Brant Gaede

Reprise --Brant

But you have no understanding of or true engagement here of your critics? Please pardon the rhetorical, but the boat is pulling you, not you the boat. --Brant

This is a slice and dice thread. Not fair to poke and choke. --Brant

You created the new context. Not I. Your put down was thus gratuitous. --Brant

You quoted too little, Ellen. I quoted it back. Flight is flight and I'm a pilot. --Brant

This is a correct statement. --Brant

The planets--absent atmosphere--are not in flight As far as I know, flight is for birds and insects and airships only. --Brant

Can M go there and modify--I mean correct--it? --Brant oh, you beat me to it; I read these threads from the last post

There are various types of torture depending on motivation. If the desire is information it's a very poor way to go for the information gained is not to be trusted. A German in WWII interrogated captured American airmen and all gave him all the information he sought with only one exception. It was just conversation. After the war those particular techniques he used were adopted by US intelligence agencies. Just for information there us a drug that will make it impossible for the interrogated to stop spilling the beans. So why torture the sap? --Brant

The US cannot comport itself geo-politically by playing morality games abroad. We don't really know who cut up this K guy and why. The msm "knows" of course and saturate tells us all about it. In the Persian Gulf we are talking about an incipient nuclear situation policy wise and can't afford to take our eye off the ball. Maybe this distraction is the whole point courtesy of real bad actors. I'm not saying the Saudis didn't do it. I'm saying we chose to work a long time ago in that cesspool because of oil. Several wars and counting. We're shaking hands with the Devil trying to avoid hell. --Brant I know I misused "we" and I apologize to the offended

Carol, I was a Special Forces Aidman, a combat veteran of the Vietnam War. I've seen hundreds of dead bodies. Do you think a jejune moral/philosophical discussion about torture has much effect on me? There are good guys and bad guys in war. The baddest good guys eat the bad guys for lunch and go get second helpings so back home the ladies can vote Churchill out of office so they can get free medicine. I neither condone nor condemn torture per se. The context creates the morality. If one is capable of it it can be immoral not to do it. Guns per se are neither moral nor immoral. How they are used creates the morality. Automobiles are neither . . . --Brant

It is not a proper role--as opposed to example --for the United States government to morally inflict itself on the world. But Woodrow Wilson did just that turning the Great War into WWI. The proper role of a government is to protect the lives and property--tbe rights--of its citizens. The idea that socialized medicine is benign because it dispenses medicine and such is purblindedness to the bigger picture of what could and ought to have been from the context of freedom. Everything government is and does is an expression of force. Retaliatory force is its only justification. Socialism is the initiation of force--the violation of rights. --Brant

The State is torture and the torturer. One way is through socialistic economic policy policies that affect everyone. Torture is grossly immoral and evil. --Brant

In the realm of ideas we can all coffee house blah, blah, blah all night long--even longer, much longer. This doesn't work with Aristotle's Paradox unless one thinks one's blah, blah, blah can displace factual science. Rand, BTW, did a much better job with her blah than anyone else I've ever read. --Brant