... many quite broad spectrum words and their underlying concepts have fallen prey to conflation: racism, poverty, genocide, promiscuity, and torture, for example. We can learn here, as in many other left-oriented articles, just how widespread “racism” is: all opposition to President Obama’s policies and initiatives is “racist.” “Poverty” is no less widespread; the word is used as applicable to both the United States and Haiti and all places in between. In Haiti, 40.6 percent of the workforce of 4.81 million are unemployed and eighty percent of the population exist below the “poverty line” (2003 estimate — it is likely worse now). Not having a color television and an automobile seems, in the United States, to be associated with poverty. Not so in many other countries. Genocide is a term often applied to Israel’s activities in trying to keep Palestinians from sending missiles and terrorists into Israel to kill Jews and anyone else in their way as well as to the activities at German death camps during World War II’s Holocaust. Promiscuity suggests flagrant sexual conduct, but that means many different things to many different people, particularly when it is done to mock religion. That’s true of many activities. Even threatening to burn a Koran is viewed by some as terribly bad because it sets off massacres among Islamists, but burning a Bible or soaking one in urine is hardly even newsworthy because Christians and Jews aren’t likely to go on killing sprees on account of it.
The core of his essay is on the issue of "torture." Perhaps we would have more moral clarity and less moral preening if the effects of people’s pronouncements were visited on them. For every soldier killed because of lack of intelligence perhaps we could kill a random member of the faculty of a law school. The outcry for waterboarding teams to accompany every platoon would be overwhelming along with the demand that the rack should be part of every well-equipped brigade.
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