Point and applaud

No updates lately for the simple reason that way too much has been going on. I have something like fifteen hours of meetings this week; if it weren't for oases on Wednesday and tomorrow, no non-meeting work would happen at all. (It's very difficult for me to get anything else substantial done on a day when I have over four hours of meetings, even though logically I should be able to work the difference of the meeting hours and the eight-hour day.)

I'm currently fighting hard against talking about politics: fighting because of what's going on in the world right now I despair of changing any entrenched positions or reaching any conclusion to a discussion that justifies the (extremely high) amounts of stress, and hard because I am so deeply angry and disgusted that I have a hard time not railing at the world. Not so much at what's being done, as that is sadly predictable and no different than what has been happening for years, but at the lies that are being told about it.

Into that mood, though, came the following journal post from Ken MacLeod:

Nothing has done more to corrupt humanity than the attempt to civilise warfare. Just War Theory is an utter perversion of the moral sense, a doctrine of literally mediaeval barbarism, invented by clerics to regulate wars between Christian kings. Its finest moral discrimination to date is that it's legitimate to kill a munitions worker on his way to work, but a crime to kill him on his way home. It tells us that to aim a bomb at an enemy soldier and kill a hundred civilians is -- if the necessity is there -- legitimate collateral damage, but to deliberately aim one bullet at one enemy civilian is murder. In its pedantic, casuistic jesuitry it still stinks of the cringing, quibbling fusspots who invented it, and retains too its usefulness to a useless and barbaric ruling class. It does nothing whatsoever to restrain their behaviour. Its only function is to befuddle those who oppose, protest and fight them. It justifies every horrific, predictable consequence of imperialist assault as an unintended consequence, and condemns every horrific, predictable consequence of resistance to that assault as an intended consequence. Their violence against civilians is mass murder, ours is collateral damage.

Amen, sir, and bravo. Letting out some of the vitriol I feel helps a great deal; having someone else let it out for me is even better.

Comments disabled. Listen or don't, think or don't, and hold what opinion you wish of me; I'm not in the mood to discuss it with you.