[extropy-chat] Rational force?

[Samantha Atkins]

On Sun, 2006-12-10 at 20:33 -0800, Lee Corbin wrote:
> Right, Mike, but your "brutes" not swayed by either marketing or *any*
> other civilized expedient. Woe be unto him who tries negotiating in any
> civilized fashion with them.
> 
> The Geneva Convention, for example, was expressedly designed to
> rely upon the civilized conventions of modern advanced nations. It's
> the ultimate in foolhardiness for highly civilized nations to abide by it
> when the brutes are cutting people's heads off in the most painful,
> barbaric, and horrific manner that they can devise.
> 

Do you then find common cause with those in the US who justify torture,
detention without charges, arraignment or trial of all we simply call
"enemy combatand" or "suspected terrorist" with no burden of proof
required?


> This has always been a fatal flaw in the Western psyche and in Western
> traditions. Barbaric mobsters were able to take over many neighborhoods
> in Chicago and New York in the 1920s and 30s simply because the
> civilized law-abiding people of Illinois and New York State could not
> understand that the circumstances were no longer as the American founders
> assumed.
> 

You mean back when the government was so barbaric as to foist the
Prohibition on the people?  This notion that liberty and rights should
disappear because somehow things are like in the times of the founders
shows a singular lack of understanding of liberty imho.


> San Francisco, on the other hand, behaved much more appropriately in
> 1850 when lawless and uncivilized men subborned the legal process, 
> bribing officials, judges, juries and so on in a manner to be reenacted by
> Al Capone and his ilk.  But the people of San Francisco would have none
> of it, and mounted the finest vigilante effort I know of. They arose en masse,
> rounded up the perpetrators, gave them quick but fair trials with no appeal,
> and hung most of them forthwith. And civilization was restored.
> 

I would be damn careful what I call good if I were you.  You could
someday end up on the wrong end of such means.

> The "brutes" had to be hanged or shot, you understand. And if Thomas thinks
> that this is "brutal", then let him cheer as society crumbles in south central Los
> Angeles and other places---all quite legally.  Let the gangs rule:  many
> people, probably including Thomas, prefer gangs like those of Al Capone
> or the Cribs to be in control, to the "brutal" repression of such that is
> necessary by civlized men.
> 

Stop the War on some drugs and much of the problem will lessen
considerably. 

> All that seems to matter to some people is that their own government play
> by all the niceties, no matter what ultimate loathsome consequences obtain, 
> and that their own hands remain lily-white. 
> 

It is our own freedoms from unfettered government evils that we protect
not the lily whiteness of our hands.  Do you not understand that?


> Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.
> 

Evil triumphs when people forget about freedom from fear of government
power and consider freedom and civil rights as optional niceties.

- samantha


> Lee
> 
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