parachutes to safety, but is soon captured by the Germans and interned in a POW camp. There's no doubt at all about who they are, what they were doing, or where they were captured.

Now -- everyone in that crew has blood on his hands, possibly including civilians, women, children. WWII-era bombs weren't all that accurate.

Leave aside the question of guilt. I'll assume that everyone in those two cellblocks is an insurgent who was picked up while planting a bomb. Would the Germans have been justified in treating our captured fliers as Sen. Inhofe seems to feel we're justified in treating captured Iraqis?

BTW, I do know what cellblocks 1A and 1B refer to, since I read MG Taguba's report.

Here's a paragraph from that report:

33. The various detention facilities operated by the 800th MP Brigade have routinely held persons brought to them by Other Government Agencies (OGAs) without accounting for them, knowing their identities, or even the reason for their detention. The Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center (JIDC) at Abu Ghraib called these detainees "ghost detainees." On at least one occasion, the 320th MP Battalion at Abu Ghraib held a handful of "ghost detainees" (6-8) for OGAs that they moved around within the facility to hide them from a visiting International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) survey team. This maneuver was deceptive, contrary to Army Doctrine, and in violation of international law. (Annex 53)

Now take the phrase "...deceptive, contrary to Army Doctrine, and in violation of international law." How exactly are we supposed to take that other than at face value?

Lance, how many armed rebellions have actually succeeded? You can't count ours, because we were actually a colony breaking away from the colonizers, which is a significantly different situation, logistically and politically. My history isn't perfect, but at the moment I have a tentative count of zero. Although maybe I should count England's Glorious Revolution, in which case I have a count of one. Anyone want to count Cuba? I'm disinclined to count the Bolsheviks, and I flatly will not accept the French Revolution. In both cases, the power passed from the revolutionaries to other hands, making the actual revolution a failure. This is why I am an incrementalist.

Oh, if the revolution should happen (heavens forfend), I'll fight on the side of the people and against the government (provided I can figure out who is who in the first place). The biggest problem with revolutions is that they alienate the majority of the people in the country. You can call them shallow, and make fun of them for being more concerned about their personal comfort than they are about the truly big and important issues. That doesn't change the fact that you need them to run the country. They have to show up for work, keep the power and water running, move money through the system, and generally keep the mechanisms of civilization properly running.

Meantime, we've got a real-time disaster on our hands. We're moving steadily towards Armageddon, and I don't think that Jesus is likely to make his Second Coming after the Middle East has finally had that catastrophic war that they've been gearing up for for the last...well, 50 years? 2000 years? 4,000 years? You pick. It doesn't matter what the antecedents are, a war in the Middle East is a disaster of global proportions, and I have no hope of divine intervention to pick up the pieces afterwards.

Can Kerry keep us from that? I don't know. What I do know is that Bush thinks that Armageddon is a good idea. Kerry will at least try to keep us back from the brink. And of the two political parties that have held sway for the last 100 years, I'm pretty sure which party tells the most lies, and demonstrates the least regard for human life. I know which party has the support of the pro-life people, which party has Tom DeLay and Newt Gingrich as members, which party thinks that it's appropriate to discriminate based on sexual preference. These are not trivial differences. Do I like the Democrats? Actually, no. However, I'm also quite certain that a revolution will not succeed right now, and that right now we've got to stop Bush, which means voting for Kerry, and trying to keep the vote count honest.

Compromising with evil is distasteful, but refusing to compromise at all is a death-spiral. Politics make strange bedfellows. Paul Wellstone, who is probably the most idealistic senator of the last 50 years, writes with great pride about being able to find compromises with various Senatorial members in order to achieve vital legislation. He was a remarkably effective senator, and he made compromises in order to accomplish that. However, I never felt as if he'd abandoned his principles. I wish I could have voted for him a third time.

"Compromise with evil is what got us here."

I'm in favor of compromise with evil.

I'm also in favor of getting evil to play three-card monte. In addition, I frequently have evil over for dinner and get it drunk.

Indeed, evil is a real sucker, particularly for vodka Collinses and old Grand Funk Railroad songs. My next plan is to bombard evil with Nigerian spam emails.

You were saying?

"gimme chaos. [...] Submission to the unknown and true balance are what's missing."

Yeah, that's what's wrong with the world--not enough chaos.

Definitely, we need more of the kind of circumstances in which, for instance, more disabled people would be dead. Nice of you to share your thoughts.

It's not "compromising with evil" in the sense that saying Well, yes, I have my principles - but 50 million dollars is too much to pass over, sure you can have your boondoggle, friend - is compromising with evil.

It's doing what you can that's positive versus doing *nothing at all*, or versus making things *worse*, or versus making a meaningless gesture.

It's recognizing that every political system and program is flawed including your own, and instead of either trying to force a utopia and destroying everything in the name of a utopian vision (I can't help but think of Rumsfeld versus the Army here) or letting everything fall to pieces because you can't make the utopian dream, still doing something positive.

It's also not demonizing everyone who disagrees with you into The Enemy with whom no negotiations nor detente are permissible.

That way lies madness...

(can't remember if I posted the link to this one yet: "I am a democrat because..." by an author the Xtian Wrong would be unhappy about. Little "d" but that makes it the more applicable.)

"The best is the enemy of the good."

Kerry will not fix everything. He may, if we're sufficiently unlucky, not fix anything. However, I do believe that he'll stop making things worse as quickly.

Lance Boyle, I'm sorry, but that's just plain ridiculous. It has nothing to do with politics, which are by definition a social activity, an interaction with our fellow critters.

No compromise with evil?

Blaming everything on the "abject fear of death" and a "servile reverence" for controlled predictable outcomes?

Deploring "rigid discipline and omniscient technocracy"?

Guy, I don't think I'm an ageist, at any rate I hope I'm not; but I suddenly doubt you've seen your twentieth birthday. I have as much respect for the young as I have for anyone else in this global Turing test; but.

A short course:

Evil: There's little or no unmixed good in the world. Compromising with evil is the price of doing anything, including doing anything good. The alternative is to crouch in the corner with the Judaean People's Front, hissing anathemas at the People's Front of Judaea -- in which case you'll unquestionably be compromising with evil, but will have rendered yourself incapable of noticing it.

Politicians compromise with evil. They compromise with everything. A politician who runs on a "no compromise" platform is either lying, has no functional political instincts, or is hopelessly stupid. He will go nowhere. The history of politicians who've achieved great good in parliamentary systems is a long litany of trimmers and compromisers. And by the way, Mohandas Ghandi was one of them. Don't kid yourself. He was very, very good at it.

Lyndon B. Johnson is a seriously underrated figure in American politics.

Abraham Lincoln was the despair of the Abolitionists.

You have no idea what all went into the making of the great Reform Bill of 1832 -- but neither do I, and I want to. We'll never know. It's that big, and that murky: a close vote on a bill that affected a huge range of interests. Most likely you'd need an exclusive interview with the Recording Angel to get the whole story. Nevertheless, the bill passed, and great good was done thereby.

All you cherish in the structure of American politics was won by politicians willing to compromise with evil. Enough said. Have respect for evil. Sometimes it's you.

Abject fear of death: I feared death less when I was young, and knew less about what I had to lose. Arguably, I ought to be less tenacious of life now, when I'm older and slower and creakier, and have been living with various disabilities for some decades, and have come to what I trust is a satisfactory rapprochement with God. I'm not. Life is very sweet, and I mean to dodge death as long as I can.

For the right causes, in the right circumstances, I'm prepared to die if necessary. But I won't court my death, and I won't trade my life cheaply. I believe my attitude to be a fairly common one, perhaps the commonest of the possible positions.

