This is no longer a moot question. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been charged with using a weapon of mass destruction, a capital offence. Isn't just murder, four counts, and another couple of hundred counts of attempt, charge enough?
Weapon of Mass Destruction is an interesting term. In just a decade past the mere allegation of possessing such things was deemed a casus belli, a case or justification for pre-emptive war.
But if we hold young Tsarnaev culpable of using WMDs what does that mean for our own forces dropping 500-pound, 1000-pound or 2000 pound high-explosive bombs, weapons that can pulp lungs and brains of anyone within a radius of several hundred feet? These are the very type of munitions we've been known to use to take out entire wedding parties in Afghanistan.
We associate the use of WMDs with pure evil, butchery, mass slaughter, heinous barbarism, an affront to humanity itself. Perhaps in the trial of Tsarnaev we'll be setting the bar for ourselves.
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Not likely, Mound.
Whatever we do in the defence of corporatism is justifiable.
There are no limits.
It troubles me when our complacency to this sort of disequilibrium becomes so commonplace. It leads to an utter breakdown of coherence, logic and reason.
"… our complacency to this sort of disequilibrium …" is as old as human society. Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, his successors and the Angles, Saxons and Jutes are remembered with fondness, affection and as great civilizing forces while Assyrians, Genghis Khan, the Vikings, Visigoths and more are remembered as invading barbarians, looters et cetera. These are classic examples of distinctions without differences. The modus operandi of all these groups is violence followed by a demand for tribute and complacency under the threat of more violence. Along the way, the Assyrians spread the Phoenician's alphabet around the Mediterranean, Alexander spread Greek culture eastward, those barbaric Visigoths stopped the brutal Roman games and were tolerant of other religions, as were the Mongols. The Vikings maintained trade and contact from Iceland to the Black and Mediterranean Seas. The contributions to civilization by these various groups do not in any way shape or form justify their means. Alas, our collective memories are selective at best or, in a state of disequilibrium.
And yet I thought, wrongly obviously, that we were at the point of transcending tribalism.
The worst WMD's are Bush, Dick C and Rumsfeld. Mound, your views on these WMD's will be appreciated.
"The bottom line is to never forget that “a poor man’s war is terrorism while a rich man’s terrorism is war” – and sometimes those lines cross for the purposes of big-power politics. War and terrorism seem to work in sync that way."
Or as I've always maintained to King George, George Washington was a terrorist, to Yankees, he's a hero!
We're still tribal. Of course one of the tribes, the tribe of the incredibly rich, is globally distributed now.
Opit, I find your holocaust denialism odious and I want nothing more to do with you. For the record, you're the only visitor whose comments are banned from this site.
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