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Friday, March 28, 2003 |
Morally responsible people cannot suspend their consciences in time of war
This from a self-described right winger (the column is called Hard Right):
But it is one thing to support the troops, and another to give a blank check to a particular administration. What is the difference, morally speaking, between the statement “I support the troops, no matter what the cause and no matter how the war is conducted” and “I was only following orders”? Morally responsible people cannot suspend their consciences in time of war, and, if the United States decided to use poison gas or nuclear weapons against the people of Iraq, moral people would be obliged to speak out; and if there are moral Americans who agree with the Pope in believing that the United States is not justified in its war against Iraq, then they have the right and obligation to speak their minds--within the limits of civility and loyalty.
...I do not believe that the government of the United States has just cause to invade Iraq, and I believe strongly, for reasons that I and other Chronicles editors have previously stated in print, that the long-term result of this war will be an increase of Islamic terrorism against the United States, the solidification of Arabic hatred of our ally Israel, and the formation of anti-American alliances among France, Germany, Belgium, Russia, China, and who knows how many other important states. In the months leading up to the war, upon which George Bush resolved absolutely at least a year ago, which his advisors urged upon him shortly after the election, and which the neoconservatives claim to have decided upon before the end of 1997, we have spoken out forcefully against what we believed then and still believe to be a wrongheaded policy. Now that the war has come, and some of our predictions are already coming true (though the American media is not, for the most part, covering the violent demonstrations taking place in the Islamic world, especially in Cairo), I am not prepared to retract my statements or, insofar as the future is concerned, to fall silent on the difficult issues that our nation faces. Silence, under such circumstances, would be quite properly interpreted as a display of cowardice and opportunism worthy of Arthur Vandenberg.
Nicely stated.
11:29:07 PM Permalink
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A List of Bush LIES on Iraq by Kelley Kramer
Here is a list of the serial lying from the Bush Regime about Iraq, including links to a cross section of all the news sources. [more]
[Craig's BookNotes]
Good thing for Dubya he doesn't lie about sex; then we'd have to investigate and impeach him! But snideness aside, the true is that good can't come on something built on a foundation of lies. If your heart and intentions are thruth, your actions and words follow the truth. If you don't follow the truth, you can only reap the conseqences if lies.
8:46:05 PM Permalink
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"There Is Nothing Conservative About War". writes Tory Peter "Yes, I'm Christopher's Brother" Hitchens in Britain's right-wing Spectator. The idea that naked force can create human freedom is itself a left-wing idea. Even more socialist are the war faction’s contempt for the sovereignty of nations and their unashamed belief that ends justify means. No wonder that the war’s hottest-eyed supporters on both sides of the Atlantic... [No War Blog]
There's nothing conservative (compassionate or otherwise) about the current regime in Washington. From the monstrous deficit it's raising, to the growth of government, its contempt for of civil liberties, its assumption of power in the hands of the presidence, its fighting to squander natural resources, and on and on, it's not a conservative government, but a big-government, paranoid regime, ruled by what it thinks will get it elected next time and solidify its power. It's a parody of true conservatism.
8:36:38 PM Permalink
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It's nothing, really.... An amusing tale that begins: In March, 1999, a man living in Kandos (near Mudgee in NSW) received a bill for his as yet unused gas line stating that he owed $0.00. He ignored it and threw it away. In April he received another bill and threw that one away too. Is over in Jim O'Halloran's weblog. That's almost as good as the story about the guy who cashed a junk mail check and got away with it.... [Jeremy Zawodny's blog]
A great story, and the one at the same post about the guy who deposited a $95,000 junk check is great, too.
2:02:44 PM Permalink
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He's Sick All Right
Henry Norr gets the honor of being declared sick today by the Online Wall Street Journal. They reprint this paragraph from Jim Romanesko's Media News under the headline "he's sick all right:"
San Francisco Chronicle technology columnist Henry Norr says he was suspended without pay after getting arrested in "a peaceful civil disobedience" against the war. "The offense the Chronicle is charging me with is falsifying my timecard, but this is a bogus, after-the-fact cover for an act of political retaliation and an attempt to intimidate other employees," Norr writes in an e-mail. "For Thursday, the day I spent in jail, I took a sick day. I did so because I was sick--heartsick over the beginning of the war, nauseated by the lies and the arrogance and the stupidity that led to it, and deeply depressed by the death and destruction it would bring."
I guess Henry wasn't being patriotically correct enough for the Journal.
I've known Henry for years; he edited me at MacWEEK and taught me a lot about wriiting, back when that's what I did. It's an outrage that the Chronicle would treat him this way; it's not as if he were a political writer becoming involved in his story. He's a technology writer, by the way exercising his constitutional rights as a citizen, in an arena where there's no conflict with his work.
1:38:55 PM Permalink
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Gary Hart's Blog
I'm excited to see Gary Hart's blog. I hope he keeps it up and can turn it into a real tool for consensus building in the important quest to defeat W in 2004. Dave Winer made a comment today about the lack of worthwhile opponents to W, and it seems that way today. But in 1991, it didn't seem likely that anyone could defeat Bush I the next year, either.
10:55:52 AM Permalink
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The non pareil Edward Tufte dissects a Boeing PowerPoint slide on the Challenger disaster. "Some tables are difficult to read because of the grid prisons surrounding the entries in the spreadsheet, and it is difficult to make comparisons of numbers across the table. Bullets lists are used throughout, with up to 5 levels of hierarchy on a single page of 10 or 12 lines. Consequently the reasoning is broken up into stupefying fragments both within and between the many slides." [Davos Newbies]
8:12:40 AM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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