Look at the bright side: The world you're living in has this effect on people. You have much to look forward to.

Rigid discipline and omniscient technocracy: It would be nice to try those someday and see what they're like. If we didn't like them, we could try something else. But we surely haven't seen them yet.

"Rigid discipline and omniscient technocracy" is what the world looks like from the early end of a college course catalogue. You know all those jokes about Parkinson's Law, and Murphy's Laws, and the Law of Unintended Consequences, and all the other humor in that vein? There's a reason those jokes exist.

I once took a job working for the Illuminati. I was the Assistant to the Director of the Meetings Program at the Council on Foreign Relations. What I decided during my time there is that conspiracy theory is the optimistic belief that someone out there is running things. (Since then I've learned different models of conspiracy theory, but I'll stand by that earlier insight.)

The world is a terribly complicated place. Really. Some of the people who'll tell you that are emitting BS, using "complication" as a cover for some other malfeasance. However, the fact that they're fibbing doesn't mean the world is not, in fact, terribly complicated. Computers have improved our ability to keep track of it -- and that is a very relative "improved".

A servile reverence for controlled predictable outcomes: As I was just saying, the world is a terribly complicated place. Billions of people are trying to make advantageous arrangements that they hope will enable them to prosper, care for their loved ones, survive, engage in work they wholeheartedly wish to do, not hurt so much so often, find a spouse, serve their ideals, et cetera and so forth: a vast long list of things.

And what makes that all possible? Well, a lot of things. But controlled predictable outcomes are a huge help in doing all of them.

Chaos is a real babe, and she'll whisper intoxicating sweet nothings into your ear, but she's not your friend or the friend of your friends, and she won't make you happy. Chaos is the enemy of the minimum-wage worker trying to balance two jobs and two kids and food and sleep when the only transportation she has is mass transit. Chaos is much harder on quirkily intelligent little books than on fat gilded predictable bestsellers, harder on poor but brilliant students scraping by on financial aid than on the children of wealth and privilege, harder on me than on the thoughtlessly able-bodied. If you still don't understand, read Steve Brust's 500 Years After and watch the changing fortunes of the pie-seller. That's the difference between chaos and order when you're working with the tiny vulnerable margins of error of the poor and hopeful.

Time was, we had a distribution system that kept books in print if people wanted to read them. Science fiction had a distinctive sales pattern. If it never had the sharply peaking initial sales of the mainstream, it didn't have anything like the mainstream's falloff, either. You wrote one book, then another, then another; and the trickle of small royalties, foreign sales, and other minor income streams could (if you worked hard and were lucky and were talented to start with) eventually combine into an income you could survive on. That was the way of it. Then the world changed, the distribution system went into chaotic upheaval and change, and suddenly the old patterns weren't there any more. Authors who'd worked all their lives to get that income stream going, and stoke its flow, were suddenly out of print and out on the sidewalk. I acquired my best-loved author (now gone, alas) when that happened with his previous publisher. All his plans had been based on the previous state of affairs. He hadn't pushed for big advances because he knew his best bet was that constant trickle of royalties from many sources. Then, when the patterns changed, he had no capital, just a bunch of revenue streams that had dried up.

"The invisible hand of the marketplace is not to human scale," I told him. Then I took him on and published him for the rest of his life. (Made money, too. He'd have been miserable if we hadn't.)

Chaos makes money markets thrash like a dragon with food poisoning. Those who have a lot of money and a lot of power can ride it out, even profit from it. But it wipes out the savings and the small hopeful plans of schoolteachers and bus drivers and nurserymen.

You should have been here for the last big blackout. There was chaos for you. What it put in peril: Insulin and dialysis for diabetics. Clear passage for ambulances. Reliable as-needed deliveries to small businesses. Travel plans for the one four-day vacation of the year for a poor family with children. ATMs for cash for office workers who were at the end of a pay period. Elevators for the elderly living sixty floors up in Co-op City. Air conditioning for asthmatics. (Another one of my authors stopped staying on top of his lifelong fight with asthma when a days-long power outage took out his climate control system.) And more, and more, and more besides. The poor and vulnerable build the fragile structures of their lives, and pray for chaos to pass them buy. But money and power? They're robust, as they always are.

I remember passionately wishing change chaos down upon my hometown and all that I knew. I was very young then. I got my wish. I no longer recognize the place where I grew up. I don't blame myself. It didn't happen in response to my wishes.

Chaos: Seriously? You wouldn't like it. Trust me.

Summary: All those boring, frustrating, dowdy-sounding virtues and organizations and considerations you're always hearing about are social devices meant to make it possible for more life and better life to happen. If you're as young as I think you are, you haven't learned about all these things because your culture has deliberately kept you away from real responsibilities and consequences. You can take it on faith now or learn it from experience a little later, unless you get stubborn and lathe yourself into some strange predetermined shape. This is the heart of politics. This is what it's all about: what's made easiesr for whom, and what's made possible for anyone at all.

From another angle, life is what happens in the chaotic region between stasis and randomness.

Too much order, and nothing moves. Too much randomness, and nothing gets built.

What you left out in your rant against chaos is that for some people, letting anyone near the bottom (or perhaps anyone who isn't at the top) have plans and build anything is more chaos than can be endured. Okay, a lot of your rant was quite reasonably against rapid social change/breakdown, but you were calling it chaos.

I like contemplating chaos with a full bank account and a cold six-pack of beer. While at the beach, preferably.

Good rant, Teresa, but the tallest buildings in Co-Op City are some thirty-odd stories.

Nancy, social chaos was what Lance was advocating; social chaos was what Teresa addressed. Cosmic chaos, and chaotic phenomena, are essential to life. I assume Teresa knows that.

I can't believe I ever took "Lance Boyle" at face value, especially since his OPP (in this case, Obvious Punk Pseudonym) belies the thrust of his arguments: lancing a boil relieves the immediate pain, but if you don't eliminate the caustic substance that gave you boils in the first place...can't imagine what caustic substance I'm talking about.

Bravo, Teresa. Beautifully written, too, as always.

Nancy, the fact that, to some especially cold and narrow people higher up on the socio-economic scale, a degree of social order and social mobility that lets those further down make plans and work their way up looks like "chaos" doesn't make it chaos. Lack of 100% predictability is not "chaos." Other people having a reasonable amount of predictability in their lives, so that they can make halfway useful decisions, is not "chaos."

From the archives of healthy comprises with evil department:

Alice: Arrest him!
More: What for!
Roper: He's a spy...
Margaret: Father, that man's bad.
More: There's no law against that.
Roper: There is—God's law.
More: Then God can arrest him.
Alice: While you talk, he's gone!
More: And go he should if he were the Devil himself until he broke the law.
Roper: So! Now you give the Devil benefit of Law.
More: Yes, what would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: Yes! I'd cut down every law in England to do that.
More: Oh? And when the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws being all flat. This country is planted thick with laws—man's law's not God's—and if you cut them down...and you're just the man to do it, do you think you could really stand upright in the winds that would blow then?

(silence)

More: Yes, I give the Devil benefit of the law, for my own safety's sake.

(from Man for All Seasons—going by memory however faulty).

Thanks, Teresa. You need to collect all these gems of yours and publish them.

Think Inhofe's a jerk? You don't know the half of it. Check out this post for more outrageous Inhoferry.

