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Well yeah. It's a territory next to India, which is short on water, has a huge population and the atomic bomb. So it was always about who would get it first wit

Well yeah. It's a territory next to India, which is short on water, has a huge population and the atomic bomb. So it was always about who would get it first without getting busted.

musage 9y ago
> it was always about who would get it first without getting busted The question is, to what kind of person, and how would they realize they have been busted? Eichmann demonstrated that even sentencing and hanging someone doesn't necessarily make them understand what they've been sentenced for and why they must hang. What is left is to weigh the guilt of judging someone without the mental capacity to understand what is going on, and the guilt of leaving them destroy and kill yet others. It's not fully satisfactory either way, that boat kinda sailed. > [Q: Isn't there a certain calculus that someone who is sitting in the shoes of a Condoleezza Rice can make, that they're responsible for the best outcome for American citizens, and there's an upside of going into Iraq which is we get one of the greatest material possessions in world's history, and there're downsides which are: we upset the international community, and maybe there's more terrorism. Couldn't you envision a calculus where they say, sure, that's the reason, and it's a good reason, let's do it. What's the flaw in the calculus?] > Oh, I think that's exactly their calculus. But then we ought to just be honest and say, "Look, we're a bunch of Nazis." So fine, let's just drop all the discussion, we save a lot of trees, we can throw out the newspapers and most of the scholarly literature, and just come out, state it straight, and tell the truth: we'll do whatever we want because we think we're gonna gain by it. And incidently, it's not American citizens who'll gain. They don't gain by this. It's narrow sectors of domestic power that the administration is serving with quite unusual dedication... -- Noam Chomsky, Talk titled "Why Iraq?" at Harvard University, November 4, 2002 Same shit, different contintent.

Well yeah. It's a territory next to India, which is short on water, has a huge population and the atomic bomb. So it was always about who would get it first without getting busted.

musage 9y ago

> it was always about who would get it first without getting busted The question is, to what kind of person, and how would they realize they have been busted? Eichmann demonstrated that even sentencing and hanging someone doesn't necessarily make them understand what they've been sentenced for and why they must hang. What is left is to weigh the guilt of judging someone without the mental capacity to understand what is going on, and the guilt of leaving them destroy and kill yet others. It's not fully satisfactory either way, that boat kinda sailed. > [Q: Isn't there a certain calculus that someone who is sitting in the shoes of a Condoleezza Rice can make, that they're responsible for the best outcome for American citizens, and there's an upside of going into Iraq which is we get one of the greatest material possessions in world's history, and there're downsides which are: we upset the international community, and maybe there's more terrorism. Couldn't you envision a calculus where they say, sure, that's the reason, and it's a good reason, let's do it. What's the flaw in the calculus?] > Oh, I think that's exactly their calculus. But then we ought to just be honest and say, "Look, we're a bunch of Nazis." So fine, let's just drop all the discussion, we save a lot of trees, we can throw out the newspapers and most of the scholarly literature, and just come out, state it straight, and tell the truth: we'll do whatever we want because we think we're gonna gain by it. And incidently, it's not American citizens who'll gain. They don't gain by this. It's narrow sectors of domestic power that the administration is serving with quite unusual dedication... -- Noam Chomsky, Talk titled "Why Iraq?" at Harvard University, November 4, 2002 Same shit, different contintent.