Blogtrek

Theft of time?

I found an editorial in the local newspaper that takes a stand that I question. The editorialist condemned the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) for its "terrorist" actions. I for one believe that the actions of the ELF do damage to the cause of environmentalism and preserving this planet as a place of beauty to live. They cause people to oppose ELF, and hence by association, environmentalism.

However, I take exception to one comment that the author makes. He quotes from the science fiction novel Dune in which he says that depriving a man of an hour and depriving him of his life is merely a difference of degree. He cites the case of a person who has to replace the tires of an SUV after they get slashed. If that's the case, then I can name quite a few mass murderers. Take the computer companies, for instance, especially Microsoft. Think of how much time has been wasted, probably billions of person-hours, because computers crash. How about the time wasted waiting for service at some of these computer and cellular phone places? I did not have cable modem service for four days, when it was the modem that was bad instead of all the other things they had me do and had me waste 10 hours or so on. Today I was forced to wait two hours for a service only to be told that I had to make an appointment another day. How about all the times that car repair places misrepaired my car or made me wait a long time for it? If this editorialist is correct, this constitutes many killings worth of time many thousands of time over.

I have never thought of things this way. To me there is a difference of level as well as one of degree between a vandalism and a murder.

Pure Theater

President Bush called the action of the Iraqi parliament in unanimously rejecting U.N. Resolution 1441 "pure theater". Interesting way of putting it. At least I'd rather have pure theater than polluted theater or dirty theater. Maybe he means a theater that has been scrubbed of germs so that you won't catch a cold there, or maybe he means one in which all of the things that are done and all that the actors ever do is devoted to producing plays in a theater. It is pure theater, and nothing else but theater. In any case, Bush still says that Iraq must comply else there will be another kind of theater - a military one.