If you're still feeling steamed at Inhofe, one way you can express your displeasure is to give to Brad Carson's campaign. He's running for the other Oklahoma Senate seat, and here's his website:

http://www.bradcarson.com/

He's an Oklahoma Democrat, which means he's rather far right of where I am. But if he wins in November, he'll have built a good foundation for the guy or gal who comes up behind him to challenge Inhofe when the voters next make their voices heard.

And surprisingly enough, he seems to have a chance, from the polls I've seen lately.

I'm from Maryland and have nothing whatsoever to do with the Carson campaign, except for the twenty bucks I just lobbed at him to make Inhofe mad.

That's my new tactic. Every time a politician makes me angry, I throw a few dollars into his political opponent's tip jar. Maybe, eventually, this might have some small effect.

And it sure does make me feel good.

I'm not excusing any sort of rationale for abuse; none exists, as far as I'm concerned. I've said so quite a bit, and I'll continue to say so.

But the people in 1A and 1B are there for a reason, and I don't think unsubstantiatd allegations are enough to send them there. I think the original post was trying to say that it was, to allege, perhaps, that it was worse because these people had almost certainly done nothing. While the mistreatment of a combatant is bad, and inexcusable, I think you might agree that the mistreatment of an innocent tends to be worse, and thus the inference drawn is somewhat inflammatory, imho.

Dave: look at the link immediately above your post; it's one of many stories that large numbers of people are in Abu Ghraib due to erroneous arrests. You claim to know the truth; has everyone in those blocks been tried and convicted by something resembling a sane judicial process, or at least caught red-handed (e.g., holding a smoking RPG launcher)? Are you sure? Have you actually checked whatever passes for a record-keeping system there, for every prisoner in those blocks, and do you even trust what goes into it?

And if everyone in those blocks does deserve to be there (which I find highly implausible given the gross incompetence of this occupation), is it any more valid of Inhofe to hold them up as representative (which he did; note that his first sentence was "These prisoners, you know they're not there for traffic violations.") than to say all Blacks are violent criminals simply because some are?

Inhofe's comments were indefensible enough without confusing the situation in cellblocks 1A/B with the ICRC estimate of 70-90% of detainees _integrated over Iraq_ being guilty of Driving While Iraqi. In fact, what appears to me to be the correct assessment is even more disturbing: the abuses there weren't examples of random sadism but were designed to extract information from the segment of the population thought most likely to be of use in the hunt for WMDs, Saddam, al Qaeda operatives, foreign insurgents, the One Ring... The MIs might as well have been asking, Is it safe?

The abuses suffered by the rest of the detainees is a somewhat different issue - a bit less sexy though.

Theresa-
Given a choice between the very clear direction we are now heading, and a chance at some other direction through chaotic social disruption, I say again - gimme chaos
Or freedom, or liberty, or the risk and gamble of the unknown.
The instinctual jerking of a limb, the flinch, even hysterical panic, these are not thought-out controlled re-actions, they're genetically programmed chaotic responses, to an immediate threat of harm that's greater than the risks of chance reaction. Chaos over status quo, when the status quo becomes too threatening.
Gimme chaos.
Where we disagree is the nature and extent of the threat.
Where that disagreement becomes antagonistic is in the disparity between our commitment to the way things presently are.
The election, the US presidential election, which was the original touchstone for this, is certainly not chaos, and it's certainly not an opportunity for change, not now. It's precisely on track to continue the direction we're headed in.
That's doom. Certain doom.
It's still too early for most of your audience maybe, but the circumpolar people are facing it. The Akha in Thailand are facing it, the Bushmen in the Kalahari are facing it. The Yanomami, the Awa, the Arhuaco, a too-long list of real living people and cultures who are dying, and what's almost worse, having their ways-of-being destroyed, not in some abstract could-be world, but in the world George Bush's masters, and John Kerry's, protect you from having to confront, except tangentially, at your own discretion.
You can shut it off, make it peripheral, regrettable but not central, important but not crucial.
I can't do that.
I used the word chaos because it's how the audience here, in my estimation, would view the natural world, outside the artificial boundaries of human-dominant landscape. In between is the world of dystopic fiction - hub-cap frying pans and cannibalistic urban ferals. A transition away from the coward's order of this disciplined and obedient landscape, toward the old wild and its true freedom. We could get stuck there, on the other side of the risk of chaotic disruption, potentially yeah; but the only thing on the other side of this controlled burn is the possibility of a desperate lunge off-planet; and the passenger list for that leap is disgustingly craven.
So again - gimme chaos. "Nature red in tooth and claw" and all that nonsense that makes modern man so timid.
That kind of chaos is the order that created us.
We owe our brains and our abilities to that molding hand and we have done our level best to amputate it. That's the chaos I choose, over the order that provides 380 million gallons of gasoline a day to people who are going nowhere but straight into a living hell of unintended consequences.
John Kerry represents a hearty cheer for the status quo. That was the original point and it still is. The question I'm pushing forward is - what do we do when it hasn't worked to change presidents?
I'm not answering it directly because the context and the moment aren't appropriate, except to say that for all of us there will be a moment when we will say, "Anything but this; please, anything but this."
Like the way you jump when you're startled - it's a leap into the unknown, far below the will or the rational mind, a gamble that the next position will be no worse and could be better than the immediate harmful present.
What I see here and in other flagship venues is a stalwart defense of a dream that, as bad as it is now, by keeping within the boundaries of decency and compromise and altering the system by degrees, we can make the world better, and still have consciences that aren't howling with grief. That's how we got here.
That dream is over for me.
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As for your well-written series of miniature essays - great, cogent and lucid effort, but I'm older than you I'm sure, chronologically and, especially, experientially; I've seen more evil, and closer at hand, than you ever have or will.
Which is not to slight your own experience, don't misunderstand me. I realize that second assertion is a little stark, but I'm sure it's accurate. I have semi-articulable memories and vivid narratives that go abruptly blank. Stuff I don't want to remember, and stuff I can't.
It doesn't give me any more stature in a logical debate about human affairs, and I'm not pretending it does, unless the subject of the debate is the nature of evil. Then it does.
Your audience benefits from the length and depth of your exposition, that's a good thing, but for me it's like being lectured at by a teen-ager, sort of the very thing you saw as happening, only in reverse.
Those dowdy institutions are like all dowdy things, like the aged humans we shunt off to warehouses as if they're poultry - some of them were great, most of them were not, all of them are old.
There isn't one single institution on this planet capable of dealing with what we're facing now.
The world is truly a terribly complicated place. Absolutely.
One of the more egregious temptations, when you're surrounded by half-awake dunces, is to believe that the distance between your comprehension of that complexity and theirs actually measures something like attainment.
—
Patrick-
It's not about disabled people dying where no one else is.
The list of indigenous people who are being slaughtered for the automobile, which is in its essence an heroically powerful wheelchair, is shrinking.
It's shrinking because there are only a limited amount of indigenous people, and they're being slaughtered. Already. Now.
Choose.

Agenda.

CHip: The population of 1A and 1B is a near infinitessimal fraction of the overall prison population. The vast majority of the prisoners here don't live in cellblocks of any stripe.

Likewise, I think it's a bit presumptuous for you to assign "gross incompetence." There are troubles, yes, and to address rilkefan's point, I'm sure there are plenty of people in here who are more or less innocent of crimes against Coalition forces or the Iraqi people in general. Thing is, I'm damn near positive they aren't in 1A or 1B.

