Friday, April 23, 2004
Webreading notes
- Jim Lobe. Polls cited extensively and impressively, to the effect that the boobeoisie are easily bamboozled. More specifically: Regarding Iraq, al-Qaeda, Bush/Kerry....
- Butler Shaffer writes a piece. This piece is good, but more importantly, so is his work in general. This one: on moral authority as a bulwark against power structures. He takes care to distinguish such authority from the pretenses made by said power structures -- as a disguise for the (mere) exercise of their own will. Perhaps the people who exercise such authority -- think of the standard example of Ghandi -- are (to borrow the poet's phrase) truly the legislators of the world: They form the political reality -- or infrastructure, perhaps -- upon which the power structure ultimately must stand and to which it must likewise conform.......
- On mises.org, a very fine piece: 'A Dangerous Form of Outsourcing'. "A veritable atomic Wal-Mart" was one Khan of Pakistan in his distribution of nuclear technology to various states far and wide. Khan appears to have acted in connection with his political masters, the government, I mean.
Elsewhere in the article: We see in some notable detail (albeit in an overview) the latter-day Great Game between USA and USSR over Afghanistan, and more to the point and the purpose of the article, how the hegemons operated by way of proxy -- call it outsourcing -- and how the results were and ahve been disastrous.
Anyway.......
- One Paul Robinson writes [here] on the power of some ghastly ideas to gain currency in political discourse. The ideas, namely: For one, take Prof. Frances Kamm's talk of the legitimacy of directly targeting non-combatants on a scale (i.e., a number) constrained by the alternatives available to the killer by other means. That is, if you could kill 50 non-c's resulting from targeting a conventional/military target, go ahead and kill 40 direct. Robinson notes the ... discrepancy -- the dual standard thereby allowed; how it furthers the power of the powerful....
For another idea: Dershowitz on torture.
Anyway: Fight the ideas; they're not irrelevant.
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