9 Replies to “Land of the Subatomic Violin [Dan Collins]”

1. Dg says:

   January 2, 2007 at 8:56 am

   Well that WAS a good site… oh, and I’m sad that wilber is sad too…
   
   It was clear he had to be put away for good, and I don’t think there is a prison in Iraq that could keep him that secure… hell the Iraqi army can’t keep much of anything secure it would seem (damn ‘sectarians’ anyway).
   
   Actually I am sort of put off… that whole chanting and shiite glee at Saddam’s death, in the execution chamber is going to cost… it made the whole thing a lot more ‘vengeful’ than I had wanted it to be.
   
   I was hoping for a more business-like execution, with no chanting and firing of ak-47’s and taunting of the soon to die.
   
   *THAT* was the *ONLY* thing that bothered me about this whole execution…

   When are we gonna go after Al-Sadr, and the Madhi army? Anyone? Please?

2. The Sanity Inspector says:

   January 2, 2007 at 9:27 am

   Oliver Kamm brings up a similar bit of moral confusion about the execution of Adolf Eichmann.

3. Dan Collins says:

   January 2, 2007 at 9:37 am

   Thanks, TSI.  I am similarly personally opposed to the death penalty, but happy to see the law executed, and convinced that that is not a contradiction.  And then, too, there’s the anticipation of whatever South Park might have to say on the matter.

4. Furriskey says:

   January 2, 2007 at 9:50 am

   Ans so it came to pass that the spirit of the Right Reverend Spacely Trellis, go-ahead Bishop of Bevindon, was reborn as Wilbur. And he did spew out the most abysmal nonsense. For verily we are all to blame.

5. Jeff Goldstein says:

   January 2, 2007 at 10:26 am

   I feel much dumber for having read Wilbur’s piece.

   “It’s all so very very gray.  And recognizing that, I despair!”

   Jesus.  Strap on a pair, Wilbur.

6. mojo says:

   January 2, 2007 at 10:32 am

   The Man With The Plan said “buckwheat”…

   http://www.breitbart.com/news/2007/01/01/D8MCJNBG0.html

   BTW: a Hummer limo?

7. Angie Schultz says:

   January 2, 2007 at 10:59 am

   The permalinks are your friends, Dan.  Use them.

   What I liked about Wilbur’s little crying jag is this bit:
   

   …he was an evil man. But what is evil? It is a religious denunciation, a way to set a person apart from humanity…He was a bully I think. He was a man who never knew happiness I think. He rationalized his actions I’m sure by saying that he did what had to be done…Saddam Hussein was all too human.

   They’d never cut Bush so much slack.  Bush is EEEEVIL!! because of the evil evilness within him!  He hates the little brown Other because he’s a hating hater! 

   But Saddam?  A flawed man, but human…all too human.

   On the other hand, I think this sort of thing gives us an iron-clad answer to all future pleas for assistance.

   Miserable wretches: Oh, help us, America!  We are under the thumb of the cruelest tyrant ever!  He has killed all the men, and raped all the women in alphabetical order!  He had murdered all the babies who are not his own!  He’s re-named July after his cocker spaniel, and appointed his horse to the Senate!  He has ordered all crops plowed under and the fields planted in roses, “because they’re Flopsy’s favorites”.  He has outlawed gum-chewing and kite-flying, and playing gin rummy is now punishable by death!  Oh, please America!  Lend us a Cub Scout pack, so that we may drive out this monster!

   America:  Mmm, no.  Look, we’re sorry about this, but you’re just going to have to live with it.  Every time we remove some blight upon humanity, we get a crowd of pants-wetters crying about how the ensuing chaos is much, much worse than any crimes of the tyrant, and at least he made all the trains run on time and there was 100% literacy and free medical care.  So comfort yourselves by reflecting that it can only get worse.  We’re closed.

8. BoZ says:

   January 2, 2007 at 12:13 pm

   I can see the appeal of his rhetoric, but Kamm’s position, if it is one, seems to me like the worst possible, because absent some incomprehensible (to me) love for the “mechanism of justice,” regardless of whose corpse shoots out the ass end of it, there’s no principle in it.

   Well, there is, but it’s “The guy with the gun is right.” I know he doesn’t say that, but that’s all he’s got.

   And feelings! He reserves the right to make frowny above-it-all faces at his beloved machines when they shit out someone he doesn’t hate, or don’t digest their meals properly. Bafflingly, he quotes Bernard Levin approvingly, saying he “feel[s] the same way”—

   Nor is it the horrible barbarity of execution that is the worst thing about it; it is the calm, ordered, impersonal taking of a life [etc.]

   —this latter being precisely what any “mechanism of justice”—the kind Kamm means, laws and enforcers, the kind he “laud[s]” a couple paragraphs down—does to anyone outside it who flouts it. And just a few years back, Saddam’s government was just such a “mechanism of justice,” to be “laud[ed],” right? Why not—in principle?

   I’m serious. Kamm makes no real distinctions. He’s making distinction-making faces, but not distinctions.

   I don’t like the way Saddam went down, either, but I don’t like it because it was masked in legality. If the soldiers who found him had just capped him, or if a local mob had got hold of him, torn him apart and paraded with flaming chunks of him on sticks, I’d say “at least there wasn’t some bullshit trial to hide what this is”—enraged, disorderly, personal vengeance—no beta state making an alpha gesture to claim legitimacy for its “mechanism,” so it can go on killing with the approval of all “decent” leftists.

9. Ardsgaine says:

   January 2, 2007 at 3:39 pm

   Secularists castrate themselves when they say that evil is a religious concept.

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