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MEANS_WHAT

                                             November 25, 2006

One of the oddities discussed in
"The Madness of Crowds" is the
strange fad for poisoning, and the
attitude that there wasn't anything
terribly wrong with killing someone
that way.

   It wasn't as though you
   were *stabbing* them or
   something, you know?


         Possibly:

         A confusion between the crime
         and the means to commit a crime...
         so that when a new means is
         invented, it takes some time
         for moral reasoning to catch on
         that it's equivalent.


         Or possibly:

         No crime is an absolute:
         every action is embedded
         in the tangled weave of
         the world; and some
         actions are charged with      And this judgment looks
         the judgment of "crime"       to me like an aesthetic
         based on how they're          judgment, which necessarily
         embedded in the net...        includes the general feel
                                       of the crime -- was it a
                                       cruel murder? Is it hard
                                       to imagine a normal person
               Our "general            begin able to get themselves
               princicples"            to do the act?  And so on...
               are at best a
               short-hand, a
               recording of               It no doubt took some time
               previous                   for poisoning to lose it's
               aesthetic                  clean high-tech sheen,
               judgments...               it's reputation for painless
                                          release.


  The act

       Firing a bullet
       into a brain


   means little in isolation.

           But our first presumption, without
           specifying circumstances, is that
           this is Not Good.

           Our rough conviction is that
           very little good comes out of the
           barrel of a gun -- despite the
           fact that we love coming up with
           excuses to blow them off.

           "Pulling the trigger"
           has a set of connotations
           that we use in our
           first step toward
           judging the act.


           "Stabbing with a knife"
           has another set of connotations.


           A new technique, any new
           technique, can skate by that
           initial evaluation mechanism.

             It takes some time to develop
             an ethical reflex that understands
             "poisoning" as a (likely) evil.


                 And don't cruise
                 missles seem *so*
                 much cleaner than            ASSASSINS_OF_GOVERNMENTS
                 those old-fashioned
                 techniques?



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