Hello Platt, Jonathan, Horse and All,
on 10/10/01 5:42 PM, Platt Holden at pholden@sc.rr.com wrote:
> Crime is a biological value.
> Terrorism is a crime. Ergo, terrorism is biological and should be
> responded to as such.
A Rectangle is a shape with 4 parallel sides, whose angles are each of 90
degrees.
A Square has 4 parallel sides, with angles of 90 degrees. Ergo, all
rectangles are squares...
Not being a wisacre, but that seems like faulty reasoning.
It would be like saying:
"Dynamic Quality disrupts static patterns.
Terrorism disrupts static patterns. Ergo, terrorism is evidence of Dynamic
Quality and should be treated as such."
Also, Terrorism is only ever a crime until such time that it may succeed in
overthrowing/expelling the opposing/interfering State. Then - in the new
state - it officially becomes known as the War of Independence. I challenge
anyone to present any physical-force-using national liberation movement from
the last 100 years that wasn't considered terrorist by the original regime.
Israel against Britain, for example. They also codenamed one of their
operations "Mikael" (I believe) after "Michael Collins", the Irish freedom
fighter - English people, insert "terrorist" here - who invented urban
guerrilla warfare.
Horse, with respect, I don't agree that violence has to be legal to be
moral, and in fact, often enough through history the reverse has been true.
But let's get something straight though. Once one abandons the principle of
overarching legality (Social order trumping free-for-all physical-force
Biological order, in either an individual or societal capacity), you are
operating in the same arena/level as the criminals/terrorists. This does not
mean that YOU are tainted with criminality or terrorism - good God no, none
of the good guys ever are...
This is a perfectly understandable viewpoint from the Social level, it's
just that, well, it's not actually an Intellectual argument that you can
ever prove until _after_ the Social/Biological event has proven itself
empirically, and maybe not even then.
As a general rule of thumb:
"If you kill one man, it's murder, if you kill a million, it's a statistic"
- Lenin, I think. It often seems that what makes terrorism so wrong in our
world, isn't the fact that it kills innocent people, but the fact that it
doesn't kill _enough_ of them. Almost as if what offends the world isn't the
display of carnage, but the taint of weakness in the act. The Soviet state,
for example, killed (not murdered! It was after all, acting legally) more of
its own people than it did Germans during WWII. Of course Realpolitik
demands that we only drop bombs on those violent regimes (Taliban) without
the nukes than the ultra violent ones with the nukes (USSR).
And this is fair enough, so long as we do this with open eyes, so long as
we accept that this is just covering our a**es, and not an ethics class, not
high civilisation.
An honest whore is to be valued more than an upstanding hypocrite. If we
choose to be whores, then fine, but let's not compound our errors with BS,
let's be honest, _Quality_ whores.
Crime is the devaluation of Social patterns, in pursuance of Biological
motives, and by Biological methods (survival of the fittest). Crime can also
be any opposition to Social patterns, by Biological methods.
War is the reversion to Biological means, ostensibly in the pursuance of
Social ends. Warfare is survival of the fittest; nature red in tooth and
claw. A missile with jet engines is just a refinement of one of wood,
sharpened at both ends. War and crime both have the use of biological means
in common; what seperates them in our minds is usually whether our Social
selves can rationalise it or not; whether our gang are Biologically giving
it or taking it.
"War is politics by other means" (Von Clauswitz), and so is Propaganda. That
has such negative connotations nowadays, but it's etymological meaning is
the propagation of ideas... in service of a social order. Are we all
currently doing Propoganda, or Intellectual argument here?
There seem to be two views/definitions of the Social level being propagated
here: One is Global and inclusive of people in both high and low quality
States, the other is Local and somewhat exclusive of low quality States and
the people who happen to be born in them.
In other words - for example only - does Jehova's
"Thou shalt not kill"
apply to just within your tribe, or to the heathen over the hill, too?
It would seem that there can't be a resolution Intellectually, until we have
a common Social template first... What do you think?
Good luck,
-Oisín.
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