h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

If you have no choice except for two evils, will you choose the greater, or the lesser?

In my view you should always do your absolute darnedest to avoid the situation where you need to choose between two evils. We're not doing our absolute darnedest. When things go well we become complacent and then when all hell breaks loose we act very surprised.

It's obviously worth trying to avoid bad situations, but that doesn't change the choices available when you're in the middle of one. Can you see a course of action currently available that doesn't involve lots of people being killed?

For purposes of problem-solving, we simplify matters to a few possible solutions. But how many problems in life really have only two solutions?

There are dozens of ways that we could try to "solve" the problem of terrorist violence, and thousands of variations on each possible plan for attack or diplomacy or "appeasement" or economic sanctions or whatever.

"The lesser of two evils" does not apply to the "War on Terrorism." There are plenty of options open, some evil, some less evil, some hard to tell. Any way you frame it, it is not necessary to choose between only two solutions for this thing.

Beware of bogus choices - "You are either with us or with the terrorists" said Bush.

Sod off, say I, I'm with neither of you.

This 'War on Terrorism' is gonna be a long and in many ways 'phoney' war. Will the passion still be as high 2 years from now when numerous covert 'anti-terrorism' operations are quietly assasinating America's lastest demons? When ID cards come in? Will the economy be geared for war - and would't that be nice for all those lovely arms manufacturers... So many of my favourite people must be rubbing thier hands with glee by now. Will anyone care much about 'boring' politics when the dust is settled except the next bunch of terrorists?

Willem's right, its vital to be well-informed about this WAR but the 'enemy' is nebulous, the context complex and as usual the powers that be are rewriting the rules as we speak. And theres gonna be some more dead people soon, it seems certain. Military build up around Afghanistan. Propaganda machine in full swing. Blair getting a pat on the back from Bush and more police than usual almost everywhere...

dark times...

I'm going to meet with a girl called Ben at Whitehall tomorrow for the CND protest. 2pm, wear black, no banners please, and if anyone else is coming let me know and we'll do a mini-meet. I'll be interested to see how many are there, what the mood is, and if/how its reported afterwards.

*Some comments, notes and suggestions on this bit of h2g2*

Forum posts threads set up for links, quotes, announcements, futher reading. Forums better than edited entries, because more collaborative. A degree of organisation helpful, but gets tricky for any one person to do and works best when more collecive and organic. So, if you have written a peacenik entry or scouted something you think others hereish would like to read then please post a short outline and link in the 'FURTHER READING' thread. The LINKS, QUOTES and ANNOUNCEMENTS threads should be self explanatory, and allow us to pass lots of info to each other without updating the main page.

And if theres not a suitable thread for what you wanna say then start it. Comments seems to be the main thread for topic drift so far. I hope more people for peace come here and talk and learn and share and enjoy etc...

It would be nice if we could keep this forum free from external moderation, but that's not how it is. But hidden posts are annoying and disruptive, so may I suggest that we all try to stick within the house rules - no external urls, no big chunks of copyright, nothing libelous and no personal attacks on other researchers. Its hard not to be offensive when there are some f*****g offensive things to talk about, but there you go.

peace, love and the single-minded pursuit of the groovy
pj

Struggling to see where you've already got to, but wanting to catch up...

Not actually pacifist but never happy with what an army does...

Unless their information is better than it ever has been (military intelligence = oxymoron?), the US attack will be a cruel disaster.