When I used a stray tweet last Friday to illustrate a point about liberalism’s difficulties in relation to any discussion of drone warfare, I did not anticipate anything quite like the blogging performance that the tweeter, Adam Kotsko, would put in over the next couple of days.
First, Kotsko published a post on the Obama drone warfare/assassination policy under the title “Is hypocrisy to be preferred?” that is almost pugnaciously self-contradictory and proudly infirm, in the manner somewhat of a satire, a kind of “moral modest proposal.” Yet his conduct during the ensuing comment thread seemed to confirm that he really means it – actually means his hypocrisy – a mode of expression that perhaps ought to be impossible, but that, it turns out, may not be if you are open about it.
As I proceed in this post, I will link back to Kotsko’s, but I am appending the entirety of “Is hypocrisy to be preferred?” along with its comment thread – for the usual archival reasons, also to save readers from having to click back and forth between here and there, but mostly because I would not be surprised if, perhaps in an access of self-reflection, Kotsko ends up trashing “the evidence.” Of course, if he re-opens the thread, that would also demonstrate a certain consistency, or consistent inconsistency: As one commenter recognized relatively early on (Comment #16 of 37), Kotsko with his positive consideration and evident practice of what can be called the “not very noble lie” has entered a twilight zone of unpredictability, of sheer irresponsibility and inconsequence, in regard to his blogging methods as well as his political utterances.
My own contributions begin at comment #6 in the thread. Some readers may recognize familiar themes from my blogging condensed for purposes of discussion. Kotsko responds first with a crude insult which may have been intended to pick up on a piece from the Onion he had linked earlier, and which he then follows up with an apparent offer of discussion. My next comment (#9) receives another two-part response, first with another insult joined to an apparent statement of banning, then with a parenthetical remark informing other participants that my comments thusfar were being allowed to appear at all only as a kind of object lesson:
(I only let CK’s first comment through in case anyone was skeptical that people were defending Obama’s policy. Now it’s an interesting experiment to see if there are any lurkers out there who are angrier at me for my tone than they are at CK for advocating US imperialism!)
I will leave it to the unusually interested and enterprising reader to determine and explain what in either of my comments (#6, #9) could justly be associated with “advocating US imperialism!” In the meantime, against Kotsko’s stated intentions, other commenters had been responding to my comments (as well as to each other’s, of course) with varying degrees of thoughtfulness, interest, and even some sympathy, leading Kotsko as blogger-moderator to reverse himself, and to promise that I would be able to comment thenceforward “without fear.”
That fear would be of working up a new comment, hitting “submit,” and then discovering that I had completely wasted my time, since my words would not be “let through” after all. And just this feeling of abject terror was justified today, when I wrote a response to Kotsko’s own statement of a political position, but then discovered, when I hit “submit,” that he had decided to close the thread. Clearly, we commenters had fulfilled his low expectations. No longer content with insulting me alone, he chose to extend his judgment to all of his commenters (#37):
This is one of the worst comment threads in human history. I’m shutting it down.
This verdict would seem to extend even to himself, presumably, though, to be fair, the value of taking responsibility for one’s own ideas and actions is not, as we see from the top post down, something Mr. Kotsko supports consistently. Nor is, as we have noted, consistency.
Ironically, and yet consistently, and therefore contradictorily, and therefore all the more ironically and consistently – and so on – my would-have-been Comment #38 took a late turn or resort by Kotsko to the responsibly political on its face. I refer initially to his comment #36 – though the words quoted in my parenthetical remark were from another commenter (#35):
Adam Kotsko – “repeal the AUMF and Patriot Act” is at least the beginning of an effort in the realm of debatable policy, rather than the assertion of a non-debatable value proposition (the latter having the tendency to put any comparison of alternatives, or argument in favor of such comparison, under headings like “pure war-mongering barbarism”).