The issue of innocent detainees is, imho, a troublesome one. When fighting an insurgency in a country where you don't understand the language, sorting the wheat from the chaff on the spot can be difficult at best. In a typical scenario, a house is searched and a cache of weapons discovered. Say the cache is in a yard shared with three houses. Do you just take the owner of the house you searched initially? What if there's other adult males in that house? What if the guy's a patsy and one of those guys in the house is a ringleader? What if they're all patsies, and the ringleader lives in one of the other houses? All you know that you'll get is a lot of finger-pointing, going in all directions. So what do you do? Let terrorists go, when you know that one of them has to be in cahoots? Just pick the shiftiest looking one? Or snap them all up, and let the innocent ones go later, with an apology?

It's a war. Feces occur. Not that it's not bad, it certainly is. But so is war. Honest to Pete, the innocent get released as fast as they're cleared. The quoted 3800 number that someone has promised to cut in half soon would almost certainly be lower if it weren't for that business the first half of April. I watched detainees get released nearly every day leading up to that, and not in ones and twos, but in truck loads.

It's not like the stuff you guys are saying is news, particularly. You're just becoming aware of it. Corrective measures have been in place for months.

Lance Boyle: My guess is that your last post may tempt Patrick to deprive himself of some well-earned guitar playing time -- to address your affinity for "chaos" as a prima facie antidote to pain.

This might make it easier. "What kind of chaos do you want?" "How would you like to apply it?" And "How will your preferred chaos alleviate the suffering you perceive?"

Teresa was trying to tell you that certain types of chaos simply increase suffering across the board (in the name of muddying the ability to discriminate between suffering and comfort).

Hint: if you believe that the "needs of a few" outweigh the needs of "a great many," you'll want to show how the "suffering of the many" is going to satisfy the "needs of the few," -- and why the "many" should want to go along with it.

Lance, have you considered taking a course in rhetoric at your school? Please do so. Pay special attention to the Persuasive Essay and the Informal Fallacies.

Everyone else: Those of us who've said from the beginning that the origin of the Iraqi prison scandal was at the top of the chain of command may well be proved right:

http://newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fact

Lance, you say "One of the more egregious temptations, when you're surrounded by half-awake dunces, is to believe that the distance between your comprehension of that complexity and theirs actually measures something like attainment". I can't tell if you realize that applies most strongly to you, or not.

As for "cannibalistic urban ferals": dude, pop out the Mad Max DVD before you wear it out, and try going outside and talking to some people. Better yet, try listening to them. You've brushed close to several valid points in your various rants, but this is just absurd. I'm convinced that our sensationalistic amoral media wouldn't have let a topic like that lie fallow if there were a scintilla of evidence for it.

Dave, if half of the 3800 detainees are innocent of any crime, then that sounds like inefficiency at the very least. Either they've been swept up and locked away for no good reason and it's taken weeks and months to determine that, or they're just being released willy-nilly by reason of political expediency.

And we know that innocents have been tortured. Either they've been in 1a and 1b and subsequently released, in which case we know that not everybody in 1a and 1b is necessarily a very bad person; or they were elsewhere and subsequently released, in which case we know that the torture was not restricted to those in blocks 1a and 1b. Again, inefficiency.

What was the point of torturing everybody? Because one of them might have known something useful? How do you tell that "wheat" from the "chaff" of those who make stuff up just to get the torture to stop? And if that can be done, then why not apply the same magic intelligence sieve to the problem of who to arrest when you don't know who the arms cache belongs to? That way the righteous don't have to torture anybody.

Damn straight shit happens, the point is to try to stop it from happening. The tried-and-tested way of doing that is to examine the shit, however unpleasant a job that is, to find out exactly what kind it is. If there's tapeworm eggs in it, then we apply anti-worming pills; if it's weak and watery, then maybe some kaolin-and-morphine; if it's hard, compact and infrequent, then we add roughage to the diet. Maybe it'll fix itself if we ignore it, but chances are it will get worse if we do. And if the problem does clear up, then we have to keep examining it for a time to check if the treatment was effective.

Now, you say that everything's fine, nothing to see here. Well, you may not enjoy us examining your stools, and believe me, we don't like doing it, but we have to. It's a democracy, you have to put up with us checking for ourselves, because that's our job as citizens.

NelC: I'm still curious as to how you would resolve the problem I posited in the post you responded to. How to handle the problem of a non-uniformed enemy among a population of like-speaking people? Better to detain small chunks of innocents to get at the bad guys than to kill small chunks of innocents, as had been de riguer in the bad ol' days. Better still to... what? I'm curious as to your answer.

Otherwise, you make an interesting leap from "a couple of releasd people have complained of abuse" to "everyone at Abu Ghraib must have been tortured." One does not follow from the other, especially given the nearly four thousand who have been released since January. And they are still claims. You're making a very, very terrible accusation against a much wider group of people than is currently formally accused based on what may be nothing more than opportunistic claims. (How many of them went on record claiming abuse prior to this month?) Not that they should not be investigated. But the innocent are still innocent until proven guilty. Try not to smear hundreds of MPs with complicity just because it's fashionable to question what goes on here.

If you can suggest a more efficient way of prosecuting a counter-insurgency campaign, I'm sure the Pentagon would be happy to have your feedback. But right now, this smacks of Monday morning quarterbacking. Nice of you to point out inefficiencies now.

Lenny Bailes-
Your entire argument proceeds from a vision of controlled, intended, cause-and-effect. The weather we are enjoying and will continue to enjoy is a direct result of that hubristic myopia applied to immediate gain/loss rationale.
I'm not advocating the controlled application of chaos as an antidote to immediate pain, and I'm not factoring pain in numerical quantities and qualitative sub-groupings.
I'm saying the Kalahari indigenous, the Amazonian indigenous, the Australian indigenous, the First Nations of North America, the circumpolar indigenous, in their pre-contact states, embodied a submission to what you would call chaos - what I call the wilderness. What they called "home".
Inasmuch as I have to use the common vocabulary I use the word but I don't mean Cartesian chaos, I don't mean Cartesian anything.
It's precisely that "greater good" horseshit that I'm arguing against. We don't know, we are not capable of directing our own evolution. The weather is only the most unavoidably obvious proof of that.
And, again, every quality and attribute that you find admirable in the human genetic display was a direct result of the submission I advocate, and none of it was the intended result of human artifice and/or social direction. Control doesn't work. Genetic modification is for the already monstrous. The result of human decision-making on our place in this world is obese human sheep strapped into SUV's, going 90 miles an hour in rivers of molten steel and poison gas.
To support that obscene way of life we have sacrificed the integrity of every eco-system on the planet and we've been forced to blind ourselves to the daily massacre and maiming of our own children. And we have invaded Iraq. Which is where Abu Ghraib is. Which was the source of the outrage Inhofe was outraged about. Which is how this thread got started.
What I'm trying to get said is that these outrages connect, they make a larger picture.
The momentum for change is here, but the danger is in the temptation to stop where it's comfortable.
Car ads with lakes and mountains and healthy young people in brand-new hiking boots.
This is the smiling face of a cunning predator, and it's looking at your sons and daughters.
-
Not only that, but the cultural reservoirs that are vanishing with indigenous people hold what are probably the only adequate human tools for coping with catastrophic environmental disruption. They're lighter on their feet than we are.
We're wiping out the only real help we have with the same flick of the wrist we tear down the sky.
My point is essentially that the proof-estimates you demand will never be forthcoming, because what you want is to maintain control of process and outcome, even as it becomes obvious you can't. "You" meaning the larger social context from which you write.

Dave, you're being disingenuous. It's not at all cute in a man wearing a uniform, you know.

Monday morning quarterbacking? People have been critiquing this whole Iraq misadventure since 2002. Have you had wax in your ears?

