Hari's astounding rhetorical question 'Would I have (stupidly) supported the war if there was a chance I would have ended up patrolling Basra with a machine-gun?' prompts this response by Dillow:
If you have so little imagination that you're incapable of sympathizing with people, you've no right whatsoever to take views that affect them - especially when the effect extends to killing them. Hey, even I can do this - and I'm borderline Asperger's.Oddly enough he seems to have noticed an aspect of Hari's writing that Dumbjon describes as 'Liberal Tourettes' (Jon uses 'liberal' like Hari but hey) which involves obliviously stating out loud what most of his contempories keep quiet about. Party Reptile however focuses on Hari's claim that 'The people fighting the war are overwhelmingly black, brown or poor. Most of us are not.' This is untrue, in the British army only around 1% of personel are from ethnic minorites, so conscription would put more 'black and brown' people in the army. In the USA non hispanic whites make up around 66% of the army and 68% of the Marine Corps. The general population is 69% non hispanic white. These figures took me less than one minute so there are two alternative explanations for Hari's error he either lied or decided that the accuracy of what he writes does not matter in the slightest.
I suspect Johann might have blurted out a pathology of our chattering and ruling classes here. Could it be that these regard real people - soldiers, Iraqis - not as living beings with interests and desires but as mere pawns to be manipulating by their whims?
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