World Affairs Correspondent Zseni wrote:


Your mindset reflects the moral position that such calculations are permissible - that, in short, human lives and civilizations and societies can have monetary values. It's a variety of utilitarianism which has set up exchange rates.

World Affairs Correspondent Zseni wrote:


Nobody believes that the war is furthering any possible gain for us and even for Iraq except for a stable source of very clean oil. However most people are apparently willing to let the matter rest with the officials; either way they don't care all that much about Iraqi lives, and they are willing to lose a few American ones in order to secure the oil. How can that possibly jibe with pro-life rhetoric? How can it possibly jibe with environmentalist rhetoric?

Where is the consistency in American political thought? At either end of the political spectrum, and most especially in the middle. Where is the force of public opinion? What is public opinion anymore?

Actually, this is the hour of triumph for the higher-ups. A war which is essentially indefensible, which benefits only the conspicuous and unsustainable consumption habits of the world's most wealthy nation, is going to get pushed over everyone's head unchecked.

If they really can pull it off, the promise of Vietnam has at last come true: public opinion and serious political thought are dead in America.

More than that: the rise of doublethink is at last upon us. It would be one thing if our nation's leaders would say, flat out, that we're going into Iraq because we want stability in the region for our own ends and a steady supply of gasoline - but they don't say that, because who can support it? Yet the majority of the nation's citizens, who cannot possibly avoid the fact that this is what the war is really over, gives its tacit support nonetheless.

What I want to do, and what, I think, must be done - eventually - is to rebel and revolt and remake. Indeed I would be satisfied to up voter turnout to, say, 60%, which is at least a fractional revolution. But I have anime to download.

Is this not unbearable hypocrisy? Who among you can claim to be fully free of it? Why aren't we all more enraged about it? It's unnatural.