I should have been a bit more careful in my language, I admit. Instead of "everyone" I should perhaps have written "anyone" or even "everyman", by which I mean to say that the unit in charge of Abu Ghraib at the time examined by the Taguba report seemed to show no discrimination in the subjects chosen for "softening-up". See here, for example. Certainly they did not observe the rule:

the innocent are still innocent until proven guilty.

People have been released from Abu Ghraib who have been tortured by US soldiers and intelligence personnel. If they've been released, then the machinery responsible for holding them in Abu Ghraib must have decided that they are clear of any guilt. If they weren't guilty of anything, then the torture committed against them was an act of evil. Also inefficient and incompetent. Also illegal by any authority worthy of the name.

Let me turn your opening question around, since I'm confident that you won't respect any answer I, fat-assed civilian that I am, might come up with:

Say the Canadians, Mexicans and Chinese decided to occupy the USA (say, they were looking for WMDs or wanted to facilitate a regime change or something hypothetical like that), and a squad of PLA grunts knocked on your door -- I beg your pardon, I mean kicked down your door -- searched your house and found your weapons cache. I'm guessing that you've got a weapon at home -- if not, say, they found your neighbour's weapon and ammo. In that case, what would you have them do with your wife and children? You're not at home, possibly still in Iraq, perhaps.

Would you think it a good plan of theirs to lock up your neighbour, his family, your wife, your kids, your neighbour on the other side, all of them in the state prison for several months, just to be safe? Would you be happy if a bunch of Canuck MPs at the prison where your wife was being held... well, I'll leave that to your imagination. Or I could just point you to Taguba's Finding of Fact 6.k.

Is that a good plan?

Jeremy Leader-
"...if you realize that applies most strongly to you..."
"That applies" most strongly to anyone whose foot the particular shoe fits. But yeah it's a good thing to check in oneself, regularly, I recommend it. Especially when it can be shown you've erred in your analysis of someone's position, and intent.
-
As for Mad Max, you missed the sense-order path, what there was of it. From dowdy institutions, and the defense thereof against the dystopic rot of social chaos, to potential breakdown.
Order > disorder > chaos > feral BBQ.
I was actually acknowledging both Nielsen Haydens' point. That the danger of social disruption is that. As an outcome following hypothetical social breakdown due to the dim-witted and irresponsible embrace of "chaos". I was not saying that it exists particularly now. Though I'll wager you haven't spent much time in the barrios nuevos of Juarez.
Someone could also make the argument that the crack-cocaine wholesale/retail dynamic is pretty much "feral urban cannibalism", but not me. I'll just assert it, vehemently.
And wager, again, that it's a world you know nothing of, except from prosthetic media; and that you therefore consider its inhabitants tangential at best, and relatively unimportant.
Like Iraqis are to GI Joe.

NelC - there was an article last month or so in the NYT where a soldier, an NCO I think, said to the embedded reporter who was along with them on a raid as they kicked in doors, searched rooms, terrorized women and small children and shot someone's dog, that if anyone did this to *his* family back in America, he'd quote, "roll'em." He didn't sound very happy with himself and his job or clear on what the mission was any more - and this was before Abu Ghreib broke free of classification. (I'd post the link or at least the article date, but I had a crash and lost some stuff.)

Wow, Lance, you know so much more and are so much more empathic than anyone else here. I'm so ignorant and stupid that I can't tell what point or points you're trying to make. You're apparently much more far-sighted than anyone else, but I don't know what it is you're seeing, other than that things are going to hell faster than anyone else realizes, and you seem to derive pleasure from that.

Since I'm incapable of engaging in discussion at your refined intellectual and empathic level, I'm going to admit defeat, and continue trying to improve my own life and those near me at my slow crawling pace. It's too bad that I'm incapable of understanding you; I'll just have to do the best I can without the benefit of your insight.

On the other hand, a while back you said:

... the cultural reservoirs that are vanishing with indigenous people hold what are probably the only adequate human tools for coping with catastrophic environmental disruption. They're lighter on their feet than we are.

If they're so good at coping with catastrophic environmental disruption, then why are they vanishing? Maybe Western Civilization has eliminated the catastrophic environmental disruption they need to survive?

Oops, there's my inadequate reliance on dead-white-male logic again.

Oh well, I'll just go back to trying to fix the little things I'm worried about, and you can go back to doing something about the things you're worried about. I'm not going to ask what it is you're planning to do, since I won't understand the answer.

NelC: First, you have no idea what I might respect or not respect. I'm still curious as to an answer for my question. You're dodging it, I sense, because all you have is criticism without any of the constructive. We can't change to meet the expectations of a public (whom we serve) without knowing what those expectations are. What should we do? How should we do it? We're open to suggestions, I believe, but this is as good as we've got.

Secondly, your scenario is childishly inflammatory and ridiculous. You're not addressing the question at hand, you're simply trying to rile my emotions by suggesting that my wife would be raped and my home invaded, maybe while I'm still here, which is flatly ridiculous and meant only to prey further on my emotions. The vile manipulation is not cute in anyone.

Likewise, your stereotyped perceptions are laughable; I don't, in fact, own a gun and have never really been interested in purchasing one. Further, your analogy is stretched to the breaking the point by the fact that it does not match up with the situation here in the slightest; the women and the children do not get detained along with the men, doors as a general rule do not get kicked in, and we certainly don't detain people for having one personal weapon in their homes. That is not a cache. A cache is many weapons of unmistakably military use, such as RPGs, machine guns, mortars and artillery shells.

Now, take your childish assumptions and your childish analogy, and ... do whatever seems best. The fact of the matter is, for all your criticism, you cannot come up with a viable alternative and thus you're seeking to muddy the waters. None of this is about what I would have a foreign military do; I'd have them leave me and my family alone, as I'm sure many Iraqis would like us to leave them alone. Ridiculous question deserving of a useless answer. If we could leave them alone, we would, but we can't, not when maybe them, maybe their neighbors are shooting at us. We have to do something or we wind up with a lot more flag-draped coffins in Dover.

In the military, we've institutionalized Monday morning quarterbacking, into something called the After Action Report. One of the AAR's salient features, though, is frank discussion of what could be done better, and how. This is why I characterize your attempt at it as, effectively, useless. If you think we're doing it wrong, you ought to have a way of suggesting how to do it better, or you're going to get ignored. The exact same would be true if I watched you over your shoulder at your place of employment and simply told you that you were being inefficient, and left it at that. Has nothing to do with me being in uniform and you not; has everything to do with basic courtesy.

NelC: First, you have no idea what I might respect or not respect. I'm still curious as to an answer for my question. You're dodging it, I sense, because all you have is criticism without any of the constructive. We can't change to meet the expectations of a public (whom we serve) without knowing what those expectations are. What should we do? How should we do it? We're open to suggestions, I believe, but this is as good as we've got.

Secondly, your scenario is childishly inflammatory and ridiculous. You're not addressing the question at hand, you're simply trying to rile my emotions by suggesting that my wife would be raped and my home invaded, maybe while I'm still here, which is flatly ridiculous and meant only to prey further on my emotions. The vile manipulation is not cute in anyone.

Likewise, your stereotyped perceptions are laughable; I don't, in fact, own a gun and have never really been interested in purchasing one. Further, your analogy is stretched to the breaking the point by the fact that it does not match up with the situation here in the slightest; the women and the children do not get detained along with the men, doors as a general rule do not get kicked in, and we certainly don't detain people for having one personal weapon in their homes. That is not a cache. A cache is many weapons of unmistakably military use, such as RPGs, machine guns, mortars and artillery shells.

