General Discussion

mass and proactive resistance to keep things from disappearing forever down the memory hole.

So, I guess I'd have to say "Whose memory hole?"

I have a bit of a bias in regard to how that happens, which I tried to express here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/101797576#post11 . . . . in which I have made the observation that it's been going down the memory hole for a very long time and it never seemed to matter, so I am concerned about what people's motivations are now. I know there ARE honest concerns about drone programs and I agree with those, but I also know that it is highly likely that the motive to GET Obama may actually outrank anything useful that could happen in winding the results of our past crimes down into something that would not require so much of a price to our victims, foreign or domestic.

Unending War is not acceptable either, but the price of that is, unending watchfulness - ANOTHER problem for those who oppose not only drone programs but also committing to somekind of reform in the U.N. and the World Court.

Personally, the only way that I can imagine how that utopia, without watching, without anything like the U.N. and the World Court, without armed forces, without drone programs . . . Q. how would that utopia even be possible? A. that would be only after one holy hell of a lot of people "go away", a.k.a. die, then everything could be stable enough to actually allow the U.S. to put its position in the world on glide.

I understand the drone critique and agree with it to some extent, but I NEED to hear why/how, if its proponents are wrong, and we or some other country in the world experience 9/11 2.0, or Shock and Awe Chinese Style, why is that any more acceptable than responsible drone programs. Yes, I know the retort is, TTE, "Well, those things might not happen" but that's not the question that I am asking, because if something does happen that point is after the fact and ir-relevant. The point is, if it's okay for those things to happen if they could have been stopped, why aren't drone programs okay too. If the problem really is innocent people dying, innocent people die in either case, so why not do what you can about what you can.

Let's just say, I'm still not comfortable with that, but I DO understand it and to me the differences in what people do and do not know about the specific things that go into the calculation of the relevant probabilities (Can X happen? When? Under what conditions? How? Who?) the differences in what various persons involved do and do not know are not ir-relevant to what IS happening.

All of that said, you are right freshwest, the only response I can think of to this conundrum is for a fully responsible active honest citizenry to do its best to keep collaborative empirical analysis from going down the memory hole from one administration, one congress, to the next.