Sans Authoritas wrote:
Now, if you're talking about being willing to die to implement policies decided upon by middle-aged men and women who stride clean marble halls, and who do not deign to take on any personal risk and therefore send young men to fight overseas, well, there's a serious question.
How many politicians can you picture lying next to you on a rampart actually helping fight off an actual invading force? Aye. They are all about looking out for number one. They will be heading for special secure areas if a real threat to American lives crops up. But they are all quite brave, and talk about "protecting America," so long as they have young men they can send off to die in their stead.
Rbernie wrote:
Pick any culture at any time in human history, and the fact that the ranks of the warrior caste is largely young men will always be true. But it also misses the point.
I have spent decades inside the Beltway, and at least seven of those years were spent directly supporting and interacting with EoP Cabinet members (during the second Reagan term and the first Clinton term). I spent a handful of years as a DoD service member. I also spent three years popping around on Capitol Hill, travelling the back halls and observing the sausage get made, so to speak.
The sausage is not made in the clean marble halls. The sausage is made in overseas in fetid, horrible conditions: it is made of the unrecognizable, ground-up flesh of young men who died for a cause they believed in, yet who did not believe in the actual cause of what they were fighting for because they didn't
know what they were actually fighting to accomplish. Then they put what was left of those human beings in sausage wrappers and
shipped them home.
You know what? All in all, I grew to have some moderate respect for the institutions. For example, no one that I encountered in my travels around the Cabinet ever asked anyone to do something that they themselves were not willing to do or had not done previously.
This is not necessarily a laudable thing. I know a lot of people who are more than willing to do unscrupulous things and ask others to do unscrupulous things for them.
I will agree that elected officials tend to be more opportunistic than most Cabinet members, but having strode those clean white halls and observed the behind-the-scenes actions of everyone from junior Representatives to the Speaker of the House I can also state that most of them did not get to their seat by virtue of not caring or by being incapable of making sound decisions.
They can make very sound decisions, I have no doubt. Unfortunately, they are making those decisions based on the incorrect notion that they have the right to force other people to subsidize their policies, and to die for them. No matter how prudent their tactical decisions were, it did not change the injustice of the causes.
In fact, the greatest danger that I saw was not apathy or rampant self-indulgence, but the williness on the part of some CongressCritters to engage in emotional crusades - trying to 'do good things' with little respect for the law of unintended consequences.
And the most you were able to accomplish was slightly mitigating the damage those ignorant men were doing while wielding their power.
In most cases, those who rise to relative power do so because of their committment to the nation. There are always cronies and incompetents, but it has been my experience that the higher you go in the command structure the less and less of that you find.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Evil does not often walk around wearing black uniforms, jackboots, and swastikas. It walks around wearing business suits and flag lapel pins. There is more damage and fouler sins committed in Congress than in a brothel.
Sans Authoritas wrote:
The individuals in government and their policies are not "America," are they?
Rbernie wrote:
Yes, they are, actually. The policies and individuals who govern America are Americans, despite what you may want to consider them. They also shape that which is the projection of America into foreign lands, be it through enactment of benevolent or militaristic policies.
I am sorry that you feel that slavery, gun control, racist laws were part of what you consider America to be. I don't consider lying, rape, thieving and murder to be a part of what it is to be a Christian, myself.
Sans - military service is just that; it's service. You have to understand what 'service' means in order to understand the discussion.
I know what "service" is, trust me. I have also learned that in itself, service is void and pointless unless the cause you serve is truly and in itself
just, and that the means used while serving must
also be just. Taxation, as the confiscation of property from innocent men by force or threat of force, is not a just means to accomplish any end.
No man can serve two masters, as a wise man once said. I have seen the master that men in uniform have unwittingly served. Do they seek to do evil? Absolutely not. Nobody chooses to do something
because it is evil, but only because they perceive it as a good thing.
The first thing that it means is that you place your own immediate needs and wants and desires aside in favor of a group objective.
Absolutely. As long as it is voluntary. You may not sacrifice me, against my will, to attain your perceived good end. Even if the end is an actual good end, and not some flag-wrapped pile of vile excrement that smells like lies, money and bribes. And you may certainly not force anyone to die if the cause
is misguided or uses evil means. And evil means (taxation) is what the government always uses to accomplish its ends.
There are times when each-n-every member of the group will not know nor understand the objective. But they are still members of that group, and they still act as a single organism.
Absolutely. A perfect example of this phenomenon is the economy. Nobody "runs" the economy. No one "directs" it. The economy is driven by the whole world of men making billions of decisions on what to do with their own time and money, every second. It is an anarchy. It does not run by violence, but by voluntary exchanges of goods and services. All that is required is a way of ensuring that no one may use force, fraud or coercion. The economy itself, rooted in human nature, has some very good checks to violent and fraudulent men. Tax-based government has proven to be the worst means of achieving that end.
Similarly, no one man or group of men "runs" a society. Society is a collection of people who voluntarily choose to undertake mutually-beneficial actions. It is sheer prideful arrogance to believe that a man or select group of elected men can "run" a society, whether it be to the degree that the Communists tried, or a "democracy." Society is, by nature,
voluntary. Tax-funded government is a violent blow to society.
Water should be allowed to seek its own level.
Aye. But we are humans. We should actively seek the high ground.
-Sans Authoritas
.......
