Running too many pages on my browser it seems. It isn’t comment 22. I’ll find it eventually.

Here it is

If you are curious about my reactions. I feel nothing negative. In fact, it is quite entertaining and funny. I can’t make myself feel something I don’t. That’s not in my power. I used to feel something. But like I said, I had good instructors on this subject matter.

I find it funny in so far as I can come up, on demand, something 1,000 times as merciless and even more lethal than that shown in the video.

This has little to do with certainty or philosophy. It has much to do with experience. I have had a great amount of experience dealing with such things and such people. Not as great as the police or the US military in Iraq, I dare say, but greater than your average productive sheep in America or even the world for that matter. Not because I was especially lucky or unlucky, but because I am self-motivated. I actively look for such things. I have been doing so for almost a decade, which is longer than I had realized.

Terror works because most people would rather run away and ignore it than face it. It is easier to do what the terrorists want than to find ways to trump them, to kill them, to do to them what they would do to us, except do it first and do it worst.

This is a personality thing, in the end. No philosophy can equal it. Indoctrination can, yes, but not philosophy by itself. You need indoctrination on top of that, like madrassas. Or a strong emotional experience.

I think it is a good test. There is a fine line between youthful bravado and actual steel in the spine. At least for people my age. It’s hard to tell, but that’s why I tested myself for so many years. I wanted to know. It’s one thing for people my generation to talk about violence in video games and talking about “cool” ways to fight or blow stuff up, but it is quite another to look the reality of human nature in the face and not flinch away. To not even feel the need to do so. I am proud of that ability, cause I learned. I also know it isn’t very common, which I suppose, in general, is a good thing.

Let’s just say that I have had some very excellent teachers on this score. Between the Democrat party and the Islamic Jihad, it was either sink or swim. I had the benefit of reading milblogs and having otherwise direct access to the events on the ground. Something the Vietnam generation did not. But that, of course, didn’t stop many of my fellows from being consumed by enemy propaganda, of course. No, self-motivation still counts for a lot, even in these days of technological decadence.

I still find myself wondering at times, “What is the best way? What if I’m wrong?”

A nice thing about reading military science fiction is that it teaches you, by example, how to behave when everyone around you is losing their heads. Even if a military commander is hesitant or nervous, he cannot show that to his troops. If he shows, on his face, his own nervousness and uncertainty, then his own troops might see his example and become broken in the face of the enemy advance. Fear spreads like wildfire once it is uncontained. That is how armies are broken.

To get the opponent to simply question themselves to often, is to leave the opponent unsure and on shaky foundations, and less capable of action.

To the Left, they also have a very primordial motivation in these matters. Like the Islamic Jihad, they cannot refuse to blame others and to attack them. For otherwise they would start questioning themselves and that way lies ruin for them. To survive, they must make others unsure of themselves, not even because they want to but because they have to if they wish to preserve their own identities.

Too many of us question ourselves too often, perhaps, to be effective.

That is both the strength and the weakness of a representative republic. More openess means more ingenuity and innovation but it also means more internal instability and more vulnerability to external enemies.

To have principles mean that your actions will be motivated by those principles, even if you know that it would benefit your enemies. In the end, we choose principle over animalistic emotion because we believe in the correctness of principle. We have faith that these principles will provide us, our family, and our nation a better living standard and less chance of ultimate collapse.

The Left has faith that humanity can be controlled by their DNA, class warfare based, and elitist pyramids. Their pyramid schemes result in financial collapse, military disaster, and national suicide. That is what they have faith in and like most fanatics, they don’t particularly have any doubts on this score.

Ymar, you are unaffected by the pervasive propaganda around us, it seems. I still find myself wondering at times, “What is the best way? What if I’m wrong?”

And that’s a primary purpose of the nuance of the incredible propaganda, and why I said they’re so good at it. To get the opponent to simply question themselves to often, is to leave the opponent unsure and on shaky foundations, and less capable of action. That’s 98% of the battle right there, and they are winning.

Too many of us question ourselves too often, perhaps, to be effective.

Growing up in a world where the terrorists made the military and political rules has the side benefit of a great amount of clarity. No Cold War “detente”. No WWII worry about Communism vs Fascism or Chamberlain vs Churchill.

Churchill himself said that if you have a heart, you would be a liberal when young.

I recall sometime after 9/11 and sometime before the Surge, when Nick Berg was taken hostage and then we saw Z man saw his head off on a grainy video posted on blogs, that I wanted to see how much effect that intentional act of terrorism had on me. So I kept replaying the video to check out every frame of detail. There was some Leftist talk about Nick berg being fake and that Zarq man didn’t really cut off his head. I also had that in mind as well.

Most of the people on the blogosphere expressed disgust, horror, and numerous other things concerning Nick Berg’s snuff video. But what I felt primarily was a cold desire to kill Zarq man. Maybe not at first, since the video was a shock, but soon after the 5 or dozen times I saw the vid. When they finally took Zarqawi down, there was a great big smile on my face. That was a night to celebrate. Because, you see, I replayed that video clip so many times because I wanted to remember that event. I wanted to notice every detail, including that sawing motion which Z-Man used to saw through Nick Berg’s neck. Some small part of me didn’t want to, but it was a very small part. It was the pacifist part that said to turn the other cheek, to ignore evil, and to accept one’s emotional weakness in the face of ruthlessness and strength. For whatever reason, I chose not to do that.

Nobody is born with moral clarity or strength of will. That gets put there by both internal and external factors.

People who have compassion for humanity and want to see human life preserved have two choices when it comes to the real world test. Pass or Fail. If they fail, they become what I call fake liberals. If they pass, they become classical liberals.

After almost 10 years of this, Book, what you tend to see here is a very pure and consistent philosophy. The doubts were erased long ago. But that wasn’t how I started.

Wow, Ymar, so even for you, 9/11 was a catalyzing moment. For so many of us that is true, it seems. It was when I realized the world was filled with far more crazy, evil people than I’d ever believed. That the world might actually consist of a few oases of rational civilization immersed in a vast darkness. That civilization was precious, and not at all permanent, and must be cherished and defended, and fought for, lest it perish.

Local College Student ‘Used Up’ in Voodoo Ritual
from Target Focus Training by Chris Ranck-Buhr
Now that I have your attention…

If things went to violence, no matter who chose it, I was going to be the one doing all the ugly, awful things — not the other way around. Period. [Damn straight there]

link

My little moment of decision came about when I studied what happened on Flight 93. While 9/11 was the catalyzing moment, it didn’t actually produce my reaction at the time it occurred. That came later.