Now, take your childish assumptions and your childish analogy, and ... do whatever seems best. The fact of the matter is, for all your criticism, you cannot come up with a viable alternative and thus you're seeking to muddy the waters. None of this is about what I would have a foreign military do; I'd have them leave me and my family alone, as I'm sure many Iraqis would like us to leave them alone. Ridiculous question deserving of a useless answer. If we could leave them alone, we would, but we can't, not when maybe them, maybe their neighbors are shooting at us. We have to do something or we wind up with a lot more flag-draped coffins in Dover.

In the military, we've institutionalized Monday morning quarterbacking, into something called the After Action Report. One of the AAR's salient features, though, is frank discussion of what could be done better, and how. This is why I characterize your attempt at it as, effectively, useless. If you think we're doing it wrong, you ought to have a way of suggesting how to do it better, or you're going to get ignored. The exact same would be true if I watched you over your shoulder at your place of employment and simply told you that you were being inefficient, and left it at that. Has nothing to do with me being in uniform and you not; has everything to do with basic courtesy.

NelC: First, you have no idea what I might respect or not respect. I'm still curious as to an answer for my question. You're dodging it, I sense, because all you have is criticism without any of the constructive. We can't change to meet the expectations of a public (whom we serve) without knowing what those expectations are. What should we do? How should we do it? We're open to suggestions, I believe, but this is as good as we've got.

Secondly, your scenario is childishly inflammatory and ridiculous. You're not addressing the question at hand, you're simply trying to rile my emotions by suggesting that my wife would be raped and my home invaded, maybe while I'm still here, which is flatly ridiculous and meant only to prey further on my emotions. The vile manipulation is not cute in anyone.

Likewise, your stereotyped perceptions are laughable; I don't, in fact, own a gun and have never really been interested in purchasing one. Further, your analogy is stretched to the breaking the point by the fact that it does not match up with the situation here in the slightest; the women and the children do not get detained along with the men, doors as a general rule do not get kicked in, and we certainly don't detain people for having one personal weapon in their homes. That is not a cache. A cache is many weapons of unmistakably military use, such as RPGs, machine guns, mortars and artillery shells.

Now, take your childish assumptions and your childish analogy, and ... do whatever seems best. The fact of the matter is, for all your criticism, you cannot come up with a viable alternative and thus you're seeking to muddy the waters. None of this is about what I would have a foreign military do; I'd have them leave me and my family alone, as I'm sure many Iraqis would like us to leave them alone. Ridiculous question deserving of a useless answer. If we could leave them alone, we would, but we can't, not when maybe them, maybe their neighbors are shooting at us. We have to do something or we wind up with a lot more flag-draped coffins in Dover.

In the military, we've institutionalized Monday morning quarterbacking, into something called the After Action Report. One of the AAR's salient features, though, is frank discussion of what could be done better, and how. This is why I characterize your attempt at it as, effectively, useless. If you think we're doing it wrong, you ought to have a way of suggesting how to do it better, or you're going to get ignored. The exact same would be true if I watched you over your shoulder at your place of employment and simply told you that you were being inefficient, and left it at that. Has nothing to do with me being in uniform and you not; has everything to do with basic courtesy.

Woops... posted three times. Mods remove, please?

"If they're so good at coping with catastrophic environmental disruption, then why are they vanishing?"

I think the idea is that "primitive" peoples have retained the skills to survive in a "primitive" environment - the sort of things that survivalists may train in, like tanning skins, hunting without guns, making your own weapons or clothes or building shelters with minimal tools & no manufactured materials, first aid with natural materials & so forth.

A less extreme version is often found in places like Iraq or Cuba under sanctions, or poor parts of other countries, where people develop skills in making higher-tech things from improvised materials, or repairing & maintaining them - e.g. the high level of ingenuity in the mechanical tradesmen of Baghdad & beyond.

They may not be useful skills when it comes to surviving against bulldozers, measles & massed rifles, but if the bottom drops out of a high-tech culture they might prove useful again. Some of them may also may demonstrate ways to survive long-term in an environment without destroying it.

I, for instance, have a high medical dependency on certain technologies & products which would be very difficult to obtain without high technology, would suffer quite a lot, and probably die from infections reasonably rapidly without very intensive nursing, which in a 'collapse' would be unlikely now my partner's dead & without relatives. Diabetics, paraplegics of most types & a whole slew of others would probably go the same way.

There was a book of collected sf stories about a fictional planet called "Murasaki" which posited one possible way of approaching this problem. It involved a high degree of genetic manipulation to set up self-maintaining ecosystems which provided for the civilization. They also developed an interesting technology that enabled them to go back to a nomadic lifestyle without sacrificing all "high" culture.

Alas, you'd probably need some serious mental reworking to get humans to live that way without dropping back into the type of "strongman" culture we've supposedly spent the last thousand years trying to get away from. Well, some of us have. Others just seem to like being "top dog".

Dave: I have a pretty good idea of what's going on, and I have to say I don't believe the totality of the prisoners in those blocks are innocent.

The nature of the reports I've read, and seen related, and the people I know who were there (as Humint collectors, last July, before BG Miller made his reccomendations) is such that I see a lot of positive feedback loops, with positive re-enforcement of poor behaviour.

A lot of that stems from the presumption of guilt which seems to be ascribed to anyone who gets lumped into the class of suspected bad actors, and the need to make them give up what they know.

And we do know of at least one case of a family being taken hostage by a US Army Colonel, to get someone we wanted to talk to to turn himself in. To date I've not seen any negative repercussion to that officer.

As to how we deal with the people who are attacking us? The same way one deals with any POW, with the proven techniques we've developed over the past 50 years. They work, and while they may be as fast (or have the emotive thrill of revenge) as beating the crap out of someone, they have something far better, 1: they produce reliable information, and 2: they don't degrade the person doing it.

As for your critique of the question of what you would do in the same shoes as the Iraqis... I don't think a bunch of Canadians would do such things either, but then I'd have liked to think there weren't pictures of us degrading Iraqis, (and if allegations are to be believed, raping a few). I know of some rapes in Afghanistan... and I'd've thought Americans wouldn't do that either. The point Lance was trying to make is that the sort of resistance to our occupation is something that, were the situation reversed, we would be praising.

To then describe what wewould otherwise think laudable, as terrorism; or otherwise, as beyond the pale is foolish. That lack of understanding only serves to perpetuate the present, at best.

Terry: As to how we deal with the people who are attacking us? The same way one deals with any POW, with the proven techniques we've developed over the past 50 years.

I'm not really talking about the interrogation techniques, though. If they're wrong, then they are, and they ought to be ammended. I'm talking about the actual process of accidentally collecting the innocent along with the guilty. This is the problem of dealing with an enemy that does not wear a uniform, and one we've had very little experience in dealing with over the past 50 years. I daresay in Vietnam the question was addressed much more brutally than it has been addressed here, but the difference between then and now evidently is not good enough for some; we have to find a way of singling out the bad guy on the spot, so we don't trample the universal human rights of the others who happen to be standing around. I don't know of a way, personally, and I'm curious as to how others would suggest we proceed, if not in this "inefficient" way.

Whatever I've said, I really haven't said anything about the interrogation techniques themselves. You misconstrue me if you think I'm defending them.

Well, what *could* have been done was to take serious steps to create a good humint situation long ago. The fact that there were plans back in 1998 being drafted, the Desert Fox thing and the resolution against Hussein - and from what rumours I've heard, even earlier, that there were factions in the Pentagon who wanted to not enage in the Balkans due to being tied to a longed-for Gulf War instead, possibly engaging both the Mid-East and China simultaneously. I heard this from someone who follows strategy, and a couple other places, so I don't have references to hand on this, at the moment - but I don't have any real doubt that there were WWI-style plans in the drawer for many years.