In relationship to the drone policy specifically, you could even say, “One of the best reasons to repeal the AUMF and the Patriot Act is that this unnecessary war leads inevitably to horrors like the drone policy and its [insert agitational description here] – along with torture, torture by proxy, indefinite detention, creeping erosion of civil liberties, de-stabilization and war in countries around the world, generation of hatred and creation of more terrorists…” and so on.
[Note: Find way to add “drives a certain kind of academic intellectual quite mad” to list of horrors, but under a less trivial formulation.]
I’m not going to minimize the political dangers and difficulties that people like you might then encounter, including the possibility that someone who believes what you believe, that no military response to AQ was ever justified, is always at grave risk of losing the sympathy of the vast majority of those to be persuaded, but at least you, or your coalition, would be implicitly taking into account the potential for successfully ending the drone program while leaving the war footing in place, and getting something worse in exchange.
It goes without saying that you would still face the risk of losing the larger argument. Perhaps it’s less obvious that under certain contingencies, the ones that we may reasonably surmise loom large in the minds of policymakers, actually getting what you wanted – more or less immediate cancellation of the WOT, and not just in name – might have a very high cost as well.
I’ll close with a brief consideration of a passage that I had expected to get to earlier on this blog and in the general discussion of drone warfare, from Sacred Violence, a work by Paul W Kahn that I was just mentioning in connection to the Chris Hayes “heroism” controversy. Published in 2008, Sacred Violence mainly focuses on torture, but it is my strong and only getting stronger belief that Kahn’s thinking on torture is quite useful in relationship to the “presidential Hellfire” policy. At every mention of torture in the following statement, we can insert the words “drone assassination” or similar, adjusted for syntax and immediate context:
To most liberals, torture appears as a display of pure power: the torturer says to the victim, “I can do this to you, and there is nothing you can do about it.” This asymmetry of power is anathema to liberal morality, which insists on the equal dignity of and respect for every individual. From the liberal perspective, law has no place for torture and politics must be circumscribed by law. Most academic work today is little more than repeated demonstrations that torture violates the fundamental principles of liberalism. In truth, liberalism has nothing interesting to say about torture.
What Kahn might have meant with the above (or how he asked his readers to take it) deserves its own discussion, but I submit that Kotsko’s post and its world-historically worst thread already offer a preliminary explication, even though I suspect that Kotsko features himself an interesting radical rather than a mere liberal. It would seem that in this context, both liberals and radicals are “inconsequentialist.” The difference is that the liberals are committed to discussion (perhaps “at other blogs“) that goes nowhere, if without their knowledge; the radicals continually re-commit themselves to nothing – openly and consistently – that is, hypocritically.
[wpspoiler name=”Is hypocrisy to be preferred? – full post by Adam Kotsko at AN UND FÜR SICH, including comment thread, 2-3 June 2012″ closebtn=”Close”]
Is hypocrisy to be preferred?
Saturday, June 2, 2012 — Adam Kotsko
In the last decade or so, one has frequently heard people express the sentiment that it is somehow “better” for powerful politicians to openly proclaim the evil things they do, because “at least it’s out in the open.” In my mind, this is profoundly and disturbingly misguided, as our present experience with Obama’s “kill list” shows. When Bush openly claimed excessive powers, his party embraced that position and it became part of the mainstream debate. Similarly now with Obama’s “kill list” — there are now liberal pundits who are openly defending the indefensible, simply because it’s their guy doing it. I don’t think any rational person can argue that this course of events has improved the chances of rolling back the Bush-Obama anti-terror policies.
What’s nice about hypocrisy is that it at least maintains some point of connection with morality. It keeps moral principles — like “you don’t torture people” or “you don’t send killer robots to murder people on your sole say-so” — enshrined as norms, meaning that there’s some kind of leverage for change. Actually committing the crimes is bad enough, but publicly proclaiming them to be the right thing to do is an even more horrific crime, because it closes down the possibility that the crimes may end in the future.
