On July 21, 2015 2:35:23 AM Steve Kinney <admin@pilobilus.net> wrote a post that deserves to be QFT, so it's included below: Echoing Seth's sentiment, but wanted to be sure your post was read by anyone who might have missed it. I truly don't have the time right now to pen the kind of response I wanted to after reading those state apologist diatribes. Upon reading your reply below, I see you have it covered (and you made your point without the salty language I may have used. Heh.) +1, +1, +1... -Shelley
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On 07/21/2015 03:15 AM, Stephen D. Williams wrote:
On 7/20/15 10:32 PM, Juan wrote:
On Mon, 20 Jul 2015 21:36:57 -0700 "Stephen D. Williams" <sdw@lig.net> wrote:
[...]
Are you saying the pentagon is good and useful?
The Pentagon et al are protecting a large portion of the world from being overrun. Nobody else will do it.
And all along I thought, the sooner the Pentagon et al stood down and let the world be overrun, the better for the human race. Better in every measurable way, except for the net worth and sovereign power of the wealthy and powerful gangs that sponsor and direct those organizations.
Politicians are morally responsible. The military are morally and materially responsible.
Are police always bad too?
Last I heard, police forces were not dispatched to cross borders and kill large numbers of people, to advance the financial agendas of some few thousands of the folks back home. When the police do what the military does, they become criminals even by the definition of the laws enacted by their own masters.
Anyone who deliberately and for personal gain participates in mass murder might be considered "bad." I prefer to think of them as ignorant and disinformed, aside from a minority among them who are psychopathic and in need of minders.
... Is everyone from the CIA scumbags by definition? Yes.
Whatever you gotta believe. Most of their job is to understand the world, publishing both a nice public database and the presidential daily brief (today's news). And to consult with the President as need so that hopefully reasonably intelligent decisions are made, but that depends on the intelligence of the current president.
So... If I understand this correctly, the CIA, a clandestine U.S. military service, is in the business of persuading Presidents, elected to embody the will of the People, to their way of thinking. Come to think of it, their charter implicity says so. I guess we should have dumped them when we had the chance. IIRC a President once said he was going do just that, too bad somebody shot him.
Every corporate entity needs intelligence to function. How many need a department to promote, codify and implement torture as a psychological weapon? How many need a department that arms, trains and directs gangs of killers to put inconvenient market competitors out of business, and take over their shops? How many need a department to set up and run major drug smuggling operations, to fund other violent criminal enterprises off the books ?
I try not to go around calling people "scumbags" and come to think of it, I succeed. But there's no denying that working for the CIA in any capacity imparts a certain taint, given that it has been a criminal enterprise more or less since its inception and shows no signs of meaningful reform. By "criminal" I mean, per any common sense definition that does not duck the issue by asserting that certain functions of State are by definition "above the law" due to some existential necessity. A MAFIA bookkeeper who always does an honest day's work and never hurts anybody is not a criminal, righ t?
What's your alternative to all of these things? If you really are into security in any sense, you should be able to explain what security exposures moderating or eliminating those entities would cause and what you would advocate to replace them. Are you talking about the US military? And FBI, CIA, State, Google, etc.
Practical alternatives to endemic, high dollar institutional violence are limited by the inherent nature of the institutions that carry it out: They exist to impose the will of their masters on whole societies. They defeat their masters' specified enemies by any means necessary, which covers a spectrum from propaganda through deception, bribery and terrorism to the industrialized mass murder we call warfare. Try to stop them; if you show signs of success, their masters will direct them to neutralize YOU by any means necessary.
As things stand, we don't have enough volunteers to shut down the killing machine by direct intervention. If and when we do, the emergent organizations that make it possible will also play key roles in developing long term solutions for international conflicts.
As a practical matter, one must do what one can to stop the bleeding; such efforts tend to be contagious, and we have ways of spreading that contagion. It starts with telling the truth. Opportunities to do that keep coming faster and faster.
I'm offended in various ways by a lot of what happened in the past, often in organizations like DOJ, FBI, etc. that should have known better. Should they? Looks like you don't know what government is. Wha?
Most people don't know what government is, because those who govern use a very different definition than the ones the governed are taught: State sovereignty is the power to rob, kidnap and kill withing a given territorial boundary, and to defend these powers as one's exclusive prerogative.
Anarchists are consistently depicted as violent lunatics opposed to any form of social order. The idea that government is based on the consent of the governed is all well and good in a civics class, but God forbid someone should try to actually implement that fine theory by withdrawing their consent from particular incarnations and/or functions of government.
Worthless murdering scumbags are 'respectable' people and not 'fundamentally evil'. Sure. Maybe they are 'accidentally' evil?
DOJ, Treasury, State, HHS, etc. are filled with worthless murdering scumbags?
I would not say so, but broadly speaking, they are directed by political appointees who, to varying extents, run them as criminal enterprises. Criminal, even by the very liberal and tolerant standards set by the State that employs them.
There are certain people, Marines et al, who are trained to be very lethal. Sucks to need that, but being anything less than the strongest & baddest isn't an option for the US. They are concentrated, supposed to be carefully deployed and directed. Create people like that from the subset of people who want to be like that and a few are going to go off the rails occasionally. That's a bummer, and needs to be constantly protected against, but there's no obvious alternative.
To me, the alternatives are painfully obvious. Step one in a real "war against terror" is to stop doing terrorism. Step one in defending a country's "way of life" is to invest in its human and industrial infrastructure. It certainly makes no sense to indulge in multi-trillion dollar tax and debt funded economic bonfires that produce nothing but paychecks, stock dividends and the odd few million dead bodies and refugees here and there.
The US is the least imperialist top superpower that ever existed. Still not perfect, but better than all the rest.
That's kind of like advertising oneself as the kindest, most considerate serial killer presently at large.
It doesn't take a lifetime of study or exceptional brain power to recognize gross offenses to the values that define human beings as social animals fit to walk the Earth. It does take a lifetime of study and exceptional brain power, on the part of a whole managerial class, to direct that society to commit such offenses and take them for granted as regrettable necessities.
The survival value of human intelligence has not been satisfactorily demonstrated. Its hazards are becoming more obvious every day.
:o/
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