Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2001 20:18:24 +1000
From: Reg Mifflin <regm-AT-space.net.au>
Subject: Re: provocation


Steve,

Couldn't agree more. Incommensurability approaching at 40 knots...

Reg

At 08:13 PM 9/20/01 +0100, Steve Devos wrote:
>Reg
>
>The virtual reality that Eric is discussing is rapidly coming to pass. It is
>moving towards being actual at 40 knots as the ships move towards
Afghanistan.
>In what appears to be now almost classic postmodern terms they are attempting
>to bring Afghanisatn back into the world economy. Such is the unconscious of
>the G8 powers - but the question here is not the issue of Capital
occupying the
>whole world, but when the virtual transgresses into the actual will they be
>victorious quickly and the G8 public ticker tape down the streets of New York
>(pretending that terroism has been victorius) or will we be standing on the
>streets protesting against the Afghan War in 5 years time...
>
>Personally I'd bet on the latter but I hope that the cowboy understands
>violence better than Clinton or Blair appear to and its something else...
>
>regards
>
>sdv
>
>
>
>Reg Mifflin wrote:
>
>> Eric,
>>
>> You ask the big question here:
>>
>> "It may sound like we've reached the reductio ad absurdum of my argument.
>> I seem to be talking about fighting a war while trying to avoid
>> antagonizing the enemy! But I submit that this is the weird new reality
>> we face. And if the language we're using to describe that reality makes
>> it seem inconceivable, then it's time to find some new language."
>>
>> I know this is hardly the time to sound flippant, but ...
>>
>> This new war is a crusade that can only be fought by soldiers not wearing
>> uniforms. It is a crusade nevertheless because what is uniform to soldiers
>> of both sides is a single defining characteristic - certainty in an
>> afterlife, and that self-sacrifice will lead to a heavenly paradise. We
>> haven't come all that far from the French romaunce, courtly love, the
>> chivalric code.
>>
>> The answer, perhaps, to the dilemma you describe, of resisting panopticonic
>> terror (they're watching us, we can't see them) without using a scatter
>> gun, would involve military rationalization. Devolve the role of front-line
>> soldier to one's own fundamentalist heaven-gazers. Their zealotry might
>> easily be channelled into appropriate skills, razor and garrotte, and hand
>> to hand combat with (and only with) others of their ideological ilk.
>> Two birds one stone?
>> Too cynical?
>>
>> Reg
>
>
>