Alternate Reality

I sometimes think I live in a different universe than most of my conspecifics. Perfectly nice people are able to declare over lunch or around the water cooler that killing innocent people in Iraq and Afghanistan is self defense. Firebombing civilians in Germany and obliterating entire Japanese cities in acts of terror were "unfortunate" necessities of war. They explain that "we" have to protect "ourselves" from "them" as if we were actually part of the states to which we are subject.

My moral objections to war and my insistence on prosecuting war justly are "radical" and "unworkable" in the real world. One gentleman actually said, "We can't wait around to see if one of these other countries is about to attack us before we act." I asked if the 9 year old who killed his schoolmate (another recent news nugget) might perhaps have merely engaged in a preemptive strike, but this was immediately declared to be entirely distinguishable from state action. I was berated for my sophistry and told to apply "common sense". I still don't know why something is immoral if an individual does it but becomes honorable if done in the name of the state.

My boss confesses that Jesus is his Lord and is a devout Catholic. Yet, he is able to espouse total war and to advocate indiscriminate killing if it saves American lives and money. Does he read from a different Bible? Is his Christ militant and destructive?

I suspect that our universes differ because we hear and read a different narrative of it. After all, each of directly experiences only a small part of the complex world and only at most contacts a few hundred folks (outside of traffic relationships). We make sense of the wider world through the media, and the choice of media may influence our interpretation of the world. My conspecifics get their news from Faux News and CNN and WSJ, while I eschew the MSM. The MSM makes evil seem normal. The MSM sees the world in simpleminded dualities of them and us, left and right, conservative and liberal. The MSM is surely poisonous.

I have come to depend on blogs and alternative media for news, and I feed off the blogroll of the Mises Institute and LRC. I suppose I should support them financially, and I plan to, but my addiction to this end of the blogosphere is of recent origin.

Being the resident anti-state crackpot is lonely, and the libertarian blogosphere is a sanity preserver.