Daniel Versus Gooliath

[jawn_tech]

yall let me know when the topic boomerangs back to google-watching so I can jump back in...

I thought we were supposed to be going after DB like a mad village with pitchforks and torches.

Now we're on politics...like we're really go to set each other straight...(*sigh*)

[Andilinks]

But we are not at war.

Kendall, US troops are on dying on foreign soil, numerous fatwas have been issued by fascist psudo-mulluhs all over the world, not the least of which is Osama bin Laden. The radical Islamo-fascists would love to upstage 9/11 with wmd's and you can bet they are at work on it. Wake up.

Here I thought you understood simple things like that... my bad.

Andi

[acornwebworks]

But we are not at war.

Kendall, US troops are on dying on foreign soil, numerous fatwas have been issued by fascist psudo-mulluhs all over the world, not the least of which is Osama bin Laden. The radical Islamo-fascists would love to upstage 9/11 with wmd's and you can bet they are at work on it. Wake up.

Here I thought you understood simple things like that... my bad.

Andi

Oh I - and a lot of other people - understand completely. And I agree with you completely that there are terrorists of all sorts out there who would love to get their hands on WMD and use them on us. Sadly, I fully expect there will be a serious attempt (hopefully unsuccessful) in my lifetime.

But we aren't at war. As I wrote before, terrorism is like poverty and crime and drugs. It's a 'bad thing' to be sure. But there's no country to beat, no government to overthrow to make these problems go away. War is actually something pretty specific. The kinds of 'war' where the word is used as a euphemism, such as the war on terror, are unwinnable by attacking peope with weapons. But when the word gets misused this way, it starts people thinking that it's OK to 'do this' or 'give up that' because "we are at war".

Giving up our rights is not going to protect us from WMD being smuggled in through our porous ports or porous borders. It won't protect us from electromagenetic pulse which, to quote Popular Mechanics: "In the blink of an eye, electromagnetic bombs could throw civilization back 200 years. And terrorists can build them for $400."

When FDR said "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself", he meant that we need to be very careful to not make decisions solely based on fear because those will often be very unwise decisions that only give the illusion of safety.

I am not afraid of Daniel Brandt' Cookie Monster as much as I am afraid of your willingness to give up everyone's rights to privacy because you think this wll somehow protect us from 'them'. It won't.