{"id":10016,"date":"2005-10-12T15:26:19","date_gmt":"2005-10-12T19:26:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2005\/10\/12\/10016.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:53:08","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:53:08","slug":"rant-emperors-and-pirates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2005\/10\/12\/rant-emperors-and-pirates\/","title":{"rendered":"Rant: Emperors and Pirates"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

One of the things that has been going around the net is Pirates and Emperors<\/a>, a Chomsky-inspired Schoolhouse Rock style video about how the US is EEEEEEvil. Like a Pirate, see? Or an Emperor.\n

It contains one of the anti-war arguments that I found most annoying before the invasion of Iraq. If you remember, back in February 2003 YHB said, “In fact, any time I hear an administration official, I tend to start reconsidering my pro-war stance. Any time I see an anti-war protest, I become confirmed in my pro-war stance. The only time I give out with the old \"he's right, you know?\" is when Tony Blair speaks. Which, sadly, leaves me with the sneaking suspicion that I'm only pro-war because he is.” This was one of the anti-war tropes that drove YHB back towards the pro-war side.\n

The argument essentially is that we shouldn’t invade\/have invaded because twenty-five years ago, we supported the Contras, and that was wrong. Hunh? I mean, yes, it was wrong, but surely that ignores all of the details of what was actually going on in Iraq and its neighbor regions. I mean, the argument applied equally well to Haiti, Central Europe and Somalia, and surely any argument worth paying any attention to couldn’t be applied equally well to four totally different situations (always excepting pacificism as a first principle). Further, the argument as I saw it presented at the time and as presented in Pirates and Emperors<\/I> is essentially an argument ad hominem<\/I>, and the hominem<\/I> in question is Uncle Sam, who isn’t a person.\n

Now, an effective argument ad hominem<\/I>, which was also argued, although not as frequently or publicly, would be that the individuals involved in planning the invasion of Iraq were also involved in planning the disastrous actions in Nicaragua, and hadn’t shown that they were better planners now than they were then. Even then, we do need that step that argues that the person hasn’t changed. It makes perfect sense that Saddam Hussein may have been a reasonably benevolent dictator forty years ago, but that he was an evil tyrant by 1991. It may not be true, but it is plausible. Similarly, if Robert S. McNamara was advising on the invasion in 2003, one would have to decide if that were a good or bad thing, in light not just of his years as Secretary of State, but since then. Still and all, it makes much more sense to say that we can’t trust Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld to make either moral decisions or coherent plans than that we oughtn’t invade Iraq because some other administration did something bad somewhere else.\n

And, of course, in the end it was the ad hominem<\/I> argument that convinced me. But with luck, and a lot of work, these particular people will be ousted, and a new Executive will be in place soon, and we will have to judge them as well. Because Augustine certainly would not have argued that all emperors are pirates, or even that all pirates are pirates. We should judge each one by his (or her) actions, and we judge each action by its merits. It’s not very persuasive (or I hope it isn’t) to say that the US has no standing to do a moral action tomorrow because it did an immoral one yesterday.\n

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the things that has been going around the net is Pirates and Emperors, a Chomsky-inspired Schoolhouse Rock style video about how the US is EEEEEEvil. Like a Pirate, see? Or an Emperor. It contains one of the anti-war…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10016"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10016\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17559,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10016\/revisions\/17559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}