The basic intent of non-lethal in law enforcement is to protect the general public by providing an alternative to “suicide-by-cop”.

The basic intent of non-lethal in the military is to provide some alternative to simply killing innocent civilians when they happen to get in the way of combat. As such, if you oppose all non-lethals as a class, it really means that you’re saying that its okay to ignore any means by which civilian casualties can be minimize d.

Perhaps we should think through our positions a bit more thoroughly, instead of knee-jerking.

For example, here’s a knee jerk: we lament about the 129 killed at the 2002 Moscow theater incident – - but we conveniently forget that there were 850 hostages and that over 700 of them survived! That’s an 85% hostage survival rate.

And that incident also reveals the need for keeping some stuff a secret: as a result of the controversy, it was revealed how it was done. Two years later as a result, at the Beslan school hostage crisis (aka “Belsan massacre”), over 334 hostages were killed – - a hostage survival rate that was15% worse than at the Moscow theater .

Another shortcoming of pundits is to forget that they’re not an expert in all fields, nor are others necessarily so either….yet the pundits try to hold them to a higher standard.

The pundits are thus conveniently are quick to condemn when some scientist – - who’s not a lawyer familiar with International Treaties – - comes up with some whacky idea. Paranoid conspiracy theories abound. ..if we let them. Its more likely that that scientist believed that he had a seemingly-good idea that could improve on a noble goal of minimizing deaths.

But if we must assume that everyone has ill-intent, that includes all pundit bloggers too: so who are *you* really working for? What’s *your* hidden agenda? Sorry, but if I’m going to be paranoid too, then your claim of: “peace and social justice” simply isn’t believable. Try putting yourself under the same paranoid scrutiny that you put others, lest you be a hypocrite.

And then we have those capitalism-driven company claims that their new product does something astounding. A hundred years ago, these were called “Snake Oil Salesmen”. Today, when their targeted customer is the government, they’re called “Beltway Bandits” – - and conveniently, the Pundits choose to blame the government for every outlandish sales pitch directed at them, instead of the Snake Oil Saleman/Beltway Bandit who made the claim and who is trying to do the selling.

Of course, since many of the world’s problems have been magnified a hundredfold by the effects of supercharged capitalism enabled by neoconservatives who greed opposes any regulator y balance, perhaps the blame is also being misplaced. Blaming the tool instead of the root cause is also merely putting a band-aid over gangrene and is over -simplistic.

And pundits too seek simplistic “magic bullets” that will put things right. Here, there’s opposition to so-called ‘tools of repression’, but with a failure to recognize the historical alternative: mass murders of populations, which today is called ‘Ethnic Cleansing”.

When the alternative is to invoke The Holocaust, there is no question that research into these weapon systems will continue, because it is clear that even “repression” is less appalling than mass murder. If the pundits disagree, let them say so unambiguously: otherwise, they’re simply trying to blame others for trying, but lack the backbone to stand up to offer any real alternatives – - and take the heat for when they forgot some complex factor (like the ire the pundit directed at someone who did dare to try to offer a suggestion). Since the world isn’t a utopian garden, the stark reality is that we don’t want to deal with its shades of grey. In many cases, the best we can do is to make some things slightly “less black”, and we do nowhere if all we do is whine and complain about the shortcomings of others.

http://zerosix.wordpress.com/2008/01/21/the-gay-bomb-better-living-thru-chemistry/