Rebecca West

Cosa Nostra enforced its will by force and violence. It broke the legs and heads of debtors running late on the “vigorish” due to their loansharks; it burned down buildings to terrorize its victims; it corrupted unions to enforce its edicts and ruined businessmen to coerce their unwilling co-operation. Men in the crime families, who broke the code of omerta or silence, were murdered without compunction. Informers, or rats as they were known, were slaughtered as a matter of course — a dead canary stuffed down their throat. A man obsessed with greed would die, and every orifice in his body would be stuffed with money as a warning to others. Someone who dipped into the Mob’s money would be found dead with his hands chopped off. Gigolos who indulged in extramarital affairs with the wives or girl friends of “wise guys” would be left dead, brutally mutilated, their genitals stuffed down their throat. When they left a message, Cosa Nostra did so in the knowledge that it would act as a deterrent to most potential transgressors.

http://www.crimelibrary.com/gangsters_outlaws/family_epics/lucchese3/1.html

A $2,000,000 missile to neutralize thirty dire threats supposedly sitting in one place is one of the unstated cryptotypes. But cheaper rockets or bombs and air strikes are also there, as are spraying and praying in which a lot of innocent bystanders become the enemy only after they are killed.

So part of the hypothetical as phrased is the hidden message–”Using tool X, which causes civilian casualties predictable in amount y, is morally justified”.

Why worry?

How about if they all could be more effectively killed with a trenching tool?

But there are other hidden types–that anything is precisely predictable, including civilian casualties.

Who are the objective statisticians cross-referencing claims in the past with the present, and investigating the predictability of the predictability?

Finally, who the hell is “Osama bin Ladin” and why is he used in the hypothetical at all?

Ah, I see–”the incarnation of evil” and the “direst of dire threats.”

In next week’s hypothetical will it be an Iranian?

Finally, stated functorially, where comes the predictability of, “if Z is allowed to continue to exist and plan, horrible event E, which is preventable, will happen. Can we kill a few score kids to prevent E and remain ‘ethical’?”

And what is the predictability of missing Z, not stopping E, and killing innocent kids in amount y anyway?

By the time Air Force pilots finish their training do you think they are about to enquire whether any of the numbers they are given to salve their consciences, if they have one, are valid.

How about this hyptothetical–instead of killing y amount of what is implied are subhuman wog civilian children, rather to take out Incarnation of Evil Z will kill 1,000 friendlies, including Air Force pilots, and all their family and friends?

Worthless hypotheticals like this have been popular since WWII.

The ancients did it better, and mainly for entertainment, which also included the absurdities of lawyers.

Did Free Fire Zones lose the “war” in Vietnam? The North Vietnamese likely had no trouble seeing exactly why that might have been true. The US military brass are still sitting in darkness covering their own moronic rearends with a fully inserted digit of what they happen to have at hand.

Is it even imaginable these days that a nation might have a huge and useless technological military establishment that no longer can be used in large part because using it loses wars?

Only the Marxists, who at their best are cutting and unequaled political, social, and economic critics, saw through him quickly.

Nor does one have to be a Marxist to say or recognize that.

What makes Strauss and his followers so dangerous and effective in their incompetence is that he has a dialectic, as Xenos, for example, recognizes.

Moreover, this dialectic mimics and matches the traditional American “religious” pathology in several important ways.

What Xenos does not recognize, or, if he does, only implies, is that the dialectic is more or less completely presentist, and precisely tailored for popular American consumption and manipulation.

Phrased this way the larger context also takes on significance.

The Straussian dialectic is synchronic where the Hegelian dialectic is diachronic.

There lies another correspondence with Hitler and the Nazis.

It also explains, in a roundabout fashion admittedly, how someone like Mullen, whether he has read a word or Strauss or not, is so casual in defining a United States whose “Reich” will protect “Israel” for a millennium.

As some of the contributors to antiwar seem to understand, the lunatics are in charge of the asylum.

What does it mean, however, to realize your political structure is in the hands of certified madmen?

How is that someone like Congressman Paul is not sufficiently a Constitutionalist to see that his strongest and best response at this moment is both structural and existential–to join Wexler and Kucinich and to lead other Republicans into joining similarly minded Democrats to impeach Cheney immediately?

Has Paul in fact been bought off? Or was he only play-acting with the Constitution to begin with? Does he have a hidden agenda? Is he a lot less intelligent than some of his supporters take him for?

Is he being blackmailed? No honest man can be blackmailed.

I will leave all that to the Paulists to try to answer.

To date, all they have accomplished so far politically, is to defuse and confuse what began as a strong antiwar movement, first with the election of Democrats to Congress, second with the presidential campaign.

It is no defense to say that many of the Democrats, led or intimidated by Pelosi, seem to have gone the same route.

Paul Craig Roberts, for one, and whatever one thinks of his political attitudes, or even his economic program, saw all this early and very presciently, and had the courage to stand up and say it.

Not many seem to be listening to him.

Without a Constitution there is no Constitution in common.

Without a Constitution in common, and as the basis for further dialogue if only in the matter of limits, or lack of limits, according to which the American political process unfolds, there is really very little to talk about.

http://www.logosjournal.com/xenos.htm

Bush’s military adventure also will have unintended consequences….

[Paul Craig Roberts November 25, 2003]

[Jerusalem Post]

Send in the “special ops/special forces” ground teams that we hear so much praise about and “surgically remove” (to borrow a popular piece of Pentagonese) the high-profile targets with minimal “collateral” casualties (even if there were “collateral” casualties from such a raid, they would be considerably fewer in number than in the aftermath of an air attack). Let the Pentagon put its money where its mouth is. Why on earth would offensive air power even be needed at all in this hypothetical situation?