@ fuster:
Fairly "in-play" for a Chomsky at bat, but the comments make up the difference - just in case anyone thought that schizophrenic inanity was solely the province of the Republican primary electorate.
@ bob:
No paper- or pixel-work necessary. Scott's just being polite, since he intends to be "away." He'd probably have just let us know anyway, but he's making a point of it underlining the fact since otherwise it might look like he was checking out in a pacifist huff, having had enough of us warmongering savage bastards or something.
It was initially mistakenly posted to the main page, so I can understand the mistake, even though Friedman writes much differently than I do, I think.
However, I do think that Friedman offers a reasonable perspective, and I specifically selected segments from his post that bore directly on Scott's assumptions as well as on Sullivan's. At the same time, though Friedman is neither a pacifist nor a moralist, but a self-conscious realist or even ultra-realist, the practical implications of his views, at least regarding particular policies, dovetail more with Scott's and Sullivan's than with those of the increasingly isolated war on terror "dead-enders."
We don't know what would have happened if our response to 9/11 had been "we understand, it's our fault, we'll try to do better in the future," but one reason we don't know is that it's very difficult even to imagine such an alternative reality. "Blood will have blood" is an ancient dictum that we - all of us, not just the U.S. - are very, very far from having completely outgrown. We have done a good job, however, of inserting multiple layers of rationalization between primal bloodlust and policy formation. We make war, or shape our military responses to threats, as "the continuation of politics by other means," not as "blood cries out for blood," but we are aided in that process because the urge to gain revenge is itself already the emotionalization of one entirely rational response to perceived threats: to eliminate their source. This goes for animals in the wild as well as for human beings in civilization. It goes for the design of our very immune systems. It even goes for Scott's pacifism, which, to the extent it's not merely passivism, is a rational response to the perceived threat of militarism.
So, we were going to respond to the events of 9/11, to the violent deaths of thousands of our fellow citizens and the clear statement of uncompromising violent intent against our civilization as represented in the 9/11 target set (finance/trade, defense, politics). It was rational to seek to defend against the threat as well as to seek to eliminate it at its source, to whatever extent we were able to do so.
In some absolute Scott-Millerian sense, we ourselves always were and remain the real source of that threat, but the work of defending against and eliminating ourselves requires much more than a political system or a culture can consciously embrace. Overcoming that limitation and completely transforming politics would be the same thing. It's a messianic project, a project for the true end of history.
We'll know when we're ready for it because we'll already be there. In the meantime, we may see our political system continually embracing our necessary self-destruction unconsciously - which may be how Friedman, Sullivan, and Miller meet up on another level, all aware, as I have argued before, that any war on the suicide bomber could only have itself taken the form of a suicide operation.
@ fuster:
Fairly "in-play" for a Chomsky at bat, but the comments make up the difference - just in case anyone thought that schizophrenic inanity was solely the province of the Republican primary electorate.
I'd gotten lazy about putting quoted pieces in blockquotes, too. I should probably go back to that... Ach, there's so much I SHOULD do.
@ bob:
No paper- or pixel-work necessary. Scott's just being polite, since he intends to be "away." He'd probably have just let us know anyway, but he's making a point of it underlining the fact since otherwise it might look like he was checking out in a pacifist huff, having had enough of us warmongering savage bastards or something.
It was initially mistakenly posted to the main page, so I can understand the mistake, even though Friedman writes much differently than I do, I think.
However, I do think that Friedman offers a reasonable perspective, and I specifically selected segments from his post that bore directly on Scott's assumptions as well as on Sullivan's. At the same time, though Friedman is neither a pacifist nor a moralist, but a self-conscious realist or even ultra-realist, the practical implications of his views, at least regarding particular policies, dovetail more with Scott's and Sullivan's than with those of the increasingly isolated war on terror "dead-enders."
We don't know what would have happened if our response to 9/11 had been "we understand, it's our fault, we'll try to do better in the future," but one reason we don't know is that it's very difficult even to imagine such an alternative reality. "Blood will have blood" is an ancient dictum that we - all of us, not just the U.S. - are very, very far from having completely outgrown. We have done a good job, however, of inserting multiple layers of rationalization between primal bloodlust and policy formation. We make war, or shape our military responses to threats, as "the continuation of politics by other means," not as "blood cries out for blood," but we are aided in that process because the urge to gain revenge is itself already the emotionalization of one entirely rational response to perceived threats: to eliminate their source. This goes for animals in the wild as well as for human beings in civilization. It goes for the design of our very immune systems. It even goes for Scott's pacifism, which, to the extent it's not merely passivism, is a rational response to the perceived threat of militarism.
So, we were going to respond to the events of 9/11, to the violent deaths of thousands of our fellow citizens and the clear statement of uncompromising violent intent against our civilization as represented in the 9/11 target set (finance/trade, defense, politics). It was rational to seek to defend against the threat as well as to seek to eliminate it at its source, to whatever extent we were able to do so.
In some absolute Scott-Millerian sense, we ourselves always were and remain the real source of that threat, but the work of defending against and eliminating ourselves requires much more than a political system or a culture can consciously embrace. Overcoming that limitation and completely transforming politics would be the same thing. It's a messianic project, a project for the true end of history.
We'll know when we're ready for it because we'll already be there. In the meantime, we may see our political system continually embracing our necessary self-destruction unconsciously - which may be how Friedman, Sullivan, and Miller meet up on another level, all aware, as I have argued before, that any war on the suicide bomber could only have itself taken the form of a suicide operation.
@ Scott Miller:
Dude, you're aware that this piece was written by someone else, right?