It's been known and lamented for a long while that there weren't enough Arabic speakers in Intel. Why not? Why werent efforts made to actively recruit until after 9/11? Why all the problems, the fact that say, native speakers were not allowed because of homosexuality, or that they couldn't process their security fast enough, or that they couldn't figure out if they should clear them? This was, given the plans in place for*at least* five years, simply *criminal* on the part of the Pentagon/intelligence communities.

Two reasons - trust in tech, which was shown to be stupid when India's scientists figured out how to use the Keyhole satellites' blind spots to work their nuclear program unobserved, because we had reduced our humint - no primitive Mahbub Ali's for us, we have cameras that can read license plates! and trust in Stickyfingers Chalabi and his brigade to take care of negotiating with the natives for us.

This is almost *exctly* the situation we had pre-Vietnam, where the Southeast Asia experts had been purged by McCarthy and replaced by parttimers who didn't know and didn't care about an obscure area when the Soviet Union was all that mattered and who trusted the French to provide all necessary information, and then the South Vietnamese regime, when the time came - as if a faction in a civil war was going to be accurate and impartial and so on when it came to intel.

Welcome to Bright Shining Lie, Part II.

But hey, the way the administration is once again as they were a year ago rattling the saber at Syria, you won't have to worry about dealing with iraqis for long, you'll have an entirely new batch of foreigners to deal with. On to Damascus!

bellatrys: I totally agree with what you're saying, on the surface of it. Again, though, it doesn't really help us now.

And I seriously doubt anything will happen with Syria. We're spread thin enough with this occupation cycle. Can't afford the troops to invade and then double our efforts elsewere. Doubt I'll be on the road to Damascus any time soon.

Dave Klecha-
One of the real difficult things about being a late teen/early twenties kid in the late 60's/early 70's was the constant police harrassment - the whole period has been dressed up in bell bottoms and goofy smiles, but there was some mean stuff that happened. Wheeler Ranch in California is one I knew a little about. It was an "us" and "them" thing. People who were not harming anyone, and trying real hard to find a healthy way to live, were basically beaten and run out of town. It was a lot like the whole Native American program.
The difference with Iraq is we were being made to feel like aliens by uniformed men who were themselves being made to feel like defenders of the homeland.
The Iraqis go way back right there. Back to Babylon, and the time of Daniel.
That time I'm talking of, it was hard to remember the good that cops could be, so much of what was done was so insane and harsh, and cruel.
There must be a military tradition for being in a position of having to defend yourself, while being in the wrong place, and ordered to do the wrong thing.
I haven't heard one justification for the invasion that didn't stink of duplicity, or ignorance.
There's a fair-sized segment of the public in the States who're starting to come right out and say that if it was to get more oil for the US, then it's a good thing.
And there are people who feel that it was at least as much to provide Israel with a wider, more secure perimeter, though they aren't as vocal about it.
Those two things are the only reasons I've heard or seen that make any kind of sense. Neither one is worth one American soldier's life.
I'm writing this to say I hear you, and recognize the patience and discipline in what you're saying. It's an arduous task, having a conscience.
It makes me wish I knew more about military history and law. There must be a way to be a good soldier in a wrong war without capitulation or dereliction.
I hope you're right about Syria.
I hope I'm wrong when I say that Israel wants al-Sadr neutralized, and there won't be an American pull-out until he has been. The price in Iraqi and American lives of that action, essentially nothing more than a political assassination, will be terrible.
As far as your serving the public, I like to think of it more as serving what the public's going to be. Not what it is now, but what it could become, given the chance, and the protection.
Thanks.

Lance: What you tell Lenny he would call chaos (a pre/semi agricultural society) is not chaos.

The presence of a social order is the antithesis of chaos, and, while it may not always have been a social order I might like to live in (the Yonanomo are about as close to chaotic social order as one can get, and engaging in semi-random acts of violence on a semi-regular basis strikes me as a piss-poor way to run a country) it is order.

Chaos, the lack of a social structure to control how people, and groups interact, is a Hobbesian life, and leads to things far more repressive than the present system you seem to advocate breaking before fixing.

To which I say, I am against you, in all ways and with all the resources (and force, both moral and physical) at my disposal.

Bellatrys: re Arabic speakers... The Army does not have enough speakers in ANY language. The logistics of it are too great. I did the math once. If we assume the Army has a need for only ten languages, and trains the number of interrogators (and only interrogators) it needs to run a war in each of those languages, we have about 25,000 linguists.

That's almost two-divisions of interrogators. That leaves out the voice intercept guys, the counter-intelligence guys, the Civil affairs guys.

And you can't really cross train them, unless you teach them more than one language... which raises other problems. It took the best part of $250,000 to train me, and that was more than ten years ago. The wages for all the people involved (and the cost of the equipment) have only gone up.

That's a pretty piece of change for something which is probably never going to get used.

The armed forces are the last bastion of the late medieval/renassaince service economy. Labor is plentiful, and people get paid for doing small things. Because when the crunch comes, bodies are what are needed.

The compromise made was to see how many linguists (in each skill) were needed, and to divide that, proportionally, by the number of languages needed. The hard skills are the ablities to question, and to analyze, and with interpreters I can work anywhere.

Back in the early ninties, and even to the late nineties, Arabic was the hot language, but people who are good at languages, can often find better pay, and better conditions (interrogators get to do a lot of trivial mechanical stuff, and the learn to mainain landscapes) using the skills they got in the Army, so they leave.

Those who really like it stay, which makes it worse, because the upper ranks are full, so promotion is hard, and that makes it even harder to keep the younger troops in.

Terry Karney-
Know a lot about indigenous culture(s)? Maybe more than me. I don't know a lot really. But then there aren't many left, are there? And what little we do know about the ones that are gone is coming from...well, the guys who destroyed what was there, pretty much. Kind of a biased view, I'd expect.
My impression of pre-contact Inuit culture, to take one example, and some post-contact Inuit culture as well, with its complete submission to an environment that is absolutely unforgiving, is that they weren't all about nothing but rude and crude behaviors. Gretel Ehrlich's got a great interweaving of Knut Rasmussen's early 20th c. trans-polar adventures with her own experiences in Greenland in the 1990's. It's called "This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland" I highly recommend it. Rasmussen loved the Inuit he knew. Ehrlich too. Both of them are highly intelligent, compassionate, and open-minded people.
I'm not clear what your "chaos" thingie was about. I said I was using the word in a common-speech form, more in the way a teenager's bedroom might be described as "chaotic", than in formal cosmological/physical terms.
It's my impression that the majority of people in our modern culture look at "unmaintained" landscapes, especially ones that are still pretty fecund, as chaotic. As opposed to a park with its trimmed trees and mowed lawns, and orderly beds of flowers.
Chaos in that sense is not "the lack of a social structure to control how people, and groups interact", it's simply not anthropocentric. And that one element is the most frightening of all, to the people I'm saying describe the wilderness as "chaos".
Our landscapes now are acts of bondage. Discipline and forced submission being the primary aesthetic. If you can't see that you won't see much else of what I'm saying. Which will make your repudiation and fierce resistance slightly more comical than threatening.
You don't understand what I'm saying, but you will oppose it with everything you've got. This particular dilemma wasn't covered in the study sheet — how to behave when attacked by a well-meaning, valiant, but thoroughly mistaken warrior.

