I am deeply flattered by your posts. Thank you. I will not pretend that it doesn’t mean anything to me, because it matters a lot. I try to write with clarity and passion, and I work hard at it and feel that I don’t always succeed.

I will say that if you want to express your ideas well, you need to read the work of people who express their ideas well. I have an advantage there because I have always loved to read essays. Indeed I have scant patience for great fiction (I prefer genera fiction) but love the non-fiction work of people like Mark Twain and Steinbeck. I read and love Mencken, though I disagree with him on many points, and I prefer Tom Wolfe’s essays to his (later) novels. Hunter Thompson’s HELLS ANGELS is a fine work of reporting, and shows what might have been if he hadn’t been determined to turn his brain into oatmeal with strong drugs. And if you want to read a near perfect example of someone in a towering rage of eloquence, find a full translation of Emile Zola’s classic J’ACCUSE!. That I looked up because of an essay on the Dreyfus Affaire by a science fiction author named Eric Frank Russell; the book it’s in is called THE RABBLE ROUSERS – it was published once, in paperback, in the early 1960′s, but you can get it through interlibrary loan. And whatever you do, don’t pass up P. J. O’Rourke.

I think that one of the disservices that the myth of ‘unbiased media’ has done is to reduce the quality of newspaper writing to pap. Every news source has bias because every news source is written by humans. It is pretending otherwise, rather than a Liberal bias, that makes the New York Times so thoroughly unreadable.

After that, writing is simply a matter of staring at a blank page until beads of blood form on your forehead (not original with me). Don’t let the blank intimidate you. Write, edit, and keep trying. It helps me to read aloud what I’ve written; if it doesn’t read smoothly aloud, it won’t come across silently. Like everything worth doing, it requires practice and work. But the rewards are there if you want them.

And you two just provided me with some.

Thank you.

I’ll second that. I’ve been telling my children since they were little that you aren’t taking money from people, you’re taking minutes, hours, days, or more from their lives claiming you have more right to that time than they do. Thieves do that, and thieves will do it to you.

Shiver, I think I just channeled Ayn Rand. Begone spirit…

Oh, how I WISH I were this eloquent. These are words I’ve tried to express countless times without ever finding these particular words. My thanks.

Not all ‘moralists’ object to calculating the real costs of doing things, just the ones who are too goddamned lazy to think about the consequences of their morals, and the ones who fear (often rightly) that actually looking at the cost/benefit balance will make it clear that their morals are mostly hot air.

What I’m saying about money being little bits of life is a reaction to people tub-thumping for regulations that will deprive people of lots of little bits of life in order to (actuarially speaking) save one life every four thousand years, or some such. I want to see more awareness that money from the State comes from people using bits of their lives to work, when they would probably rather spend time with their kids, or their wives, or their collections of 1950′s LP records. It’s never ‘only money’.

The sad end of “the government can do this, the government has the money” is cultures like the USSR; where everything was drab and largely hopeless, and even new buildings were visibly decaying. The State sucked up all the little bits of peoples lives, and still didn’t have enough money to really do much of any practical use to anybody. Of course at least half the trouble with the USSR could be traced back to the paternalism/power hunger of the Tsarist Autocracy (which was still operating on a basis of serfdom as late as 1917, when the ceiling crashed in.

Government is wasteful. And, ultimately, what it wastes are lives.

I don’t want to live without any government; I’d be much worse off and I know it. I would, however, like to see more awareness of what government money costs.

And I actually think the idea is to totally destroy morality and replace it with economics.

Morality is what teaches us all to think in terms of “finding the right answer” or “doing the right thing”. What do you do when you find the right answer? Stop thinking, or better yet, make it a sin to engage in any further thought, because further thought might change the right answer.

What do moralists always say about people they don’t like? They call them “calculating.”

Morality teaches us that the “right thing” is not a trade off, but some essentially free benefit one can create simply through the act of caring. Morality teaches us that if something bad happens it’s because somebody (else) must not have cared as much as he was supposed to. How does anyone know how much he is supposed to care and about what things? The moralist answer is: yes, all of it.

