Here's something I wrote two years ago this date. For context: while cries for control ring about, mongers stock has risen in deed, then guys who hawk the concept of security, the good folks who lobby for them, &, who knows, even those who just innocently muse. Disclosure: I don't care much about my personal freedom as it relates to open secret snooping or home inhuman security services, but I also don't care much for the commodification of compliant paranoid suspicion.
On the title: Don't have a gun & don't want one. If the strictest gun control were miraculously able to make it through the US Congress, that's fine with me. What might it look like? I see cocaine: a flawed analogy, in that you can't cap somebody from a thousand paces with a crack rock, but that won't stop the same formidable forces from flying it in, buying & selling it, and firing it up & trying. To great turnover. There's money in implausibly solvable problems and it's worth so much more than twenty-three modified melee machines and any freak who'd bet their hotel trip on 'em.
On the title: Don't have a gun & don't want one. If the strictest gun control were miraculously able to make it through the US Congress, that's fine with me. What might it look like? I see cocaine: a flawed analogy, in that you can't cap somebody from a thousand paces with a crack rock, but that won't stop the same formidable forces from flying it in, buying & selling it, and firing it up & trying. To great turnover. There's money in implausibly solvable problems and it's worth so much more than twenty-three modified melee machines and any freak who'd bet their hotel trip on 'em.
Wednesday, 7 October 2015
Gun Control
When the US bombs a hospital, it's the Taliban's fault or at the Afghan coalition's behest. But a guy running amok on American students is the fault of gun laws.
The sickness that leads to the latter above is characteristically evident in the way a discussion of the former unfolds and is subsequently shaped. Never never never would the American intentionally target a hospital as a military objective. Unless they had good reason, of course. Ideological returns on what that all means may vary. At worst a mistake with vaguely criminal implications.
Ignored is the fact that the stated objective as it relates to tactical regional command and the individual action thereunder and, not of lesser importance, the governmental legislation or lack thereof that dictates an entire policy are not homogeneous.
Anybody old enough to remember the stories told by returning vets from Viet Nam can testify to the divergence in stated policy and coordinated action. In this case, soldiers often complained that they were kept in a state of stalemate. This is instructive, as the objective from highest above was not to win a conflict, but to maintain it. Why? Weapons and heroin. There were longterm goals, but it takes more than military labor to fund them.
Gee, what could Afghanistan have in common with that? The amount of money generated from weaponry in any conflict zone is significant, but it's usually only the cost to the taxpayer that's discussed in the media. And the amount of money generated by the opium trade is likewise significant, but the US would never traffic in that, would they?
The longterm strategy is a pipeline of a different kind. This funds itself as long as other resources flow. Now, you might ask, why would the US under such circumstances deliberately target a hospital? Well, for one thing, when you as a country release your dogs for any action, you cannot count on the logic of the warrior to maintain the philosophical code of fiction that defines the killing. Add to that the general stress of war over generations (in Afpak, 14 years and counting), then you lose even a semblance of the myth of decorum.
I'd like to say I don't know why the American can be so blind to recurring obvious precedents regarding their intelligence service's function as project manager of perpetual war profiteering, but I am aware that otherwise intelligent people get buried in the patriotic paradigm after a mere few formative years, let alone a lifetime of conditioning.
You don't have to be jingoistic to represent the worldview and mindset of the nationalist. Even anti-war folks claim to be "for the troops" with little-to-no real idea what the implications of this attitude are. Homies always get the benefit of the doubt.
The war's a ruse. Not that it doesn't produce plenty of terror. The most accomplished thing about Dick's Iraq was that he in all likelihood knew that by misattributing a moment's motif of simple numbered significance to real or imagined purveyors of WMD, the ongoing action in Afghanistan (and eventually everywhere else that would follow) would be last season's flop that nobody's watches even free on Yootoob. Because we all just know how it turned out: it was the Taliban's harboring of OBL & his Al Ciadydids that made the whole thing happen. The perps who hailed from the princely peninsula of persuasively profitable exchanges & agreements would be amused at their homeland's dealer's gun issues.
Why is it that Americans continue to pick which intelligence they believe and which intelligence is manufactured? Not one person prattling on about Sunni & Shia in Iran, Iraq, and Syria has a friggin' clue about the veracity of any intelligence. Not by the longest of shots.
I can't imagine why a nation waging war in hundreds of countries, killing by a conservative estimate two million people over a decade-and-a-half during which both allowable parties have enjoyed majorities and multiple terms would be a land where people occasionally shoot each other.
If one were to take an entirely dispassionate view of the world as it is today, they might suggest that the best form of gun control in America would be to let the Americans exhaust their munitions on each other to make the rest of the world a safer place. But, of course, the idea that Americans could exterminate themselves by running amok is as much a hyperbolic pipe-nightmare as it is that they might win a war on terror. Either one would be bad for business.
