It utterly amazes me how idiotic BoingBoing commenters can be...

I was reading this article and the comments just blew me away. "Al Qaeda doesn't exist." "Military force is useless in preventing terrorism." And so forth. (The Rand Corporation came up with the intial report?!? Geez, I used to respect them...)

You would think that the kind of people who read BoingBoing would have brains --they're presumably IT and techie types. Of course, many of them have that curious genetic predisposition to worship youth and edginess for their own sakes, not for any practical reasons. (Most of them also could be classified as having legitimate Bush Derangement Syndrome, which is far worse than any right-wing paranoia that circulated regarding Ma and Pa Billary.)

Naturally, I felt compelled to respond to the comments. I'm anonymous there, but that's because a) I'm too lazy to register, and b) my Deluded Fool quotient for BoingBoing is very close to "capacity" and I'm probably removing them from my feed (just as I removed Gates of Vienna). My comments may not even be allowed --not that I was obscene or ad hominem, but sites like that have a tendency to only allow straw-man opposing arguments.

But the gist of my post was as such:

1. Most of the "ZOMG ur right it's all a Bush plot to keep us at war foreverz n make Halliburton a ton of $$$" crowd would have thrown negotiations out the window and, instead, would have been screaming for increased use of police force --even the use of the military -- against American citizens on American soil, were we to be talking about an early 1990s scenario where McVeigh et. al. didn't stop at Oklahoma City, or where Eric Rudolph's accomplices had bombed more than a small handful of abortion clinics in the South. (And, IIRC, they did scream for more use of force --not one cry for negotiating with the right-wing fringe). Negotiations with right-wing extremists are never an option with this crowd (or would they have been content with allowing abortion-free zones in entire states of the country?)
   
   2. Negotiations without the implied use of force are worthless. Witness the following: Oslo (Arafat bargained in bad faith), Iran-Contra (Khomeini reneged on reining in kidnappings in Lebanon), SALT II (Brezhnev knew that Carter wouldn't respond to pre-planned Soviet violations --he hadn't responded to SALT I violations), Paris (N. Vietnam knew that [secret] Nixon pledges to S. Vietnam regarding security were shaky or hollow, thus did not evacuate troops from rural countryside south of 17th Parallel). And the granddaddy of them all: Munich (Hitler predicted France and Britain would not go to war over Sudentenland). Negotiation without force equals appeasement.

Negotiate for your own security, not mine.