I wonder too about that life-good categorical imperitive. How does one factor unknowable questions like lives given to, perhaps, save other lives. Isn't that what a soldier hopes, in risking theirs? Isn't it the hard part of the whole question that we can't predict the future?

    The other thing that bothers me is the article's defense of a good/evil equation. There's more wrong with it than I could ever finish saying, but the writer simply pretends that rejecting rhetorical absolutes of Good and Evil is the same as saying everyone is morally the same, and it just doesn't mean that. Right and wrong is still shy of such absolutism. To recognise that a wrong action may have a motivation is still not to say it was a right action. And so on--it's so tiresome to take a silly misleading argument seriously, one feels taken in, no matter what.

Somehow, this makes me think of the rightist notion that casual pot-smokers are morally responsible for "drug-related" murders. But those murders are about money, not drugs. So then, is the casual money-user responsible for money-crimes, hunger, economic terrorism? I guess I think so. Me--my meager excesses kill, I think. Kill real living children, horribly--I think it's the truth. So I hate letting myself be drawn into political discussion, because for me it always leads back to the fact that we, in general--I in particular am not a better person than I am. No number of thoughtful points or well-reasoned arguments changes anything, morally. The ballgame quality of idealological politics is a pastime to distract us from seeing our guilt, compromise, weakness, and complicity. Seeing our faults doesn't change them either.

   I'm not completly a pacifist, but I wouldn't call a war good, or for the Good, it's just sometimes the best we're able to do, being what we are. I don't trust Mr. Bush's judgement. He has not been convincing.