Under L sez on morality in politics:
I think too often these days politics is affected by a simple unwillingness to either see or to face up to the factors that mark it for what it is in a crude, effective pattern.
Politics is governed to ol' Under L by a simple, crude, harsh dictum: whoever provides the most efficient application of force, his (and it's generally been a he, politics is only recently accepting that women have after all been just as good at leading states into war as men have. The 18th Century and before warmongers who were women who ruled states generally get short shrift in that discussion but this isn't the space for that) is the determining arbiter of what is acceptable/good, and unacceptable/evil.
Politics as such amounts to dressing up evil in such a fashion that it becomes not good but acceptable to a sufficiently large number of people. It is this that is ultimately behind such hypocrisy as declaring the extermination of most of the Native Americans and the reduction of their survivors to poor, impoverished minorities regardless of how numerous they actually are or not, and it is also this that's why things like the Atlantic Slave Trade and Trail of Tears are held to be things that peoples affected by them should get over, where the Holocaust and Nazi atrocities should never be forgotten. The deeds themselves, the sheer death toll involved, is irrelevant. What matters is the degree to which the atrocities are deemed to affect those people who "matter." The Holocaust, I should emphasize, truly is unique and outside the scale of other genocides insofar as it was an industrial process, taking the bureaucratic process of the state, taking the industrial process behind the rise of the West, and making both turned to producing quantities of corpses. Other genocides are more sporadic, and while well-planned, do not show the particular Hitlerian emphasis on bureaucracy as their modus operandi, relying on things like radio networks and privately hiring people to do things like exterminating the local pesky Aborigines when they're not exactly helping the cause of Manifest Destiny (see: Tasmania. This was, incidentally, a major inspiration for the War of the Worlds).
Under L also wishes to emphasize that in saying this, Under L is absolutely not endorsing this. I would not go into politics for just this reason, with this kind of viewpoint I would not make an effective leader in any sense other than making myself rich at the expense of others by making money hand over fist, working within an evil system to perpetuate it. Going into politics would be a Bad IdeaTM for me for just this reason.
At the same time, I am increasingly convinced that the only law that unifies societies across time and space is that force is the arbiter of all things, a savage, brutal, cruel arbiter whose very savageness goes far to explain the half-steps and clumsy stumbling that makes up so much of the change in human history, as well as why the elites that made and wrote the definitions of and shaped societies are invariably violent. I would also like to emphasize, related to the paragraph above this, that this is why I say that those who worship force the most are those least equipped to use it well. The converse that force is the ultimate arbiter of all things is that it is possible to indeed resort to force, but to fuck it up so badly that the people who do this are deservedly on the garbage dump of history. In this category belong people like the leaders of the Confederacy, Nicholas II, Franz Josef (every single time, no less), Adolf Hitler, Yasser Arafat, Hajj Amin Al-Husseini, Solano Lopez, and a great many other monsters of history. Yes, I call them monsters, and it's because they took the step to unleash all the horrors of force, and provided great terror and destruction with no "redeeming" aspects of it altogether.
At the same time, I should finally emphasize that for all this I am no pacifist. War and its attendant horrors are certainly necessary at times. Reality being what it is, this will always be the case. But to bring war on a false premise, in any fashion, is however the most disgusting and vile act a leader can engage in to me of any state. Nixon, Johnston, Bush, Wilhelm II, they are all to me examples of this kind of leader. *Because* reality is determined by force, it must be used only wisely, not for a lark or for the purpose of force in itself. To do otherwise is the action of those who scar bodies, who mangle minds, who harm limbs and extremities for the purposes of their own egos. And that act to me no-one of conscience can condone.
And it is for that reason I also oppose capital punishment, as it to me is the irrational use of force, where the state is concerned. A state that indulges in the death penalty is given power that it should not have, unless there is a damned good reason for it having it. In a modern society that reason does not exist.
Politics is governed to ol' Under L by a simple, crude, harsh dictum: whoever provides the most efficient application of force, his (and it's generally been a he, politics is only recently accepting that women have after all been just as good at leading states into war as men have. The 18th Century and before warmongers who were women who ruled states generally get short shrift in that discussion but this isn't the space for that) is the determining arbiter of what is acceptable/good, and unacceptable/evil.
Politics as such amounts to dressing up evil in such a fashion that it becomes not good but acceptable to a sufficiently large number of people. It is this that is ultimately behind such hypocrisy as declaring the extermination of most of the Native Americans and the reduction of their survivors to poor, impoverished minorities regardless of how numerous they actually are or not, and it is also this that's why things like the Atlantic Slave Trade and Trail of Tears are held to be things that peoples affected by them should get over, where the Holocaust and Nazi atrocities should never be forgotten. The deeds themselves, the sheer death toll involved, is irrelevant. What matters is the degree to which the atrocities are deemed to affect those people who "matter." The Holocaust, I should emphasize, truly is unique and outside the scale of other genocides insofar as it was an industrial process, taking the bureaucratic process of the state, taking the industrial process behind the rise of the West, and making both turned to producing quantities of corpses. Other genocides are more sporadic, and while well-planned, do not show the particular Hitlerian emphasis on bureaucracy as their modus operandi, relying on things like radio networks and privately hiring people to do things like exterminating the local pesky Aborigines when they're not exactly helping the cause of Manifest Destiny (see: Tasmania. This was, incidentally, a major inspiration for the War of the Worlds).
Under L also wishes to emphasize that in saying this, Under L is absolutely not endorsing this. I would not go into politics for just this reason, with this kind of viewpoint I would not make an effective leader in any sense other than making myself rich at the expense of others by making money hand over fist, working within an evil system to perpetuate it. Going into politics would be a Bad IdeaTM for me for just this reason.
At the same time, I am increasingly convinced that the only law that unifies societies across time and space is that force is the arbiter of all things, a savage, brutal, cruel arbiter whose very savageness goes far to explain the half-steps and clumsy stumbling that makes up so much of the change in human history, as well as why the elites that made and wrote the definitions of and shaped societies are invariably violent. I would also like to emphasize, related to the paragraph above this, that this is why I say that those who worship force the most are those least equipped to use it well. The converse that force is the ultimate arbiter of all things is that it is possible to indeed resort to force, but to fuck it up so badly that the people who do this are deservedly on the garbage dump of history. In this category belong people like the leaders of the Confederacy, Nicholas II, Franz Josef (every single time, no less), Adolf Hitler, Yasser Arafat, Hajj Amin Al-Husseini, Solano Lopez, and a great many other monsters of history. Yes, I call them monsters, and it's because they took the step to unleash all the horrors of force, and provided great terror and destruction with no "redeeming" aspects of it altogether.
At the same time, I should finally emphasize that for all this I am no pacifist. War and its attendant horrors are certainly necessary at times. Reality being what it is, this will always be the case. But to bring war on a false premise, in any fashion, is however the most disgusting and vile act a leader can engage in to me of any state. Nixon, Johnston, Bush, Wilhelm II, they are all to me examples of this kind of leader. *Because* reality is determined by force, it must be used only wisely, not for a lark or for the purpose of force in itself. To do otherwise is the action of those who scar bodies, who mangle minds, who harm limbs and extremities for the purposes of their own egos. And that act to me no-one of conscience can condone.
And it is for that reason I also oppose capital punishment, as it to me is the irrational use of force, where the state is concerned. A state that indulges in the death penalty is given power that it should not have, unless there is a damned good reason for it having it. In a modern society that reason does not exist.