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Hmm, it's a shame my screed of invective against Speaker4Dead seems wasted. However, the point still stands. We are obliged to fight moronitude in all its insidious forms.
Kudos to the eminent Dr. Bernstein on his somewhat pedantic yet spirited defense of objective standards for judgement. The current deconstruction of any sort of moral or ethical standard of behaviour is fueled by these annoying people who demand that I agree that I, and everyone else, is just as "savage" as any barbarian or Nazi or scalp scalper or "Injun' shooter". I refuse to accept that premise. I realize the big, scary implications of saying that there are objective standards of behaviour, but grab your rocks and realize that there is real, actual good and bad. Actions, people, taste in movies, whatever, all must be weighed by some sort of outside moral scale. This means that there is no automatic relativistic defense of the Native Americans by saying that their scalpings were justified by their culture, or by the fact that 100 years later Truman would nuke the Japanese. I think that nations, interestingly, are one of the few things that do not fall under the judgeable rubric. Nations do not do evil things, people in the nations do. It was not a big, faceless "Germany" that killed the Jews, it was Germans. Individual people who must face the music. Just as it was not "America" that nuked Japan, it was Truman and the other people who were (and get this word) - RESPONSIBLE.
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