When American armed forces working for warbotObama kill non-combatants in the Afghan theater, they are referred to in the press as NATO forces. MSNBC.com leads with the story that “A NATO airstrike in southern Afghanistan killed at least 33 civilians, the Afghan cabinet said Monday, an incident that is inflaming already heightened sensitivities over noncombatant casualties in the war.”
On the 15th, at least 10 people, including 5 children, were killed in Marja, with American rockets.
Face it, the forces might be deluding themselves that they are killing bad Taliban in Afghanistan, but they don’t really know who they are targeting. “NATO forces confirmed in a statement that its planes fired Sunday on what it believed was a group of insurgents in southern Uruzgan province on their way to attack a joint NATO-Afghan patrol.”
It turned out they were women and children.
On the other hand, the Israelis—in a spectacularly surgical operation—remove the blight of a terrorist from the face of the earth and the world, Israelis included, is fulminating.
So wrote Joseph Stack, the pilot of a Piper Cherokee plane, before he crashed into an office building in Austin, Texas, that housed IRS offices.
What transpires when a government says to a desperate citizen, vaguely conscious of his natural rights, “Your earnings are not exclusively your own; we have a claim on them, and our claim precedes yours; we will allow you to keep some of it, because we recognize your need, not your right; but whatever we grant you for yourself is for us to decide”?
What transpires when times get particularly tough. And they just take and take and take what’s not theirs to take. So Joseph Stack said, “Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different …”
However you slice it, there is no moral difference between a lone burglar who steals stuff he doesn’t own and an “organized society” that does the same. In a just society, the moral rules that apply to the individual must also apply to the collective. A society founded on natural rights must not finesse theft.
The founders intended for government to safeguard the natural rights of Americans. The 16th Amendment gave government a limitless lien on their property and, by extension, on their lives. Joseph Stack took his, in the hope of taking out some of them.
Update: Repetition is a theme on this blog. So I will cut-and-paste my last reply to the exact same moral equivalence the provocative, if repetitive, Myron has already advanced. How about coming at me with a new angle? I’m being made to go around in circles. Here goes from our last debate about anti-state violence:
MORAL/INTELLECTUAL EQUIVALENCE. Conflating the causes for which McVeigh, for example, committed his cruel crime against agents and family of an oppressive government with the causes of the “Unabomber, Hitler, Stalin,” is akin to conflating MY causes with those of Myron’s taxonomy of the evil, again the “Unabomber, Hitler, Stalin.”
What sort of moral relativism is this? What kind of messy thinking is this? The causes and theories of the Unabomber, Hitler, Stalin were wrong on their logic and facts; McVeigh’s causes and motivation, if not his deeds, were right. What’s so hard about that?
Stack is justified in his anger against the shakedown agency and its agents who partake in pillaging their countrymen. He’s wrong to try and kill them. I feel so lame saying this, but it’s the safe thing to say. Incidentally, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC was more sympathetic than Fox’s statists on steroids.
So wrote Joseph Stack, the pilot of a Piper Cherokee plane, before he crashed into an office building in Austin, Texas, that housed IRS offices.
What transpires when a government says to a desperate citizen, vaguely conscious of his natural rights, “Your earnings are not exclusively your own; we have a claim on them, and our claim precedes yours; we will allow you to keep some of it, because we recognize your need, not your right; but whatever we grant you for yourself is for us to decide”?
What transpires when times get particularly tough. And they just take and take and take what’s not theirs to take. So Joseph Stack said, “Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different …”
However you slice it, there is no moral difference between a lone burglar who steals stuff he doesn’t own and an “organized society” that does the same. In a just society, the moral rules that apply to the individual must also apply to the collective. A society founded on natural rights must not finesse theft.
The founders intended for government to safeguard the natural rights of Americans. The 16th Amendment gave government a limitless lien on their property and, by extension, on their lives. Joseph Stack took his, in the hope of taking out some of them.
Update: Repetition is a theme on this blog. So I will cut-and-paste my last reply to the exact same moral equivalence the provocative, if repetitive, Myron has already advanced. How about coming at me with a new angle? I’m being made to go around in circles. Here goes from our last debate about anti-state violence:
MORAL/INTELLECTUAL EQUIVALENCE. Conflating the causes for which McVeigh, for example, committed his cruel crime against agents and family of an oppressive government with the causes of the “Unabomber, Hitler, Stalin,” is akin to conflating MY causes with those of Myron’s taxonomy of the evil, again the “Unabomber, Hitler, Stalin.”