We have a “natural experiment” before our eyes right now of how the “at least it’s out in the open” strategy worked with Bush and Obama — once moral norms are dethroned, it just leads to further degradation. I know that one might be uncomfortable with such slippery-slope arguments given how often they’re used by conservatives, but that really is how it works. We just happen to think the moral norms they lament weren’t truly moral in the first place — it’s good that we’re on a slippery slope toward greater freedom to divorce, greater acceptance of gays, etc. It’s not good that we’re on a slippery slope toward greater acceptance of torture and assassination. (I hope this isn’t too complicated for anyone.)
So in conclusion, if I had to choose between Obama having a top-secret kill list that he’d disavow in public and the current situation, I’d chose the top-secret kill list every time — because say what you will of hypocrisy, at least it leaves open the possibility of an ethos.
37 Responses to “Is hypocrisy to be preferred?”
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willmcjunkin (@willmcjunkin) Says:
Saturday, June 2, 2012 at 9:42 am Nowhere better to hide something than right out in the open, in plain sight. When it’s all openly acknowledged, that removes the jarring effect, the jolt that results from having to bringing something to light, because that’s already done in advance. The two layers of public and the concealed subterranean level become collapsed. There’s no longer the possibility to have real scandal.By the way, the creep of this logic seems to be advancing in other ways too. Note Romney’s nonchalance this week when it came to light that he had given hecklers the OK to disrupt his opponents’ rally speech, which he seemed to acknowledge with a shrug. To which my first reaction wasn’t “how awful that he would stoop to such tactics”, but was more an icky feeling that “we really shouldn’t be told that. Why aren’t you HIDING that?” That’s the difference between say a Nixon and Bush-Obama-Romney. Shame is becoming more and more rare, as Lacan might say. -
zunguzungu Says:
Saturday, June 2, 2012 at 9:49 am Worth adding that this process is still nothing close to democratic accountability, and the idea that this is “out in the open” is therefore itself a pernicious fiction. The fact that we know that a group of top secret dudes get together and decide who they will secretly kill is just the public announcement that the executive arbitrariness of the process will not be something they wil hide, but will, rather, flaunt. But there will be no oversight of it, which is the only important thing about its ostensible public character. -
Adam Kotsko Says:
Saturday, June 2, 2012 at 10:02 am I think this is the ultimate apotheosis of the Christian gut instinct that always prefers honesty to hypocrisy. If you think about it, the typical Christian apologetic move of “we’re just as terrible sinners as everyone else, but we openly admit it” is the archetype here.So I’m going to say that openly embracing the kill list policy is the best possible proof Obama is a sincere and devout Christian. -
CK MacLeod Says:
Saturday, June 2, 2012 at 11:09 am Setting aside the question of whether “you don’t send killer robots to murder people on your sole say-so” is in all crucial respects an accurate description of the current policy, is it obviously much worse than any other mode of warfare? Why? How about “you don’t send assassins to slit people’s throats” or “you don’t order planes to drop bombs that turn people into bits of meat” or “you don’t order your conscripts to mow down thousands of enemy conscripts with machine gun fire”? The focus on the novel means of applying lethal force seems arbitrary, a substitution of aesthetic reaction for analysis. Your problem might be with this war, or with war in general, or with any use of lethal force on behalf of sovereign power – assuming you actually have a coherent position. As I was just arguing in abbreviated form with zunguzungu/Mr. Bady on The Twitter, it seems to me that you and your political allies find it easier to agitate against the war-pornographic image of the killer drone and its pseudo-personalized victims than on behalf of a serious alternative policy – and by serious I mean at least as legitimate (and susceptible to legitimation), not to mention likely less harmful to children and other living things, than the current policy – which has been formed in part on the basis of prior rounds of left-liberal discomfort with “military necessity” as previously understood and concretely realized.The ostrich solution that the blogger ends up advocating fits nicely within the larger pattern of political and moral avoidance. So at least on that score, it’s consistent, even if it seems to add up to “I’ll just let the grown-ups handle this for me.” -
