ON COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT

 I'm watching the latest Tucker interview with Colonel Douglas MacGregor and he uses the term collective punishment as if it is an epithet and should always be avoided and then in the same breath talks about American military policy and strategy and deep thinking generals, every single one of which was brought up and ruled in an environment that consisted solely and entirely of collective punishment. It's in the blood! So, if we're waiting for some general in the Pentagon or elsewhere to rear his head and demand options other than collective punishment, it isn't going to happen.

Lawfare and the neocons exist purely because they employ collective punishment as their first and ultimate resort every single time. Dictator of country does a bad thing and everyone in the lawfare and neocon world starts leaping up and down and screaming for sanctions to be applied across the board to every single person living in that country. It's almost laughable.

In general a good time to look at one's strategic and operational options is at the beginning and before jumping in with guns blazing. Once the guns come out all other options fade away almost instantly and the deep thinkers are finally brought into play to nut out some way of extracting us from the meat grinder. As with Vietnam, that can take decades to happen. A better example is of course, our approach to resolving our difference with the USSR in Europe. It took some time.

In the meantime, everyone making and selling and buying weapons gets richer and influence peddlers get obscenely wealthy by selling access or just the appearance of access.

In this country the law is taking a beating and that it is mostly at the hands of the law is a surprise to me. This society has not even begun to try to control unlawfulness and it is allowing it to spread unchecked from the streets to the courts to the universities and to all the rest. This is how vigilantism works. When the law has irretrievably broken down and there is no justice, people will start to make it themselves.

On what the Israelis forgot or never learned.

The world gets used to a certain number of youths blown away every single day doing something wrong or just being in the wrong place. Simply look at Chicago. Nobody riots about the 15-20 shootings every day there because by and large nobody really cares. By the same token, nobody really cares if hamas rock throwers and missile men get shot and blown up every day. It's just another day of shooting a minor irritant that nobody really cares about.

They share an underlying problem. The people doing all the violence? They're otherwise completely and totally useless to society. Only an absolute moron would employ them, befriend them, allow them in their home and so society is finally forced to wonder, just what the Hell do we do with this thing we let our school teachers and news media create?

What do you do in a modern society with an entire underclass of useless people that can't read, won't work, aren't qualified temperamentally to behave like civilized beings and actively harm/destroy civilization wherever they run into it? 

Think about it. At this moment they are the punishment. I still feel some sympathy for the original inhabitants of Seattle and Portland and the other cities ruined by barbarians run amok.