Dealing with Iran (and Other Formerly Glorious Empires)
(The following post comprises, at its core, an email I sent to a friend here in Essex County, New Jersey, about whether Americans should endorse the Obama Administration's agreement with Iran.)
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What choice is there but to support a deal with Iran? Americans are ahistoric, that is, they tend both to know nothing about history and care nothing about history, even their own, but esp. not that of any other country, such as Iran. I know enuf of Iran's history to know how glorious it must seem to the people of Iran, which country has in prior eras been called Persia, Media, the Achaemenid Empire, etc. Iran, by any name, was also a very major part of the Caliphate, the Empire of Alexander (the Great), and the Ptolemaic Kingdom. Compared to Iran, the United States and indeed the rest of the West are young whippersnappers disrespectful of their elders. Iranians can in all justice say that Iran was a great empire and glorious civilization when the ancestors of all of the West's major powers were living in thatched huts (if not even caves!) and hunting animals with primitive spears, for not yet having mastered agriculture.
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When you deal with a person (or country) of great past distinction, you do so RESPECTFULLY. Yes, Iran is much diminished from its earlier glory -- but, then, it was much reduced in glory when Alexander the Great conquered it from tiny Greece.
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Excessive and irrational national pride can do crazy things to people. Vladimir Putin is trying to recreate the Russian Empire, not just the pseudo-egalitarian "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics". Almost no American knows why Putin is so nuts about (the) Ukraine: because (the) Ukraine was The First Russia, "Kievan Rus", which should, to his mind and that of many other Russians, never have separated from "Mother Russia". The term "Ukraine" means "borderland" (between more modern "Russia" proper and the West). But huge numbers of Russians feel much more connection with and affection for (the) Ukraine than to any other "borderland".
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Some people in Communist China's People's Liberation Army have fantasies of recreating the Mongol Empire of Kublai Khan, based on China but extending far beyond the borders of present China. Note that I say "present" China, not "modern China" or any other formulation, because some people in China (but esp. in the "People's Liberation Army") may see current China's borders as much too restrictive, and aspire to enlarging China's national territory to match its aspirations to historic glory. People whose country's history goes back a very long time are esp. susceptible to the thought of exceeding the glory of the greatest of their nation's heroes. The person who fantasizes exceeding the accomplishments of the greatest of his nation's heroes can be pitiable — or dangerous. Adolf Hitler had aspirations to grandeur greater than anything achieved by any (cultural) German ever before him. This turned out not to be a delusion. He PROVED TO BE the single German of greatest military accomplishments in the entire history of Germany. But at what cost, to others and to Germany itself?
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My point here is that constructive ambition can turn to a fanatical quest for insatiable glory, and such a fanatic may not be held in check by realists or competitors, but might be able to carry hordes of other people along in his quest for glory, which comes to be seen as THEIR glory, not just his.
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We have to be aware of these temptations to restore former glory, and help these various countries adjust to a much diminished but honorable and constructive role in the real world. They must be helped to understand that they can play a major role in world security, world civilization, and world culture; and we needn't say, bluntly or even discreetly but too much like bluntly, "Even tho you are nothing now."
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:38 AM

 
The Lying Lionkiller Needs to Die
Walter Palmer, the monstrous, piece-of-sh* dentist so insecure about his manhood that he needed to join a GROUP of fellow monsters in killing a hugely popular lion ("Cecil"), is emerging from hiding — except that he claims he wasn't hiding! No, he was just taking a "low profile", a profile so low that NO ONE COULD FIND HIM. Not the police; not the media. There's a word for taking so low a profile: HIDING. So that subhuman slimeball is lying about not hiding. What, tho, is lying compared to killing a helpless animal way beyond reach of its claws and teeth? Did Palmer even rely upon his own, unaided vision, or use a "scope" (magnifier) so he could shoot from much farther away than he dare get in person? I suspect that a worthless coward like Walter Palmer used as high-magnification a "scope" as he could, to avoid any risk of being killed by the lion he wanted to kill. Him big, brave bwana.