Adam Kotsko Says:
Saturday, June 2, 2012 at 11:17 am More substantively, though: I’ve opposed every war America has been involved in since I could vote. I went on record as opposing whatever would be done in retaliation for 9/11, on the very day. There is essentially no such thing as “military necessity” for a country that accounts for half of the world’smilitary budget.I’m not willing to come out against violence or war in every conceivable situation — but I’m definitely against all of America’s wars, because our incredible advantage over everyone means that every one of them is de facto an act of unjustified aggression. -
CK MacLeod Says:
Saturday, June 2, 2012 at 11:35 am I’m not sure that your second reply really is so much more “substantive” than your first one. That you have opposed every one of America’s wars is I suppose very interesting to you. The notion that having too much of an advantage is to be avoided would be of possibly even more interest to those who actually do the fighting, if implemented as policy.American militarism can certainly be questioned and criticized, but having a gargantuan military budget or seeking global military pre-eminence has nothing directly to do with the concept of “military necessity.” Making up your own definitions is another good avoidance tactic, I guess, but not really much more substantive than vulgar insults. -
Adam Kotsko Says:
Saturday, June 2, 2012 at 11:53 am Sorry not to get the finer points of your sophistry. I hope you enjoy commenting on blogs other than this one from now on. -
Adam Kotsko Says:
Saturday, June 2, 2012 at 11:59 am (I only let CK’s first comment through in case anyone was skeptical that people were defending Obama’s policy. Now it’s an interesting experiment to see if there are any lurkers out there who are angrier at me for my tone than they are at CK for advocating US imperialism!) -
willmcjunkin (@willmcjunkin) Says:
Saturday, June 2, 2012 at 12:03 pm CK MacLeod : ” seems to me that you and your political allies find it easier to agitate against the war-pornographic image of the killer drone and its pseudo-personalized victims than on behalf of a serious alternative policy”This strikes me as a kind of projection, one that overlaps, at least potentially, with an apology for/glorification of war/violence that we would probably agree is typically conservative. You’re saying that all this prating about the ways we justify, parse, conceal, or openly disclose the violence we inflict are just so many ways of refusing to look violence in the face and own up to it. It seems according to this position that to the extent we can’t make that killing stop, or reduce it, we need to stop engaging in idle talk and stick to doing things constructive, like devising less destructive POLICIES. And then of course when those policies are not to be had, that will just end up meaning making peace with the status quo.An opposing view – an arguably “radical” one, i.e. guaranteed to baffle from a liberal standpoint – might hold that there is something else at stake here, something just as important as “mere” life – which is the fate of the human in its moral dimension (strange as it may sound, it doesn’t always appear to coincide with a concern for human life in the strict sense). The taboos — i.e. the sacredness or public non-questionability of the ideals we strive to uphold — and the hypocrisy that ensues when we inevitably fail to live up to them, are also important, though this fact seems sometimes to condemn us to an impossible/absurd dilemma. Maybe the difference is that we’re in favor of avowing/acknowledging this dilemma, while you’re saying the only sensible thing to do is disavow it and submit to the deadlock of inevitable violence. -
CK MacLeod Says:
Saturday, June 2, 2012 at 12:10 pm willmcjunkin (@willmcjunkin) I’m considering a reply to your thoughtful comment, but I appear to have been disinvited – put under the blogger’s sovereign ban. As I write, I can’t have any confidence that he will “let [my] comment through,” this comment or any particular comment – not conducive to discussion, to say the least.. -
Jason Hills Says:
Saturday, June 2, 2012 at 12:46 pm Adam,This has made me ponder whether the round-about insult is better than the direct insult.I teach the wider point when we discuss Machiavelli, and it is always the most poignant moment of the course when I play the courtroom scene from A Few Good Men. When we sacrifice the moral for the political, even in the name of the moral, have we not already lost? Or spend our power accidently killing cadets and covering it up rather than fighting wars, as in the movie. I concur with your point that open sanction opens debate on a topic and politicizes it, which is rarely for the better.Regardless, Macleod, can you not note that you first comment was almost all accusation and that the response, at least from Adam, was entirely predictable? -
