WELL: Andrew Sullivan:
"Somehow this evil puts everything else in perspective, doesn't it?"
Very much so. Makes same-sex marriage, budget deficit, economic worries, what-have-you seem awfully small, doesn't it?
So a brief expansion on the idea of deontologist ethics and the teleological suspension of the ethical I was mentioning before. There's not any justification that's available to people who undertake terrorism (you can read Trotsky (and even Lenin) at great length about how destructive terrorism is towards any serious political cause), nor, I think, do we even need to be that concerned with what their motivations are. I also don't think anyone has the option of pretending as if this doesn't affect them, because the sort of people who have no respect whatsoever for democracy and liberty have been mighty indiscriminate in choosing their targets--if you're not them, ipso facto, it's acceptable to go after you.
I have, as I've said before, about zero faith in John Kerry's/generic Democrat's ability to take foreign policy reality seriously, so I'll be interested to see if his reaction to this is up to snuff.
Bush/Cheney '04 anyone?
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
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