Fuck it.

[bryant]

If you want to talk about some interesting stuff in a thread in which actual discussion is going on, go here. If you're incapable of thinking for more than a second before you put your mouth in gear, and all you want to do is spout poorly thought out political bullshit that doesn't allow for even the possibility of nuance, feel free to just rant in the comments here -- oh, wait, you can't. I turned off comments for this post. Go figure.

For the record, I have just become completely intolerant of people who use my posts as an excuse to post generic rants. I can tell a generic rant from a real discussion, since the generic rants are generally reproduced wholesale from Daily Kos or Andrew Sullivan, depending.

The comment which has me so pissed off is reproduced below, because it turns out that I can't turn off comments without hiding all existing comments. C'est la vie.


[Again, this is carelessflight, not me. These are not my opinions. I disclaim responsibility for them. Etc.]

...but to a lot of us, there was a really really obvious way for the number of American-soldier-generated atrocities in Iraq to be precisely zero.

We, however, were shouted down as un-American, "objectively pro-Saddam", "soft on terror", and other names.

There is a reason that it's bad to go around violently overthrowing the governments of other nations and conquering their people, even if we really don't like their governments.

The number of atrocities committed around the world cannot be made zero through our actions. Especially not our unilateral actions. That's an important lesson in a whole wide variety of contexts -- in the torture chambers we run as well as in the torture chambers Saddam ran.

War is hell. It's hell partly because these atrocities happen, because these atrocities get publicized, because we can apologize all we like -- and because the result is still the same: we have just recruited one billion Muslims into al-Qaeda or its siblings, because these monsters forced prisoners to rape each other.

Some of us said this would happen. Some of us said we would reap the whirlwind, precisely because once there's a war, we cannot control events. Some of us said that war was not the answer, that war would lead to more humiliation among Muslims, thus more hostility, more anger, and more terrorism.

By t.rev's argument, anyone who supported this war -- anyone who supports this war -- implicitly supports some amount of what those monsters did in that camp. Because, exactly as he said (and with which I agree), there is no way to completely eliminate this behavior (except by refusing to fight the war in the first place).

Americans who support the war, yet act all outraged at our mercenaries forcing prisoners to rape each other, are guilty of hypocrisy. Because, again as t.rev says, these things happen. Gotta expect some of it, once you get your war on. What's the big deal?

Well, other than the one billion people who -- as a result of this 'statistical outlier' -- now think Osama's a better guy than Dubya.

(In the history of terrorism, 9/11 was a 'statistical outlier'. Reacting in an out-of-proportion way to a statistical outlier is not something restricted to other people.)

We're likely to lose our few remaining allies. We've solidified Muslim hostility. Because 'only a few monsters' acted in a 'statistically outlier' way.

Is that unfair? No! Statistical outliers are predictable -- in other words, it's still our fault, because we could have predicted something like this would happen.

Because war is hell.