deltona: i'm sorry but i really do not see anything like a coherent defense of the war debacle in your posts--i see a number of pretty meaningless swipes--the "monday morning quarterback" one is particularly delightful in that it would effectively rule out any criticism whatsoever of this or any other administration--and that fits into the tenor of your posts in general, which seems little more than an extended justification for the following of orders.
the last bit in your post 66 even goes so far as to mount a nuremburg defense for the commission of war crimes--the argument is that you (hypothetically speaking, one would hope) would exempt yourself from asking rudimentary questions about right and wrong of a particulr action because you were simply following orders.
this is what is called compartmentalization--the separation of actions from consequences justified via a conception of one's professional duty--which leads to the erasure of any and all ethical questions, when taken to the limit, and is the kind of thinking that enabled perfectly nice people in everyday life who happened to find themselves administering a genocide in germany to see no particular problem with what they were doing. ethical questions were for higher-ups. we were just following orders. the problem is that everyone said the same thing: ethical questions were always for higher-ups, even when there wern't any. and everyone was just following orders.
it is alarming to see this kind of separation working in your posts, particularly given your affection for talking army-like in your posts. i assume that you have or have had some intimate contact with the military then. i would hope that this kind of compartmentalized thinking is not general in that context--if it is, that would explain many of the lovely actions carried out by folk who were simply following orders--you know, those nice folk in the basement of an old iraqi prison, the guys who saw that nice sign "no blood no foul" before they would torture some iraqi---who was obviously, following the degenerate legal logic of the bush administration, be guilty because he was arrested.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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