perfidy

I bow down to all you badass motherf@#$@rs. The kick'em in the teeth crowd; the take-no-shit crowd; the make-me-a-sandwich boys. You own the playground. You can tape signs on the backs of the nerds.

Then you grow up. You work in a gas station. And the nerd working in corporate fires your ass.

Den Beste gives us a marvelous example of true extremism -- the casual contemplation of nuclear genocide to rid ourselves of a tiny, nasty minority within a population with which we are currently somewhat adversarial. I find his words to be a smooth, oily kind of evil. This rush to judgement, rush to the end-game...it's an unnecessary exercise of brinksmanship and absolutism.

Is this the point at which I need to reassert myself as a card-carrying citizen of whatever democracy? Say a few things to earn respect? Boo-ya. Capitalism kicks ass. Taxes suck! I support the troops! I like pancakes and Samurai Jack. That's the limit of rote platitudes I can muster, in this moment.

I have said repeatedly that what the Arabs need to fear the most is that we begin to think about them the way they (or their extremes) think about us. But what do they really think about us? Would you kill Savas, the generous and kind Arab who showed me Istanbul? Because when you guys talk about your armies and your shiny red buttons, and how very much you'd like to push them, but only if somebody absolutely makes you do it.

Exactly how close do you all think we are, to the brink? Are we one step removed from annihilation?

We've been there for forty years, and the extremists had nothing to do with it. We put ourselves there. We built the technology; we built it, and now they've come, in the night. But we can't put the jack back in the box. It doesn't work that way.

There are two essential positions vis-a-vis the terrorists/extremists in this world. You can either do something to get'em to love us, or you can try to get'em to fear us.

Den Beste and rest of the button pushers sure do definitely want them to fear us. Never mind the cost of such an action to our souls, the very heart of what makes our countries fundamentally better. We try to do the right thing.

Is there not a 40 year object lesson in Israel right now that teaches us about this particular endgame? It leads nowhere. If we are unwilling to engage a final (read: death to them all) solution, a population cannot be suppressed through fear and violence. It only incites more violence and hatred. Like a bully in a playground, the blows rain down on someone who can't fight back, won't fight back. And then a gun shows up in the hands of the victim, and someone dies, and then the cycle starts again...the history of the world is written in these small cycles, and expanded to the larger canvas of civilizations.

I refuse to accept the playground. There are other ways. We can grow up, grow out of this. Hatred can be eased, when we recognize it on both sides for what it is.

Those in the center must find the strength to reject attempts at domination by the extremists.

This has been a circuitous route to "Idiotarianism"...but here's the point: You cannot eliminate terrorism through force. If you think it can be done through force, you are an idiot. Thousands of years of human history tell us, with exacting clarity that in any population there are misfits, there are malcontents, and there are those who are insane. The only defense we have against these sad souls is a population that doesn't want them around. People are the early warning system.

If America had ten Timothy McVeighs, and they went to Moscow, they rented ten white vans, bought twenty tons of fertilizer, and blew holes in buildings, killing a few thousand Russians, we'd have a number of people in this country who'd say "good riddance". A Russian Den Beste might push his button at that point, which would be idiotic.

Technology is dangerous. I get that, deeply and fundamentally. It places more and more power into the hands of fewer and fewer people, as every year goes by. There is no way to stop it. Suitcase nukes, an aerosol of death, radioactive dust...and in the future, we may have nuclear-powered nanites carrying tiny bladders of vile poison deep into the heart of the enemy, whoever that is.

When the next destructive wonder comes along, will you play the same risk analysis game? Will you decide that the newest technology wonder is too dangerous for others to have, and that it requires a pre-emptive strike? If we don't push our button, maybe we won't get the chance...and God won't give us 50 points at the Pearly Gates for having "smited enemies when we had the damn chance."

Holy Christ, I'm one of the pansy peaceniks, or something. I mean, why would God have given the US an Army if he didn't intend for it to be used?

Commenter Ben informs us: So the left will become more frustrated, radicalized, and dangerous. You shoot mad dogs. You may not like it, but you really have no choice. Either shoot the mad dogs, or let them destroy you and your family, your friends, and your nation.

With that paragraph I think we've arrived at the reason why "Idiotarian" bothers me so much. It's a big, obvious hook on which the narrow-minded, vicious hard right can hang anything or anyone they don't understand or don't like. It's a parrot-talk word. It cheapens the intellectual underpinnings of the true conservative and re-renders genuine argument into lead-based pablum. It's a single-color paintbrush in a multi-color world.

Right now there are tens of thousands of relatives of thousands of newly dead Iraqis who have developed a permanent hatred of the US. A significant chunk of that emotion is generated by the right-wing rhetorical chaining of 9/11 to Iraq; the perception is that they're being killed in retribution for something that they didn't do. I can't think of a better way to piss people off than that.

I know how the average American would react if he was convicted of something he didn't do. He'd scream bloody murder, vow revenge, and find a way to get back at whoever put him there. Why expect people in other countries to be any different?

Maybe they're on 3/5 of a person, per person, over there. Maybe it's less.

Yes, the rambling needs to stop. Here's one last bit of nasty perspective:

Den Beste says that "what we're trying to do in Iraq seems to be the only way to keep the body count in this war from making WWII look small". Let's go horrible, terrible-case and assume a nuke in terrorist hands...a crude suitcase model will do.

Deaths in Hiroshima: 65,000 in the first four months. That's about what would happen in a modern city, too, with a nuke of comparable size, within a factor of two or three.

Deaths in World War II: Around 50 MILLION.

Why don't we lay off on the comparisons between Al Qaeda and WWII, ok? It's BS. The only thing that could possibly generate truly high and horrific deaths are biologicals, which are going to be substantially easier to work with in the future than nukes. It's probably a bad time to "accidentally" kill an Arab microbiologist's son.

Al Qaeda are criminals. You don't nuke a neighborhood because it produces criminals. You don't walk into the neighborhood and shoot randomly, unless you don't think humans live in the neighborhood. Don't be suprised if the feeling is mutual, then..

This would be a great time for Buckethead to get a word in edgewise, and demonstrate to me just how far out of my tree I have managed to get myself.