Adam Kotsko Says:
Saturday, June 2, 2012 at 12:48 pm CK may reply without fear. The consensus seems to be undermining my fearsome sovereign ban. -
Craig McFarlane Says:
Saturday, June 2, 2012 at 1:06 pm “CK may reply without fear. The consensus seems to be undermining my fearsome sovereign ban.”Given your principled defense of hypocrisy, this is hardly reassuring! When’s the drone strike? Will there be posthumous evidence of innocence? -
Jason Hills Says:
Saturday, June 2, 2012 at 1:13 pm CK may reply without fear, because no one should fear Big Brother. -
Robert Says:
Saturday, June 2, 2012 at 1:29 pm I’ve always imagined the President uses his Nobel Peace Prize as a paper weight to keep his kill lost from flying off the desk. -
somebody who doesn’t want to say Says:
Saturday, June 2, 2012 at 1:32 pm The other problem with it being out in the open is that when you continue being a good citizen after the big reveal it just makes clear your own complicity in it. How awful that is. -
Jason Hills Says:
Saturday, June 2, 2012 at 2:05 pm Somebody,We inhabits of the nation-state cannot avoid that. Perhaps Hegel was right about the diremption of Spirit occurring from the necessity of the modern state, to which we feel beholden, in the face of its alienating aloofness from our everyday lives. -
zunguzungu Says:
Saturday, June 2, 2012 at 3:35 pm If nothing else, CK’s first comment is a nice demonstration of how basically counterintuitive an anti-war perspective has become. “If you don’t like drones, then how are you going to kill all the bad guys at all costs?” The idea that, you know, *not* firing hellfire missiles at people is the best policy, well, that’s just crazy talk; we’ve got to fire SOMETHING at them. -
Sarah Says:
Saturday, June 2, 2012 at 5:21 pm I like CK’s emphasis on advocating FOR alternative strategies, rather than simply against the existing ones, and I don’t think that ignorance is an excuse the public can hide behind anymore. Like it or not, we have access to a ridiculous amount of information now, and the responsibility for championing morality is ours, not the government’s, especially not in a lip-service-only manner. We are supposed to let measures like indefinite detention pass and then still walk on the streets and call ourselves good citizens because it’s not our signature on the bill? The world situation is calling the little guy to step up in a big way to come up with new solutions to replace the current order, and though at the moment most of us have no clue how to make that step, that fact does not absolve any of us of the responsibility. -
Adam Kotsko Says:
Saturday, June 2, 2012 at 5:28 pm In this case, it seems like simply refraining from carrying out the attacks Obama is carrying out is a perfectly valid “alternative strategy.” If I were going around serially murdering someone, I think you’d be well within your rights to tell me I should stop without also telling me how I should spend my Saturday nights. -
Sarah Says:
Saturday, June 2, 2012 at 5:37 pm Fair enough, Adam! So why ask the murderer who advertises his next victims to keep it a secret for the sake of decorum? -
Adam Kotsko Says:
Saturday, June 2, 2012 at 5:40 pm It’s different when a private individual says it and the president says it, for reasons that should be obvious — but apparently aren’t? -
Jason Hills Says:
Saturday, June 2, 2012 at 6:13 pm Sarah,Do tell me how the average private citizen can make a difference? Now, exclude all the responses that do not have significant effects, such as “consciousness raising” without action. There are few alternatives unless one wishes to devote much of one’s life to it, and that is part of the problem. There are ways of overcoming this, but I rarely see them mentioned. Do you offer specifics or alternatives to this common problem? So far, I have barely ventured beyond what you say, but then I add, with those real possibilities, how can we have responsibility?Personally, I prefer building local “publics”/”public commons,” or just plain ol’ building community, but that seems to require the cooperation of the local community, which again is defeated by our uprooted socio-economic milieu. It’s hard to build communities in a culture that advocates not putting down roots, not necessarily doing what your parents did, or moving to the jobs. -
zunguzungu Says:
Saturday, June 2, 2012 at 6:32 pm Sarah,