Dave -- you ask repeatedly what else we would suggest doing. Independent evidence suggests that what has been done is not working. It's all very well to have accounted for most of the deck of cards, but there's no sign that this has reduced the fight against the "coalition" (and it's unclear how much of the information used to capture these people came from abuse). If something isn't working -- except against you -- the first thing to do is stop; then you can talk about what else to do. That specifically applies here; this was a hearts-and-minds operation from the day Rumsfeld decided to go in with a grossly insufficient force, and anything that involves netting lots of innocent civilians makes that more difficult.

Lance: The fact that you wonder at the people here seeing you as smirking is telling, your smug implications of surperiorty from a postion of informed ignorance is the sort of thing, which in a more personal age would be lead to your bening called out.

As for your mutable uses of chaos, if mere clutter and a lack of apparent organisation were the thing in question, a serfs hovel in 20th century Russia would be more in line with it than the igloo of a an Alaskan Native of the 15th.

To assert by your having read something that I must not, because you disagree with my conclusions, and the moral advantage you seem to think that confers, well see above.

As to what you said, vs. what you are now asserting.

I used the word chaos because it's how the audience here, in my estimation, would view the natural world, outside the artificial boundaries of human-dominant landscape. In between is the world of dystopic fiction

I am now going to claim my experience. I have known that chaos. Have lived where the rules were fight or die, kill or be killed. The limits of what is just are the effects your friend can enforce in your behalf.

In such a place life is cheap, death is ever present, and fear is the constant companion. I am willing to do a great deal, including kill people to prevent such a way of life being close to those I care for... for those I love, well there isn't much I wouldn't do to prevent them knowing that.

The wilderness and its red-toothed chaos seem more and more like a warm embrace compared to this rigid discipline and omniscient technocracy.

A transition away from the coward's order of this disciplined and obedient landscape, toward the old wild and its true freedom. We could get stuck there, on the other side of the risk of chaotic disruption, potentially yeah; but the only thing on the other side of this controlled burn is the possibility of a desperate lunge off-planet; and the passenger list for that leap is disgustingly craven.

And the advocacy of destruction, of smashing the good in the hope of something better (contrary to all the history of the world) is in some way noble, because...

For the rest of the equation, I'm not going to advocate armed insurrection in a thread on what is essentially a mild-mannered journalism analog. I'm urging the group mind toward the inevitable decision

is advocating armed insurrection, which, in and of itself, may not be wrong, but to shirk the asdmission of what you are advocating, well the word which comes to mind is... craven.

Given a choice between the very clear direction we are now heading, and a chance at some other direction through chaotic social disruption, I say again - gimme chaos

None of us is stopping you, go forth and find it, but don't expect us to help you inflict that on ourselves or our loved one, nor should you expect us to sit back and passively allow you to let it happen.

Terry

Terry-
Again.
Lance: The fact that you wonder at the people here seeing you as smirking is telling...
The vocal people here. The ones who write and sign their names. And even then...That you assume to speak for everyone who reads these words makes me wonder what tribe you're from originally.
-
As for your mutable uses of chaos...
No. Same use. Multiple attempts at defining, for you, the original usage.
I am now going to claim my experience. I have known that chaos. Have lived where the rules were fight or die, kill or be killed. The limits of what is just are the effects your friend can enforce in your behalf.
Terry you live there right now, only behind walls. Behind lines of peasant soldiers. There's layers of corrupt thugs all through the society we move among. Wherever you are geographically your world is rife with viral greed and its toxic by-products. And the closer you get to the heart of what's driving this mechanical leviathan the safer it is, and the more violence it takes to make it so. So what? You think the Russian Mafia's gonna build a better tomorrow?
We're burning through an inheritance of biological capital. We're living as though there is no future.
In such a place life is cheap, death is ever present, and fear is the constant companion. I am willing to do a great deal, including kill people to prevent such a way of life being close to those I care for...
Including bringing such a way of life, killing people, to somebody else, who is in turn willing to kill, to prevent such a way of life getting close to those he cares for, and...yeah I've heard that circular tough guy talk before, just before the nukes lit up the last planet I lived on.
And the advocacy of destruction, of smashing the good in the hope of something better (contrary to all the history of the world) is in some way noble, because...
No. Oh no. No no no no. Not in hope of something better. In hope of avoiding something worse.
None of us is stopping you, go forth and find it, but don't expect us to help you inflict that on ourselves or our loved one, nor should you expect us to sit back and passively allow you to let it happen.
That's a great phrase there, Terry...."to sit back and passively allow you to let it happen."
Maybe you think the forces of order are now pushing back chaos in Iraq?
I'm saying World War 3 is gonna be as chaotic as hell. And we're headed right for it. Thanks to exactly that violent arrogant attitude. Paranoia is generally more an exaggerated sense of self-importance than an attitude of excessive fear. The riddle is it tends to create its own cause. Paranoid arrogance creates the very hatred it responds to.
I'm saying the root causes of that lunge toward destruction are the very fears evident in your posts, of chaos and danger. I'm saying that the fear of the wilderness and its immutable law has made us into orphans without guidance or direction. And I'm saying that we're headed toward more violence and danger than a hundred thousand years of wilderness living ever brought us.
-
And I want you and whoever "us" is to hear this:
I put myself out here, knowing I'm traceable, and vulnerable; I'm alone, near broke, and I have no back-up that I can summon. And now I'm hearing somebody I don't know, who sounds an awful lot like a zealot of some kind, make vaguely sinister noises at me.
As opposed to my advocating armed insurrection right? Which I am still not doing, at this time, and in this place.
I'm an American. I wonder how much you know about American history.
This country was founded in an insurrection, in an insurgency that became a full-scale revolution, by people who grew progressively more frustrated at the outrages of privilege and corruption inflicted on them by people who had it "good" and were willing to kill to protect their good life. The early events leading up to the American revolution were a succession of small grievances compounded, and polite discourse rebuffed.
My point is we don't have a couple of decades to wait. Not that it's time to take up arms against Leviathan now, but that it may become the only possible solution. And rather than wait until it does, I'm suggesting reasonable intelligent people contemplate other choices while they still have them. Think the unthinkable.

Lance:

I guess, looking at your rhetoric, that I am lumped among those, "peasant soldiers" you deride.

For the sake of the rest of the audience, I'll not be posting to this topic again.

In short... you need to apply yourself to reading what you have actually said, not what you want the rest of the world to believe you mean.

As for "That you assume to speak for everyone who reads these words..." go back and read what you quoted. I spoke about those who said your tone was smirking/smug(fill in adjective of choice). Nowhere have I claimed to speak for anyone who has not voiced the opinion publically.

My, "violently arrogant attitude," and as for, circular tough guy talk," I'm half lost. I fail to see the circularity in saying there are things I value enough to defend (which is what you say we should all do, save that, so far as I can tell the way in which you want to defend it is anathema to me).

As for Iraq... I know more about what is going on there than you do. If you want to know why I say that, google my name. I've been writing under it for a long time, and have said more than a few things about it, and what I saw there, and how I feel about it.

As for what I know, have studied, done, and hope to do... you can find that out the same way.

As for my zeal, yep. I am zealous, I happen to think that living in a civilised place is a valuable thing. I happen to think smashing it, becuase it has flaws is stupid. That armed insurrection is a useful tool, but only a last resort and the present state of the country is not yet that far gone, because, contrary to your assumption, I don't think rebellion is unthinkable, rather that history points out it is a court of last resort. A field strewn with hazards which has only rarely led to an actual betterment (and most of those betterments only after a period of greatly worse times).

Oh, yeah, my condolences on the loss of your last planet.