What sort of moral relativism is this? What kind of messy thinking is this? The causes and theories of the Unabomber, Hitler, Stalin were wrong on their logic and facts; McVeigh’s causes and motivation, if not his deeds, were right. What’s so hard about that?
Stack is justified in his anger against the shakedown agency and its agents who partake in pillaging their countrymen. He’s wrong to try and kill them. I feel so lame saying this, but it’s the safe thing to say. Incidentally, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC was more sympathetic than Fox’s statists on steroids.
It’s official. Glenn Beck gets his own category/archive on Barely A Blog. He deserves it. In addition to his other attributes—you can now track my analysis of Beck’s progression as a force for liberty by clicking on the BAB Beck category—he is the only conservative, mainstream TV commentator to treat Bush with the contempt he reserves for Obama.
The tirade against “W” begins 3 minutes or so into the broadcast.
“Debt, spending; this was insane what G. W. Bush was doing. Spending us into oblivion. National security. How about you declare a war and fight to win? How about you secure our borders? … Some people wanted global warming. The rest of us wanted us out of the Middle East; use our own energy. The Republicans had a crack at it, but what did we get? GB, in his last year, lost 3 million jobs. Debt. Spending: How about $4.9 trillion? He increased discretionary spending almost 50 percent. Fiscal year 2004 and fiscal year 2000: Bush almost spent double than President Clinton. And who can forget the $550 billion prescription drug fiasco? He abandoned the free-market system to save it with a $700 billion TARP slush fund. … The border was left wide open. Corruption was rife. Oh, and global warming: the biggest schemes of all times not only supported by Republicans, but by leading Republicans. Lindsey Graham,Tim Pawlenty,John McCain. All pro cap-and-trade.
One of the reasons a volume like The Real Lincoln is so sound is that it does NOT refute historical facts; most historians agree about what transpired during the War of Northern Aggression; it’s the interpretation of these fact.
With Diablo it boils down to deciding matters of natural law: did the states create the union or vice versa (dah Diablo)? Was secession legitimate” Is it right to sic brother on brother so as to coerce the one to remain with the other? Suspend the Bill or Right?
The “Church of Lincoln” says “Yes” to all; we who are with liberty say NO.
A reminder that I’m not adjudicating Lincoln in this post; but Beck’s progress toward the founders’ freedoms. It’s one step forward, two steps back with Beck.
“We have a solemn [negative] duty not to violate the rights of foreigners everywhere to life, liberty, and property. But we have no duty to uphold their rights. Why? Because (supposedly) upholding the negative rights of the world’s citizens involves compromising the negative liberties of Americans—their lives, liberties, and livelihoods. The classical liberal government’s duty is to its own citizens, first.”
Update III (Feb. 18): This post went off-topic, because some would rather rehash their convictions despite the answers provided. So, in reply to,”Do you believe those 500 million people form a serious military threat against which we must defend ourselves?”
For one, there are about 1 billion Muslims in the world. In the previous post, I replied to the same question. I’m reproducing the update:
Polls show a respectable percentage of Muslims condone Jihadi pursuits (search for some fresh data; I like those). If equaled by as many Jews and Christians, liberals and libertarians and elements on the American Right always helping to make the “Islamikazes'” case would protest as loud as you lot squealed over placing a bug in Abu Zubaydah’s cage. Hence the issue of fifth-column immigrants.
Back in 2005, “a leaked Whitehall dossier revealed that affluent, middle-class, British-born Muslims were signing up to Al-Qaida in droves. Translated into official speak by Timesonline, only ‘3,000 British-born or British-based people have passed through Osama Bin Laden’s training camps.’
And if that doesn’t allay unwarranted fears, ‘Intelligence indicates that the number of British Muslims actively engaged in terrorist activity, whether at home or abroad or supporting such activity, is extremely small and estimated at less than 1%.'”
In other words, 16,000 homicidal sleepers are loose in England!
These figures, of course, probably replicable in the US, are statistically significant—stupendously so—given the barbarism they portend. It is over this sort of astoundingly consequential number that our liberal-minded readers are jumping for joy.