My point is that the statement “but what would *you* propose?” has within it the barely buried assumption that you must propose some other way of getting the (people someone has decided to call) terrorists. Some of them may well be extremely vile people, but there are A. lots of other extremely vile people in the world that we aren’t (or shouldn’t be) willing to kill random bystanders in order to “get” and B. lots of reasons to question whether the people we are targeting for death by drones are actually even what anyone could reasonably call guilty of anything. Given that the costs of killing them is quite high and the necessity to kill them quite dubious, the rational response, it would seem to me, is not to fire hellfire missiles at them. To me, it seems a lot like someone saying “Ok, invading Iraq may be problematic. But how would *you* suggest we deal with Saddam?” To which my answer would be: how about we just decline all the terrible options on offer and go from there? -
Sarah Says:
Saturday, June 2, 2012 at 6:33 pm Jason, I’m still wracking my brain over this one. I confess to being one of the ones with hardly a clue of what to do beyond signing petitions and talking with anyone who will listen. I understand all the reasons why people don’t act, because I am one of them… I’m not out making a large public outcry… I wouldn’t know what to say and I fear having what little stability exists in my life destroyed if I did. It seems that any small action (e.g. not voting for abusers of power, which may include all the candidates) would make a difference if nearly everybody did it — united we would be anything but powerless — but of course I don’t see any movements picking up that much momentum at the moment. Yet I still feel a moral burden to figure it out. I am convinced that if we accept our powerlessness we give up too early, when an innovative answer or a new window of opportunity may be just within reach. -
CK MacLeod Says:
Saturday, June 2, 2012 at 7:05 pm zunguzungu: No one called anything “crazy.” The question remains whether you are taking a position generally against a resort to military action at all – warmaking, sovereign use of lethal force – in the Conflict Formerly Known as the War on Terror, or whether your problem is more with the presidential-Hellfire-assassination policy.If the administration merely gave in to its further-left and libertarian critics on the “kill list,” to my understanding it would still be required by law (beginning with the ’01 AUMF, still in effect) to employ whatever necessary force, including military force, in combating Al Qaeda and its to-be-designated affiliates, facilitators, and sponsors. I believe that public opinion is still on that side as well – and I tend to expect that the morning after the next attack it would be all the more so. Opposing the drone policy but not the war makes the question “If not drone assassination, then what?” more immediate, especially if you believe that a next attack is at all possible, and that, if possible, might have very severe political effects beyond whatever immediate destruction (as is in the nature of “terrorism” or “political violence”). This consideration takes us to “if not war, then what?” – a different question, not just in terms of potential consequences, but in terms of what kind of political strategy would be sensible. It’s not that, in my view, you or anyone is obligated to produce a sensible political strategy, or to think up a workable and implementable alternative either to Hellfire-assassination or to the CFKATWOT, but your inability or unwillingness to do any of that will tend to discourage anyone else from taking you seriously at all, even a little bit. Certainly, it’s possible to oppose both policies independently, but that means it’s possible to examine both policies independently as well.Willmcjunkin seems to be arguing or at least pointing to a position under which “taking you seriously” would already be too loaded a phrase, but saying so repeats the same refusal – a refusal of the political per se that, taken to its logical conclusion, would make any discussion at all, including this one, utterly pointless. Why not ban me or anyone else from participation? What difference would it make? The discussion would no longer be about making a difference. Differences of that type are too/merely serious. After suggesting that I’m engaging in “projection” regarding the focus on drone warfare, which I compared to a pornographic fascination, Mr McJunkin suggests that my position “overlaps, at least potentially, with an apology for/glorification of war/violence that we would probably agree is typically conservative.” I remain uncertain about how much ground “typically conservative” is meant to cover: Does it include every offering of any kind of “apology” for any kind of violence? One might think not – that’s too absurd, too extreme, and would include almost everything that up until the day before yesterday we might have