A Cry Heard Round The World: Kim Sun-Il died desperate and alone, but he did not die unheard.
Looking At And Longing For Mars: Reflections on a childhood dream.
A Robot May Not Harm a Human Being. Is The Opposite True?: Thoughts on the future rights of artificial intelligence.
Long After The Boys Of Summer Have Gone: What makes a relationship work?
Winter Of Our Feline Discontent: What the cat wants, the cat gets. But what DOES it want?
To Tell The Truth: There may be no honor among thieves, but can't we find it even in a few good men and women?
Should The Human Brain Retire?: We know that we cannot win forever. We know that machines will continue to improve. So why don't we let the human brain retire gracefully now, with honors?
Read Bear Left in:
Chinese
German
Japanese
Korean
French
Italian
Portuguese
Spanish
Translations powered by Alta Vista Babelfish
To learn how services incorporated into this blog may use personal information, click here.
Total entries in this blog:
Published: Sep 16, 2005 01:41 PM
Wed - May 5, 2004
Open Minds And Closed Hearts
You see, in Rall's opinion:
- Pat Tillman died for nothing. He may have been an admirable person in many respects--we're all complicated--but he made a terrible decision by joining Bush's mercenary military after 9/11. If someone dies because they screw up behind the wheel of their car, it's a tragic accident. It's awful and we're sad--but it ain't heroism, folks ...
Mr. Tillman served an evil president and an evil cause. Anyone with an open mind after 9/11 could easily have learned the truth, that the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq occured instead of a war on terror, not as part of one. A person who planned to risk his life in combat should reasonably be expected to dig a little deeper rather than to fall for Bush's transparent lies. We all judge each other, and while Tillman's decision to sacrifice millions of dollars for his beliefs is admirable, his belief that killing the citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan had something to do with defending America was not. At best, Tillman was foolish and misguided ...
It's time for Americans to start boycotting the military. If there hadn't been a spike in recruitment after 9/11, the Pentagon would not have had the ability to wage war in Iraq, where even now they are so shorthanded that they sent for another 47,000 troops ... It's the same sales pitch used by Hezbollah and Hamas to recruit suicide bombers: die for the greater good. Except these wars are not good. They're not defending us from terrorists; they're recruiting them.
If Rall has a point about the dangers of jingoism, he badly overplays it. He received more than 6,000 emails in response to his cartoon depicting Tillman as a stooge. Yet after reading through all that correspondence, he still sees no meaningful moral difference between Americans' military response to an attack on U.S. soil and the recruiting tactics of Hamas, an organization that last week executed a pregnant Israeli woman and her three daughters in cold blood.
Remind me, again, who never fell for "transparent lies"? Recall for me who kept an "open mind" after 9/11?