an ominous comment

[Shelley]

On July 21, 2015 2:35:23 AM Steve Kinney <admin at 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 at 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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