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That scumbag dentist, who should at very, very least, be boycotted by all potential patients for the rest of his worthless life, and should preferably be stripped of his license by the State of Minnesota for moral unfitness, also claims he did not know that the particular lion he killed was specially protected, for living within a long-established preserve. But the entire lion SPECIES is protected, so that's another lie.
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And how could he NOT have done ANY research into the lions he might kill? We are supposed to believe that that educated person, who MUST have had Internet access and MUST have done some pre-planning for his ENORMOUSLY expensive trip to Zimbabwe, did not ever encounter any information about Cecil as Internet sensation. How retarded do you have to be to believe that?
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In the lie that he did not understand that Cecil the Lion was a member of an extremely endangered species, little Mr. Dentist — a profession that practically SCREAMS "p*ssy" — was joined by the government of Zimbabwe, which co-conspired in that vile madness for PROFIT. Altho the pretense may be that a program of controlled slauter affords income for conservation, that is plainly absurd rationalization. You don't conserve a species by slautering it. And how naive do we have to be to believe that in a Third World country, such permit fees actually go to conservation? Might they not far more likely be stolen, as everything else is stolen in the thoroly corrupt Third World, almost all of which is controlled by kleptocracies?
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The notion that it advances the public good to charge fees to hunt endangered species fits in with other stories we have heard of late, of "people" who advocate the extermination of endangered species! (Curiously, and hearteningly, I could not find any media story about such "people" in a Google search.) The longer I live, the more I despise the so-called "human" race. It is not endangered species that should be culled/eliminated, but that biological plague upon this planet known, ironically, as the "human" race. I am plainly not suggesting that that entire species, of which I am part (tho, apparently very different from a HUGE proportion) needs to be exterminated, but plainly that something must be done to reduce its numbers drastically, and the best way is of course to kill the worst members. Capital punishment should not only be restored everywhere it has been abolished but should also be applied to many more crimes, to rid this planet of subhuman garbage not entitled to the protections granted human beings.
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As a start, everyone responsible for the despicable and unforgivable act of savagery in killing "Cecil" should be EXECUTED, from the government officials who issued a permit to kill a member of an endangered species, to the guide/s who lured Cecil off the game preserve, to the masculinity-impaired dentist. They should ALL be SLAUTERED. All the "men" should first be castrated by amputation (performed by guillotine or knife) while awake, so they learn, painfully, both physically and emotionally, that manhood is not about killing defenseless animals.
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Executions should be expedited by a one-appeal rule: a convict should have ONE appeal, ONLY, EVER, and it should be expeditious, within no more than two years after condemnation to death. That should be well more than enuf time to prepare a remotely-justifiable appeal.
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'People' convicted of capital crimes should be held in solitary confinement, since they have been shown to be monsters who cannot be trusted around other people, and should be fed the minimum to keep them alive, but not strong and vigorous. They should have the diet of much of the Third World: just short of starvation. If that upsets bleeding hearts, let us just point out that it is NORMAL fare across much of this planet. ALL prisoners in U.S. jails and prisons should receive only the equivalent of typical fare in the Third World, attested to by the United Nations' World Food Program. Why should "people" who separate themselves from our advanced and generous society by antisocial acts benefit from the standards of the very society they attack? Instead, everything expended, save by substituting a Third World diet on criminals, should be donated to the United Nations' World Food Program, CARE, or other organizations that work to end starvation in the Third World. Kids in the Third World deserve good nutrition. They have never aggressed against society so should NEVER go hungry. Criminals in the United States, however, should be regarded as having, by their crimes, separated themselves from society and so rendered themselves members of the Third World, to eat as Third Worlers eat.