Just read the Mother Jones piece that comes up from Burger’s link. It’s a pretty crisp specimen of what you get when you let moralistic reasoning wander into questions of economics and technology.

The economic way of thinking says: everything has costs. Everything is a trade off. The thing you want isn’t the “right thing”, it’s just some good you happen to want. And you have to pay for it. And paying for it may mean you don’t get some other thing. And caring by itself won’t get you anything. And a thousand other lessons that we all had to learn as adults, because the moralists spent so much time lying to us when we were kids.

lol

I like what you suggest, but it is a highly toxic thing to do in the eyes of the “normies.”

https://www.google.com/search?q=pinto+memo&sourceid=ie7&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-Address&ie=&oe=

I sometimes think that the answer, or part of it, is to spread the idea that money is, at base, an abstract storage medium for human life. Ultimately what you trade for money is some portion of your life. Which means that any politician who says of a pet piece of regulation “If it saves just one life, it will be worth it.” is either a scoundrel or a dolt. If you end up trading what amounts to several human lifetimes worth of money to save that one life, it simply isn’t worth it, and pretending that it is is despicable.

Fair point. The cult of safety is a general trend which cuts across many aspects of life. In some cases it’s not even a bad thing. In some cases it’s just a matter of people being able to afford more safety and being willing to pay for its costs.

The Cult of Safety as a Priceless Good is something different, and something very bad. For private citizens, it usually means demanding more safety and pretending that it has no cost, or insisting that its costs be socialized because “my safety is more important that your rights.”

But…private citizens don’t hold themselves up to be worshiped as heroes built from the stuff of raw courage. Jerry Bruckheimer doesn’t make jingoistic movies about the valorous deeds of private citizens. There is no store that sells ribbons color-coded to mean “I support the private citizens.”

As I mentioned in comment #34, what makes the cult of safety unusual among cops and soldiers is that, even as they embrace it, they continue to insist that courage and risk-taking are the characteristics that define him.

It’s that gap which needs explaining.

It isn’t just the police and the military. There was a time when it was accepted that doing anything difficult was likely to be dangerous, and that people might die doing it. At times it could be seriously callous; an awful lot of Irish workers died working on the railroads from preventable causes like bad food and bad whisky (the Chinese ‘coolies’ actually had better stats, in part because they drank tea instead or whisky or questionable unboiled water). But it was believed that some goals were worth the risks. Today if there is a death on a construction site it is treated as if it were necessarily murder until proven otherwise. I doubt that we would have built the Panama Canal with the present attitudes, or the Brooklyn Bridge. And we tend to go ballistic over third world sweat shops, as if the alternatives were as pleasant as our first-world circumstances, instead of as stark as starvation or working knee deep in rice paddies fertilized with human excrement.

I don’t blame WWII – I just agree with Burgers that it seems a good place to mark the starting point of a trend.

The fact remains that there is a very similar cult of “Safety, Safety Uber Alles”, afflicting both our military and police. They may not be the same, they may not even have the same causes and origins, but they have very similar results.

I actually think this is close to the right way of thinking about a war in the nuclear war age. is the US willing to sacrifice as many dead soldiers as it will kill on the other side (soldiers and civilians)? If so, good, then the cause is probably worth going to war for. conquer the enemy nation. Adjust the rules of engagement so we are careful to kill no more civvies on the enemy team than we lose soldiers, march in, take the nation (whatever nation it may be at a given time).

But, at least in a discretionary war, if we are killing more civilans than we are losing soldiers then it is a war fought without courage and without honor. It is merely slaughter by an Empire. It leads to attitudes that rot the Empire from within.

What is happening with the police in the US now is a symptom of this cultural rot.

It disgusts me deeply. I encourage others to be as thoroughly disgusted as I am. I feel like there is hope when I see other Americans getting disgusted over the manifest disgustingness of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and now domestic policing. I wonder if it is the type of thing that even CAN be dialed back incrementally.

