Comments on: So, so, sophist

By: Meaders

Meaders — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 07:39:00 +0000

"By any means necessary" (or variants) means exactly what it says: any means necessary. Indiscriminate killings, murder of civilians, and the rest, are clearly not necessary. Kamm et al appear to believe it is a blank cheque; I notice that he does not bother to quote Callinicos on this point in the letter he otherwise gets so steamed up about:

Of course we should condemn the kind of kidnappings and beheadings perpetrated by groups like Zarqawi’s. This is not a new problem. I remember very well the arguments we had in the 1970s with your sometime comrades in the Fourth International in Britain when they campaigned around the slogan ‘Victory to the IRA’ and refused to condemn the Birmingham pub bombings. We have never given ‘unqualified support’ to any national liberation movement.

...which seems pretty clear.

By: john b

john b — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 19:10:00 +0000

I'm highly confused. Even though, as a psuedo-leftist, I've repeatedly condemned all acts of mass murder (including this one), the fact that the STWC will not means that I mustn't have done so.

Clearly I'm a Pseudo-Indecent-Leftist.

By: Matthew

Matthew — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 18:55:00 +0000

I think Oliver’s point is correct. Just because the Decent Left won’t debate the Lancet study that suggests it’s likely that a minimum of 100,000 Iraqi’s died in the 18 months to September, doesn’t mean we on the pseudo-left should not condemn acts of mass murder because the STWC will not.

By: Oliver Kamm

Oliver Kamm — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 14:44:00 +0000

"… unless you genuinely do advance the claim that STWC would support an Iraqi resistance plan to blow up the whole world."

I don’t advance such a claim, but I do observe that the formulation you misquoted provides the STWC and the organisation for which it is a front a rationalisation for avoiding a position that a decent Left would, and does, take as axiomatic. It ought after all to be an absurdly literal reading of the STWC statement to suppose that the organisation regards the 100-plus Iraqis killed yesterday as a ‘legitimate target’ – yet as a matter of fact, that is precisely what those behind the STWC do believe, as was the observation of my original post, with which you took issue.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 11:15:00 +0000

I like this idea that "by any means they deem necessary" can only possibly be interpreted in a ludicrously literal sense, despite everyone linked with the statement insisting that they didn’t mean it in that sense. Presumably, if "the resistance" were tomorrow to "deem it necessary" that they should hand their guns back to the Americans, leave Iraq and spend the next ten years round StWC headquarters shitting on the carpet, StWC is already committed to that too.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 11:08:00 +0000

(btw, be nice to Oliver; he is no doubt a bit tetchy because he has been hard at work with a copy of "Harrison, Kreps and Pliska" trying to prove to himself that a market can be "mispriced if investors’ valuation errors are not independent" but still have a discounted wealth process which is a martingale)

By: jamie

jamie — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 11:08:00 +0000

"for various reasons that you don't adduce"

This sounds decidedly sinister. Is john involved in depraved rites or filthy practices of some sort? can you tell us what they are, or would our inferior intellects wilt under the strain?

Never mind. if he has been handed the scarlet letter by the Decent left, I must de-link him immediately.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 10:55:00 +0000

In the circumstances, you might feel some gratitude rather than indignation that I have confined this observation to your comments box.

have you ever met Michael Totten?

By: Nosemonkey

Nosemonkey — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 09:59:00 +0000

Heh – he’s a tetchy bugger, isn’t he?

By: john b

john b — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 09:52:00 +0000

Corrected accordingly. The impact on the argument is limited, unless you genuinely do advance the claim that STWC would support an Iraqi resistance plan to blow up the whole world.

I didn't suggest you were necessarily replying to this post: the fact that you criticised unspecified bloggers for unspecified errors made it reasonably hard to work out to whom you were responding (and also for your readers to evaluate their arguments, although I'm sure this was oversight rather than a deliberate attempt to obfuscate).