called “left” or “liberal” – but in the rest of Mr. McJunkin’s comment he seems, somewhat like the blogger and like at least one other commenter, to contemplate the rejection of any policy consideration at all, any comparison or estimation of consequences, as too “complicit” from the perspective of “the fate of the human in its moral dimension.”As for the last part of McJunkin’s comment, I’m not sure how the situation he describes poses a “dilemma” at all, since one of the two lemma seems to be the placeholder for an absence, for a lack of intention to pose the or any problem, alongside assertions that something also “important” is “at stake,” but no indication of what that might be or how it might be addressed at all… so maybe a kind of melancholy over a conversation that cannot be held, not because its terms violate “taboos,” but because they’ve already canceled each other out. -
miguel cervantes Says:
Saturday, June 2, 2012 at 8:58 pm Lets take this forward, since we have a general gist of what AQ demands, not only pulling out of the Middle East, abandoning Israel, but the more aggressive elements wants Sharia imposed, democratically if possible, by direct
action if not. -
ShaLaugh Says:
Sunday, June 3, 2012 at 12:11 am CK MacLeod: “…a kind of melancholy over a conversation that cannot be held, not because its terms violate “taboos,” but because they’ve already canceled each other out.”Maybe the conversation can begin to be held if we change the context and come at it from a different direction. We’re talking about the uses of hypocrisy: hiding the truth for “moral” reasons.Let’s move the context to one of marriage. If a couple are “only in it for the children,” and otherwise cannot stand one another, is their fundamental dishonesty really helping their offspring become healthy adults?Going back to one of the blogger’s original statements: “What’s nice about hypocrisy is that it at least maintains some point of connection with morality. It keeps moral principles — like “you don’t torture people” or “you don’t send killer robots to murder people on your sole say-so” — enshrined as norms ….” My thought is, if your “connection with morality” depends on having someone in authority lie straight to your face, those aren’t “morals” that you’re enshrining.It seems to me that trusting the lie to be a mirror for “morality” is in fact enshrining the master-servant power dynamic. -
voyou Says:
Sunday, June 3, 2012 at 2:36 am The fascinating thing here is that CK MacLeod’s position is deeply unserious – while zunguzungu and, to a lesser extent, Adam, are talking pretty specifically about the actions taken by the US government in the war on terror, CK is talking in the vaguest abstractions: a conflict CK isn’t even willing to name, and a “sensible political strategy” which one can apparently discuss without ever specifying what the goal of said strategy is supposed to be. -
Alex Says:
Sunday, June 3, 2012 at 5:38 am “If not drone assassination, then what?” – surely errrr no arbitrary trial-less executions on land not under any US jurisdiction? MacLeod’s argument is pure war-mongering barbarism. -
Adam Kotsko Says:
Sunday, June 3, 2012 at 6:29 am Repeal the AUMF, and the Patriot Act while we’re at it — that’s my policy preference. -
Adam Kotsko Says:
Sunday, June 3, 2012 at 11:15 am This is one of the worst comment threads in human history. I’m shutting it down.
[/wpspoiler]
). Go to our 
First of all, no matter which way we choose to swing or find ourselves swinging, or are swung, we should enjoy the way you write. You critique like Benny Goodman. Nevertheless, sometimes we also find ourselves wishing you had a clarinet rather than a computer. Sometimes. It would be a great loss if you only had a clarinet, but sometimes it would be better for everyone, especially you, if someone like me were to have the influence to hand you a clarinet and say play this instead. As always, the swinging only happens on level that inspires no solution. Your clarinet solo came and went here without adding anything to Kotsko’s playing. It was just a Kahn. Like a good Kahn man, whatever he writes is bad so it bounces off the percussion section and sticks to him. You don’t want to have gum all over you. Rise up! No matter what Kotsko plays it’s better than what gets played on the level of violence. You’re never going to unreptilian the reptilian brain. Cortisol is cortisol. It’s not a chord. Cortisol is what TV watching inspires on a chemical level and it inspires reptilian brain thinking. Watch TV news and cortisol levels increase whether you are for or against drone attacks. So you first have to get “your mind right.” Be cool, Luke. Get your mind right and you will see feel how to play. No drone is ever going to groove on the clarinet. Can’t happen.