Even free speech doesn’t seem to make a difference when the essential American character has become as debased as it has.

Then I apologize.

Other Sean,

At Hiroshima the line was “We believe that if we take another course we will end up killing more people, while more of our people die.”. I despise the us vs them mentality we are seeing in the police these days, but don’t go blaming it on WWII.

I didn’t say that.

I don’t think that.

For a long time the very thing that defined cops and soldiers was the idea that they would always act to sacrifice their own safety if it meant reducing the risk of harm to innocent civilians.

But, since the end of World War II (as Burgers rightly notes), there has been a trend toward shifting risks away from “the brave” and toward the weak. In both cases – war and police work – this has been accomplished not by doing away with the notion of bravery, but by doing away with the notion of INNOCENT civilians.

At Hiroshima, the line was ” it’s us or them, and they failed to overthrow the Emperor, so they got it coming.” In a drug raid, it becomes “it’s us or them, and they let their neighborhood get this way, so fuck ‘em.”

Now, instead of being defined by bravery and the assumption of personal risks, cops and soldiers are defined by micro-managerial safety doctrines which call for extreme caution and the transfer of risk to people in out-groups.

And which cops are the most cautious of all? You guessed it…SWAT. They aggressively shun risks that ordinary people take on a daily basis, and indeed, the refuse to do things that regular line officers experience on just about every shift.

And yet their self image hasn’t changed a bit. They still believe that bravery is one of their values, even as they embrace it’s opposite at every turn.

One could argue that Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the bombing of other Japanese cities was the start of the idea of bombing to reduce risks to soldiers.

Does it bother you to state this?

I get seriously tired of the “We shouldn’t have bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki” narrative. The cold facts are that, projecting from the casualty ratios on Japanese held territory, we expected that the invasion of the main islands would almost certainly have caused at least a million Japanese deaths. The bombs caused about a quarter of that more or less immediately, and figures for excess cancers etc. following might, MIGHT mind you, bring it up to half. Talk about Japan being ready to surrender before the bombings is not supported by any documentation that I know of.

I’m jumping on you a little, I admit. But the Japanese behaved bestially in most of the territories they occupied, especially in China. And they have been playing the “poor little us, we got atom bombed” song ever since. If I had my way, the Enola Gay exhibit in the Smithsonian would feature a banner in Japanese saying “You rape Nanking again, we bomb you again.”

I like many things about the Japanese, but their behavior during and about WWII is not honest or endearing.

Sure. I didn’t say that civilians weren’t bombed in wwii. I know they were. I said that that the modernday US military bombs civilians to bring risk to troops very low.

Battle of Britain is a good example. Civilians were bombed but it did nothing to reduce the risk to Nazi soldiers on the ground.

One could argue that Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the bombing of other Japanese cities was the start of the idea of bombing to reduce risks to soldiers. This trend started slowly, but has expanded to the point where it can now be said that the US practices killing of civilians to the point where the risks to its military troops in the field (from sources other than friendly fire) is very low. You couldn’t say that about wwii (at least taken as a whole), but it sure is true now. and now these guys are policemen and we can see the attitude now that military discipline (which now means mostly not talking honestly and not revealing one’s kill count) is relaxed due to being in the police instead of the military.

The United States Armed Forces, or at least the ground pounders, are taught to react to attack by vigorously engaging the enemy. This is a stark contrast to nearly every other military in the world, in which SOP is usually to hunker down and call for higher authority.

With so many State having gone to Must Issue on carry permits, and the trend toward Castle Doctrine laws, this could get REAL INTERESTING when the spreading SWAT idiocy runs smack into the spreading number of Iraq War vets.

A lot of police may be ex-military, but I have a feeling that that won’t really matter all that much. The idiots who pull this kind of Gangbusters cr*p aren’t really thinking about possible consequences or ways things could go wrong.