Thursday, August 29, 2013

On Syria

"I am against delaying reaction to what is a massacre of a thousand people," he said. "You saw these pictures of these dead children. Come on. This is horrific. We can't stand by and watch this happen."
Senator John McCain
What a foul and steaming pile of manure. We in the US routinely witness the slaughter of innocents without lifting a finger. We're not bothered in the least by mounds of corpses even if the product of our own policies or proxies--especially if the dead complexions are of a darker hue. We even consider our own 30,000 annual deaths by gunshots to be normal; we don't care enough to protect our own citizens from violence. We are the most hard-hearted of peoples, immersed in our own tawdry culture of distraction, isolated from each other and the world and armed to the teeth, but at the same time easily manipulated by reliable old war horses like McCain who never met a missile he didn't want to send over the horizon to deal death at a distance. The gift bequeathed by Bush and company, and one happily received by Obama, is the Orwellian concept of permanent warfare, where the enemy is ever-shifting and therefore unconquerable, providing morally and materially corrupt politicians the means of easily manipulating an apathetic and ignorant population. They can arbitrarily point to any convenient stack of bodies and loudly proclaim that a line has been crossed and now we must act immediately, that our former enemy is now our ally and vice versa, and to not act now is to allow this newly anointed evil to prevail.

Be assured that this strategy will work--yet again. But let us not flatter ourselves that the impending and deadly intervention is due to our collective kind hearts and far-reaching empathy. As history up to the present shows, we have an inexhaustible tolerance for the indifferent witness of slaughter. We care more about our "reality" shows than the reality of wholesale massacres; this is our default mode. When the missiles fall on Syria, it will be due to our fearfulness, our stupidity, our cowardice, and our seemingly unending desire to play the hapless marks of our conniving leaders.

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

A Modest Proposal

What to do with cannibals intent on consuming all of society for themselves and their own kind? The only sure course of action: off with their heads!

Economics

Not only the dismal science; also the most dogmatic.