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The sequence of punishments and post-punishment procedures for horrendous crimes should be: (a) incarceration in solitary confinement; (b) tissue typing of anyone who might have any organ or tissue that decent people might safely be given (that would necessarily entail detoxifying drug addicts before execution); (c) execution by some painful means, or a means that the prisoner might expect to be painful, such as electrocution, whether it is in fact painful or not; (d) surgical removal of all transplantable organs and tissues; and (e) cremation of the biological waste that remains, and its burial, in an unmemorialized, undisclosed, and unrecorded location within a national or state forest at a depth, in that location, at which its nutrients could benefit the environment, so that the subhuman slime we had to kill finally do some good in the world.
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Society should reserve the right to delay execution if it can carry out medical experimentation on capital convicts, with or without the permission of the convict. A death sentence should be regarded as a legal declaration that the "person" so condemned has been stripped of all rights, in that without life there can be no rights.
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There are many questions in medicine that cannot ethically be resolved by experimenting with decent human beings, but that could be answered by experimentation with indecent "human" beings. One example? Testing an ebola vaccine by administering the test vaccine, then deliberately exposing the subject to active ebola virus. Different subjects could be exposed after different lengths of time following inoculation, to see if the vaccine is effective at all, at once, or only after a certain latency period, and what that period might be.
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There are multitudinous medical issues relating to safety and efficacy that medicine today can only guess at because protocols do not permit taking serious chances of killing, or even harming, the "patient". If the "patient" has, however, already been consigned to death, there is no ethical problem whatsoever. So let medical science advance, if need be on a great pyramid of bodies of criminals who deserved to die anyway.
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One of the issues we could examine in such experimentation and get definitive answers on is whether a person killed by capital punishment actually feels pain, or NOT (because death precedes any perception of pain from a given procedure). That is, we can set up a system of sensors to record pain reactions, or nonreactions, before and during execution. That will inform debate about whether capital punishment is humane or inhumane, with facts and figures, not idle speculation or unjustified sympathy. Such information may advance the arguments of either side of the debate about capital punishment, and provide hard evidence, not mere sympathy or empathetic panic.
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Judges should be given great latitude in deciding which form of execution should apply to which criminal, based on the egregiousness of the crime, the number of victims, etc. Judges should also be given the choice of whether to consign someone to medical experimentation, or not, and the number of medical experiments that can be conducted before the prisoner is finally executed. We can't have "people" who committed multiple crimes of, say, the torture, rape, and sadistic murder of children, to live on and on just by volunteering for medical experimentation. They should instead regard themselves as lucky to be permitted to live longer.
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Never again should a judge be faced with the ridiculous task of sentencing a person to TWELVE CONSECUTIVE LIFE SENTENCES WITHOUT CHANCE OF PAROLE (as was done with the lunatic Colorado theater-shooter, James Holmes). What nonsense is that? Such sentences make a mockery of the law, because they cannot possibly be carried out. One life sentence = a TRILLION life sentences, or QUADRILLION life sentences, not just 12. So what is the point of playing with numbers?
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A judge should have, instead, a quiver of meaningful distinctions, different forms of capital punishment, with or without medical experimentation, etc., among which to choose the most appropriate penalties, gradated by severity. For instance, lethal injection, firing squad — by robot; no human being should have to be traumatized to carry out justice, for that would inflict injustice upon an innocent person — gas chamber, electrocution, guillotine, beheading by sword, beheading by knife (by robot, again, not to victimize the executioner), amputation of offending limbs / organs as to cause the convict to die of bleeding (the blood to be collected for medical use), etc.
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As regards punishments that could be carried out by robot to spare human beings of emotional pain or guilt, a judge can instead order, as part of a convict's punishment, that s/he serve as executioner in cases where an ordinary person might suffer adverse psychological consequences. But of course no one likely to find that experience enjoyable, such as a sadistic child-killer, should be assigned to execution duty. Our purpose must always be to make punishments HURT, or they don't work as punishments.
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To return to the case of the monster dentist with masculinity problems, if there are not already capital-punishment statutes on the books in all states and/or the U.S. Federal Government for "people" who maliciously kill members of an endangered species, we must fix that, and institute such laws pronto. That inadequate male dentist should be the last "person" this society even THINKS of forgiving for killing a lion.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM