I’ve seen some Kurasawi movies from decades past where its clear that guns are distasteful to the director–and likely too to samuri– for not being as up close and personal as knightly swordplay.

“So now we kill these men with drones instead of capturing them.
That’s the effect of all the anti-torture legalisms. Instead of living, they die, sometimes with their families.
Is this better? Does it help us win the war more than captures would?”

In a word, Yes. Killing more of them leaving fewer of our dead military and civilians always works for me.

In a movie house you are the willing recipient of the content and you’ve even paid to submit to the director. If you are unhappy with the result the best argument you’ve got to recoup the ticket price is… false advertising.

There are so many ways to take the arguments made here, and so many threads to pull, and to follow. Some are bound to unravel my thinking on something. I have to admit, to tipping on my thinking about the nature of a convention on war making that outlaws much of one set of behaviors, that can be controlled, while failing to address the behaviors of those who will not be held accountable.

In another thread a question of whether or not the self evident rights of man are immutable by other men, a fact that cannot be altered, and whether or no this notion prevents our ability to abrogate another’s right to life or liberty. When an individual uses his immutable rights to attempt to end, destroy or otherwise bring harm to another right to life and liberty it is the right and with consent of the governed, the duty of the threatened to defend themselves.

When acts of war involve illegal combatants I submit that there is no convention that must need be applied. Application of conventions to illegal combatants, and pirates is detrimental to the achieving the goals for which the conventions were written.

I believe the application of the conventions to illegal combatants will only result in continued actions of belligerents who do not identify themselves and do not have any incentive to follow any of the conventions’ rules at all.

Thus it is fairly easy to ascertain why today, on a battlefield in Iraq or Afghanistan that the guy with the Saudi accent, speaking Farsi is considered a highly educated son, and native to the area. The group of herdsmen wearing Nike’s are not only native but probably the peaceful benefactors of some loving Islamic aide society.

Under the current lack of detail, the Palestinian fellow with the gold watch, driving his Mercedes to the Piece of Israel Now rally is considered a refugee while the Iraqi family scraping and begging for food from Syrian benefactors because they are not allowed to perform work in Syria, and can’t pay the bribes to return to Iraq, are expatriates.

My major concern wrt water boarding of criminal combatants, is the effect on our guys.

Give me “The Wizard of Oz” or Frank Capra or Billy Wilder any day.

And re: Kubrick’s stance on the state vs. the individual, I’d be interested to see what turning a brigade of Alexes loose in his neighborhood would have on his attitudes. It’s easy to champeen the criminals when they are rampaging on the other side of the tracks.

Incidentally, the guy who mugged me at gunpoint three years ago? The judge just let him walk last week. Once again, a person making a decision that they will never have to bear the consequences of. Someone, at some point, is going to be shot by this dirtbag. It won’t be me (I moved out of that neighborhood) and it won’t be the judge, but it will be someone.

OTOH, a working artist who is ‘lefty’ can’t have really examined the individualist entrepreneurial gamble his/her career actually is –the lefty politics at bottom must amount to an appeal for more emotion in life –thus to automatically villainize the ’system’.

I thought that what I was looking at was iconography. Each set piece demonstrated ideas.

I stopped liking Kubrick entirely after he did Full Metal Jacket. The characters in it were only barely recognizable as Americans. The man just seemed entirely too alienated and nihilistic. You like alienation and nihilism? Ok. But it wasn’t even American alienation. Or American nihilism. And too, once again the story is not character driven. But rather a long demonstration of a set of static ideas.

Just read a NY Times piece on the CIA prosecutions. You would have thought they would have been baying for blood. But no. They agree with Cheney.

The C.I.A. in Double Jeopardy

Whatever Mr. Holder’s motive for reopening these cases — whether a well-intentioned desire to provide the American people with the “reckoning” for the “abusive and unlawful practices in the ‘war on terror’ ” that he demanded last year, or a more cynical political calculation — the consequences will be grievous.